Category: Personal

Part of the BGS ethos is the idea of becoming a generalist. There are three links in that last phrase, don’t miss any of ’em.

My sweep (we’re all chimney sweeps here, despite the rest of this blog) is not a manual one, and I’ve made a life’s work out of never having to resort to manual labour if I can avoid it. In fact, at the start of this journey, I found that I’d made a vow in my teens that pretty much guaranteed that my life would go that way.

Well, I’m stepping up.

We’d been empty nesters for little while, and then due to various economic circumstances, our oldest son, his wife and their little boy have come to stay for a bit. That’s not a problem, but they brought three cats with them. Added to our two, that’s a lot of cats. All boys (thankfully neutered), and all inside cats. The combination of having all five of them together, with a little boy running around, chasing them (with a pool noodle as often as not), has made a our home very unsettling environment for them. So they’d started to pee all over the house.

Urgh.

We had a family summit about “the cat situation” and it was resolved that we’d put a door in at the bottom of the stairs. Ending any of them wasn’t an acceptable option; no-one else was keen to foster any of them; and letting them go outside wasn’t an acceptable option either. So we’d add a door and our pair of cats would remain upstairs, their three would remain downstairs, and the groups would never physically interact again.

To implement this plan, we obviously needed a door. Fleur said that she’d call a carpenter. I said, no, that’s OK, I’ll do it.

“No,” she said, “seriously, I appreciate the offer, but …”

“No, I’ll do it. I want to do it.”

“OK,” she said, and I went about it. I measured the space, drew up a plan, acquired the materials, and put it all together. Just like that. Ha! As if.

I’m going include the photos through the rest of the post, but these are the before and after shots. Yes, there’s still a bit of work to do, but I regard this as success.

OK, so I wanted it to be strong. I didn’t want to do a shoddy job, so I specified it to be solid. I wanted a solid timber frame to put the door in, and I wanted it to match the style of the rest of the house. I also wanted to be able to see through the door, and we needed to provide airflow since the intake for the ducted air conditioning is upstairs.

I picked the door from Bunnings’ web site, and ordered it. It took the better part of five weeks (!) to arrive, because I ordered it a week or so before Christmas. I also bought the frame and jamb and put those together as much as I could without having the door to work with.

Oh, the timing was awful. I was going to take a couple of days at the end of the Christmas break to work on it. Remember I’m in Australia, and this is our summer break. They said the door would arrive on January 16, so I allocated a couple of days to do the bulk of the work then. I checked with them on that day, but they said that it was likely to be delayed, so I went back to work on the Tuesday, pretty disappointed about it. The work had been relegated to a weekend endeavour.

The door arrived the next weekend, so I picked it up and got started.

The second last bit of the frame was to put some spacers (noggins?) in there, and also to add the louvre I’d built to exclude cats but allow airflow.

At the end of the first day, I had the jamb and hinges in place, and the door fit the gap. It was surprising how far out of square the house is. I had all the dimensions right, but not the angles. I had to plane an awful lot of door to make it fit.

Up went the Gyprock, and I have my Uncle Jim to thank for secret knowledge here. I’d spent a couple of weeks with him in Canada, and he took me on one of his jobs when he was hanging drywall. He taught me how to measure, cut and hang it. Have a look at https://leadingedgekayaks.com/gallery/ for some of his non-drywall-related work.

I have to say that plaster is like love. You can’t apply too much. I started off trying to be economical with it (the first panel above), but seriously, it needs to be slathered on. There is no such thing as too much, and if you’re thinking of cutting back … don’t. Especially where one person board rubs up against another person board.

Thanks again to Uncle Jim, who’d also taken me through the process of relocating a striker plate. That gave me enough to be able to figure out the rest of putting the latch, striker plate and doorknob in place.

There is a cut-up plastic garbage bag taped around the base of the walls beside the door because Fleur was concerned that the cats might decide to christen the vulnerable not-yet-properly dried plaster.

This brings us up to date. The paint is not quite the same colour as the existing paint around the place, but that’s because Fleur wants the whole house done in some slightly different colours. Our youngest started on the project during COVID isolation, and bailed as soon as he could. I probably taught him that …

I’ve got the angle to go around the louvre, and a bit more time, cornice, plaster and paint will tidy that up, too.

For now, it’s enough. It appears that the level of cat anxiety is dropping, and that’s resulting in a much less unpleasant experience for everyone.

The job looks a lot better from a distance than it does up close, and I’m OK with that. I’m becoming less of perfectionist as I get older, and while I’m proud of the work, and it’s solid, I’m also OK with it being it a little rough around the edges. Visually. I’m OK with it being rough around the edges visually. All the actual edges are smooth. Beautifully smooth …

Fleur and I are on holiday in Torquay. That’s in the Hervey Bay area, in southeast Queensland. I’ve been using my phone to reasonably good effect and taking the odd photo here and there. I’m really glad for this evolution, because while there is no way I’d carry a camera around with me, the phone does come along.

Click an image to have it open in a new tab if you’re interested.

I’m going to the Become Good Soil Intensive at The Tops next weekend. I feel very fortunate, because this is something that’s targeted at men in their 20s and 30s, and I’m in my 50s. However, Morgan sent out a video message to say that they were opening it up, and I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I applied. And was accepted.

As part of a pre-Intensive letter, Dave and Morgan wrote about what to do in the lead-up to the event, and one of the things they said was this:

Plant a tree. Literally. I was asking the Father what He had for all the men in preparation for this event and He said, “Invite them to plant a tree, with Me.” Your own hands. Your own shovel. The details of where you do it don’t matter—your own yard, help out a friend. The most important part is to invite the Father into the entire process. Pay attention to what comes up in your heart and where you go with it. And send a picture and whatever pieces of the story you’d like to us at [their-email-address].

Over weeks following the letter, this particular bit of it became more and more important, and uncovered a very deep and long-standing agreement. Let me tell you a story.

A long time ago (more than 30 years ago), my parents built a house. They did it on a budget, but there were some non-negotiables. One, each of us four kids was to have our own room. Two, there needed to be a goodly amount of space. They got a 4,221 m² block of land (just over an acre), and put the rest into the construction of the five-bedroom house. That didn’t leave money for landscaping, or indeed, finishing the verandah at the back of the house. Shortly after the house was completed, I learned to use a mattock, because there was a lot of clay that had to be chipped away from the back of the house to prepare for the verandah.

A fair way into that, I got jack of the whole process. I mean, I wasn’t going to live there that much longer, I didn’t want the verandah … and so on with all of the rationalisations that adolescents come up with to not help out around the house. I downed tools, and told Dad that I wasn’t going to help anymore. He told me not to expect him to help if I needed anything. I told him that I’d pay someone if I needed anything done.

And there it was. The agreement.

Morgan talks a lot about being a generalist, and how valuable that is for a man as part of knowing that he has what it takes. Over the years, I’ve taken refuge in the notion that I’m very intelligent, and I can figure out anything I really need to do, if the circumstances dictate that I really can’t pay anyone else to. I’ve installed dishwashers a couple of times; I’ve installed a rangehood with my wife’s help (eventually with my wife’s help … that was a “growing experience”); I can install networks and any sort of technology, and I can write software to help out with pretty much any dreary intellectual task.

But outside? In the garden? Nope, that’s Fleur’s domain. That’s a whole ’nother kettle of fish. Let me tell you another story.

I hate mowing the lawn. I don’t know when this really came about, but I think it has to do with the fact that I can’t just mow the lawn. I love my wife, but she’s not a tidy gardener. So if I have to mow the lawn, it also involves moving hoses, picking discarded pots and tools, accidentally running over bits of broken pots, sticks, hidden tools, cutlery and so on. Also, we have many, many edges that have to be trimmed before mowing. I wouldn’t mind just mowing, but it’s not just mowing.

Anyway, one day, I was mowing (but not just mowing). It was hot, I was ticked off to epic proportions, and muttering under my breath. And puffing. And did I mention it was hot? I wear prescription sunglasses, and sweat was dripping down the inside of them. And because this is Australia, there was dust getting caught up in the sweat and making a mess of my glasses. Oh, and where to dump the grass clippings is a moving target. I can’t just dump it in the green waste bin … oh no, it has to go in the compost bin. But the compost bin is not close to where most of the mowing happens, and there is a lot of grass, so there is a lot of back and forth between where I’m mowing and the compost. And when the compost is full, the grass has to be dumped around the base of a tree. Which tree? I don’t know … I never really know, and if I guess, I usually guess wrong.

Don’t get me wrong here, I don’t get berated, and we don’t fight about it … but I usually need a long cold drink and a hammock in order to bleed off the stress. Or as Douglas Adams would put it, a “glass of perspective and soda.”

Anyway on this particular day, after not just mowing, I finally got inside. I was red in the face, probably dehydrated and cosmically annoyed. Fleur greeted me as I walked through the sliding door with, “Oh honey, it does my heart good to see you out there.”

WHAT?!? Are you kidding me? One of many things that came immediately to mind was “My wife delights in my misery!”

I’ve told this story several times now, and Fleur and I have got to the point where we laugh about it. She knows I can see multiple facets of any situation, and I know she loves me, so we talked through it.

And now Morgan and Dave are telling me to plant a tree. With my own hands.

Father, please help me through this.

I bought an olive tree. Why? Lots of reasons, but one of them is that it’s going to be a long time before it fruits. I don’t want to have false expectations on when it’s going to bear fruit, but I hope by the time the decade is up, I might start to see some. I decided on the olive tree.

Fleur and I decided where the tree should go. Or, more to the point, I asked her where the tree should go. Hey, she’s the gardener, and she has the plan. I figured that this was the course of wisdom. Spiritualise this if you want … I did.

I started digging, and discovered that almost directly below the grass was a layer of clay and almost-20-year-old building materials. Whatever had gone into making our house was still laying around, waiting to be pulled out of the ground to make room for growth.

It wasn’t enough to use the spade. I had to resort to … the mattock.

If I’d put some clay breaker on the ground some time before before, the job would have been a lot easier. As it was, it took a bit of pounding to get a deep enough hole, and that’s rough on the ground, and hard on the gardener.

A big thank you to the Ransomed Heart team. I’ve been sitting under your clay breaker for probably 15 years now, and the digging is a lot easier than it might have been.

The dirt that went back into the hole was a lot better than the dirt that came out. There was a lot of manure (courtesy of Fleur’s chooks) that’s going to be good for the tree. I think it would have been a dumb move to pack the old stuff in there without pulling out the crap.

And there we have it. Phil’s little tree, in the ground, and the tools are away.

One final thing that struck me. The apparent size of the tree depends a lot on your point of view.