Now that I have been back from Vietnam for a couple of months, finished my self isolation period and walked around in metaphorical circles for a while, it’s time to catch up on writing about the many jobs around and on the house. As has been mentioned before, we live in an old farm house. It’s on the edge of a village that, with the exception of too many churches and not enough pubs (here), is not too dissimilar to where I grew up in England.
This is what the farm looked like around the 1850’s. It was very much a going concern back then with quite a few workers who looked after the dairy herd and the 30 acres that produced cauliflowers, berries, gooseberries and rhubarb. The soil, being volcanic; is rich and lends itself to most kinds of agriculture – that is if the sometimes ‘high antarctic’ climate allows it.
The house and some of the outbuildings.
The house had quite distinctive chimney’s that can be seen here just behind the farm buildings and thankfully, they have fared quite well over the years. The large gable ended building on the right was actually the farm office and it had accomodation and a kitchen for the workers. Sadly, that’s no longer there, nor is the blacksmiths shop that was onsite, but periodically, I dig up horseshoes, stirrups and nails around the property. The blacksmith was probably a very busy fellow as the farm reportedly had 26 draft horses who lived in the stables on the premises; 26 huge horses – blimey and I thought our two Rhodesian Ridgebacks produced a lot of dung… Aside from the enormous horseshoes he would have had to make, the blacksmith also made and repaired all the metalwork for the farm. When you look at the burn marks around the nail holes in the hall, I could imagine the farm boys running between his forge to the house, with the glowing nails in tin buckets and handing them over to the builders and them whacking them straight in the walls.
Burn marks around the nail holes
Most people didn’t have wall paper back then, or if they did, they had made their money and showed it off by slapping newspaper on the walls and then putting up the latest wall paper designs from London (probably made in Melbourne!). Most people back then covered their inside walls with canvas or even hessian and painted it, giving the impression of a plastered wall. Thats probably what they did here as there’s still quite a few hessian fibres struck behind the nails in our hall if you look carefully.
The old roof from the courtyard – our dogs favourite sun trap
A lady called Mary Powers, was one of the original owners and according to the historical accounts she was a very enterprising woman and was the brains behind the the running of the farm. Her husband, who was the local doctor, did his rounds on horseback, looking after the communities health while she established the market garden that supplied some of the thousands of diggers searching for gold in the local area with fresh vegetables. They also had a herd of cows and established a small dairy elsewhere on the property and it was there that they processed the milk and also made butter, cream and cheese for sale.
Another view of the old property
Trevor, who was one of the later residents of the house after his family purchased the farm, was actually born in the front bedroom. He told us many stories about his life in the house and the many interesting characters who worked on the farm. He also said that his parents set up a churn for making the butter in the cellar that runs under the full width of the house and that he had spent hours turning the handle as a child. I don’t expect anything of value is really left under there, but as I still haven’t opened it up, I might be surprised, you never know. I’ll open it up one day for sure but it’s at the bottom of a very long job list, just before the 6mt deep well that has been covered over for safety.
Trevor also hinted at a few ghostly experiences associated with the house and to be honest, it would be surprising if there weren’t more than a few births and deaths over the years, but certainly we have never felt anything malevolent about the place. That said, an early house guest of ours did reportedly hear voices and movement in the night and swore that she woke in the night to a child sitting on the end of her bed and it wasn’t one of ours. We may or may not have plied her with a couple of gins over dinner so that could have been the reason for the voices, but I remain open minded about these things.
Newly replaced weather boards
When we moved in, we were so excited not to be in our usual rental accomodation overseas that we overlooked quite a few of the shortcomings and maintenance issues that the house had. I had noticed that there were a couple of trees that had grown under the eaves and actually into the roof, but I hadn’t realised that this had become a walkway for possums, rats and mice, all of whom had raised several generations of youngsters above the heads of the residents. I had foolishly gone up into the roof to investigate why there were so many lights fusing in the early days and as I shone my torch and looked around at all the chewed wires, I felt like an explorer looking into a cave full of bats, with the amount of small eyes reflecting light back at me!
The same friend who had the child sitting on her bed, was bitten on her toe whilst in bed by a mouse when she nudged it in her sleep but the last straw for Mrs. Jerry was the (admittedly very cute) field mouse sitting watching us eat dinner from the kitchen bench and occasionally helping itself to crumbs from the bread board. When the previous owners had slyly asked me if we liked ‘wildlife’, I thought that they had the Kangaroos in the paddock in mind, not the creatures residing in, over and under the house. Such was the consternation and great the threat of domestic sanctions, that I also had to nip out and buy a full set of new white goods in order to persuade Mrs Jerry to stay in the house and the second stop was the RSPCA and the adoption of a hungry looking cat, who has done us proud ever since.
A nice spot for a glass of wine as the sun goes down.
Back in the late 1840’s one of the many challenges was to make the houses weatherproof. The highest point of our village is a little elevated at 754mts ASL and we certainly do get some cold weather, with snow on the ground for a couple of days a year. It doesn’t last that long, but up on the mount, a friend who bakes professionally and has very large baking trays, gets them out and whizzes down the hill with her kids. The weather does take its toll on wooden houses and a few years ago I was replacing some of the weatherboards with a retired builder (as adult supervision) and he pulled one off one the boards close to the ground and out came hundreds of hard reddish brown pellets about the size of rabbit droppings. I was a little alarmed that they might be something unsavoury but as it turned out, the answer was thankfully less faecal than I thought. Long ago in the village, there had been a tannery that produced skins from various beasts, both native and domestic. In the tannery process, aside from a lot of urine, they used oil distilled from the eucalyptus leaves and wood chips. The dried waste from the wood had been recycled into insulation and that’s what filled most of the cavity walls in the houses.
Being an old farm, the upkeep is pretty much constant and ongoing. We had been saving up for a new roof for a couple of years and it eventually came time to bite the bullet and line up the contractors. I had actually been soliciting quotes for at least 18 months and I had seen the incredible difference in what some tradies will try and get away with. I found it hard to believe that someone could say that they’d finish a whole roof, on their own in ten days for a couple of grand, knowing that out of those ten days, there would be at least four when it would be blowing a gale and you wouldn’t last five minutes up there. Sure enough, when I asked for references, most fell by the wayside and I ended up with the most expensive, but most credible looking tradesmen.
The problem with removing an old roof is that you then can’t ignore what you’d suspected was under there, (but had secretly hoped wasn’t) and sure enough, that turned out to be a whole lot of rotten wood. I couldn’t ignore it and in-between visits from the rain and the roofers, I climbed up on the roof and replaced weatherboards, jet washed and scrubbed the chimneys, painted the visible eaves and dodged the numerous spiders lurking up there. Slowly, the house started to look much smarter.
I received a few smart arsed texts from my neighbour who had driven by the house and seen me safely harnessed to the scaffolding, wearing a full ‘bunny suit’ to try and avoid sandblasting myself, but I managed to refrain from throwing tools down at his car the next time I saw it. I had to be really careful not to wash the old mortar out of the stacks, but they certainly looked good afterwards. I did not, of course and not only did I look a lot older, having been soaked and blasted, I was also hobbling around, after falling through my ladder and ‘de barking’ both shins in the process. Luckily no one saw me do that.
A bunch of really dodgy looking guys turned up one afternoon and started mooching around the garden and as I walked over to challenge them, it became obvious that by the sound of the mutual abuse, they were known to the roofers, so I bit my tongue and just watched. They fell upon the pile of old tin and wood like starving hyenas around a kill and they had stacked it all into their trailers in just over ten minutes. I was impressed with their speed and coordination and told them so. The man in charge just grinned through his missing and blackened teeth said “it’s what we do mate” They disappeared in a fog of hand rolled cigarettes accompanied by the sound of squealing tyres. Apparently, there are several groups of these ‘general dealers’ who stalk builders who are working locally and they get rid of the scrap for nothing, salvaging what they can and presumably making a few bucks on it.
Our nice shiny new roof. I still have to paint the house and build a new fence, or hopefully, pay someone to do it for me! In the foreground is what remains of the enormous tree that threatened to split and fall on the house – I wrote about this some time ago https://www.thebearandthebees.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=217&action=edit Removing the stump and replacing the fence will no doubt take me a few more months. But as its been there for a couple of years, there’s no real rush!
Another story from Trevor involved a local handyman who had been hired to build a stable on the property. He was unfortunately very fond of the bottle and he’d work well up to lunch time and then after a sandwich washed down with a great deal of whiskey, he’d curl up in a corner and sleep for the rest of the day. This didn’t endear him to Trevors father and one day, fed up with the time the work was taking, he stepped over the snoring body and to teach him a lesson, he cemented the remaining full whiskey bottles into the wall under construction, where they still reportedly remain. Not surprisingly, this didn’t go down too well, but the stable was eventually finished, so I expect that it had the desired effect…
Now this is a much better use of a stable than housing horses!
The Southern end of the stable had suffered rather from the weather and the stonework column to the left of the door had been made with a very poor lime mortar mix. By the time this task came around to the top of the list, the mortar had the consistency of paper mâché and the collapsing stones had jammed the rotten wood of the door shut. I knew I had to remove that column and not being a dab hand at stone wall building, I decided to extend the weather boards down to the ground.
Replacing the weather boards single handed was an interesting challenge as I seemed to only be able to find a time to start when the skies were about to open and the wind would pick up to the point that being up a ladder was almost suicidal. I did eventually manage to rope in Jerry minor, who kindly left his computer games long enough to help me and that got the job finished.
I finished the timber work off with a stable door, which is something I had always wanted just there.
And here’s why!
Nicely done, mate. Hope to visit sooner rather much later.
It’s about time we caught up. Thanks for reading.
Houses -a bottomless pit of expense, but we merrily pay.
Love the view from your stable door.