Forward movement
Posted on | June 30, 2010 | 2 Comments
It’s been a hard slog — I won’t downplay any of that — and the last few years since we left our large house in Melbourne behind and moved to a goldfields era village in Central Victoria have had a roller-coaster quality. But it became apparent about a year ago as we were finishing the rather dragged-out construction of our darling and very compact eco-house that 7 and 1/2 acres was just too much to maintain when Mark works such long hours renovating houses.
Had it been someplace cool and green like England, we could have left the paddocks to nature and created a wildflower meadow. That is simply not doable here in Australia where the local shire council mandates a cut-back of any grass that is over a few inches high due to the risk of bush-fires. It is a firm but sensible approach to keeping people alive and I completely agree with it. But it also means that Mark spends hours on a tractor when he would rather be engaging in something artistic or creative. He misses that free time to just let the muse weave spells in his brain and I have longed to give that freedom back to him.
So we signed the listing contract with our new agent last week, the sign went up on Thursday, and the listing went live online today at realestate.com.au.
It’s a beautiful little gem of a house and it’s perfect for a full time resident OR for a weekender property — and the huge art studio makes it quite desirable. The combined size of the cottage-sized house and the art studio make it all bigger (and more sensible given that we have no children in residence) than our previous 3 bedroom, 2 story house down in Melbourne. So now we just wait for the right person to come along and we begin the sorting out process.
And what lies ahead? What kind of house would we like next? As much as we never thought we’d say this, I think we’ll settle for a bog-standard sized lot this time and we’ll look for a nice-ish house to rehab. Then we’ll plant our garden and fruit trees and know that we might actually have the time to get on the train and go into the city for a trip to the theatre or museum without getting too far off schedule back at the property.
Dreams of rural living are one thing — the reality is quite something else — especially when you have two creative and artistic people living under one roof and neither of them wants to sacrifice the creative hours to maintenance issues.
Ah well — live and learn!
According To The Directions…
Posted on | June 16, 2010 | No Comments
Ah yes — the manufacturer’s recommended manner of installation.
According to the directions on each huge carton of bamboo flooring, we were meant to install it over a padded foam underlay via a nail-through-the-tongue-end method. And so my husband, who renovates houses for a living and who has never installed a timber floor without both gluing it and nailing it, did exactly what the manufacturers instructed. And they were wrong, wrong, wrong on so many levels!
We moved into our new house almost exactly one year ago and those pale blond floors were a source of visual joy — joy that began to be seriously squashed when the ‘issue’ first appeared prior to Christmas. At first it was simply a little squeak sound in a few places in the living-room. Then it progressed to a more serious set of crackles in the bedroom. And by the time we decided that enough was enough, my husband said that if I got up in the middle of the night to take an aspirin or get a glass of water, he knew exactly where I was in the house by the series of sounds. Not acceptable!
Research queen that I am, I did a web search and discovered that it was a ‘known issue’ with bamboo flooring and there were anguished letters from owners of houses much larger than ours who were moaning on public forums about the snap-crackle-pop effect of simply walking from room to room. Our house is tiny and what we have just gone through was inconvenient, but most of these news-group writers were discussing huge houses that had been constructed in an eco-conscious manner with sustainable materials — the same reasoning we used in our choice of materials. I can only imagine the stress of having to uninstall and reinstall the acres of flooring in those houses!
Thus we have now gone through construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction — all in the space of a mere 13 months time period. Aaarrrggghhh!
A week ago, Mark began pulling up every single piece of timber flooring throughout the house. 
But prior to that little endeavor, we had to move every stick of furniture out and into the addition that was completed in February, a wing on the back of the house that we had (thank heavens!) tiled instead of using the bamboo flooring again. And there we have camped out for well over a week while he removed the floor and reinstalled it with toxic-smelling, gag-inducing adhesive.
The clean and tidy addition went from this shot below 
to the next two. Aarrgghh!
Expeditions were made on occasion to the kitchen or the bathroom, but the rest of the time was spent eating, sleeping, doing office work, and watching television in a 30 square metre space. At least we both had a sense of humour about it all.
Now we can reassemble the house tomorrow and enjoy strolling boldly across the blond floors. But I can almost guarantee that, for awhile at least, we will hold our breath each and every time we hear a creak, groan, or noise anywhere within these walls.
A Season For Introspection
Posted on | May 24, 2010 | No Comments
Quiet — darkness — wetness — cold. A season abundant with introspection.
Winter is at hand — a mere few days away now — and already our temperatures are hovering near zero each night. The winter-ish wardrobe has been brought out of the closets once again and wool socks are definitely one of the daily necessities now.
In an annual reprise of my life-long pattern of winter behaviour, I have settled happily into a very creative space once again. Cuddled up in the aforementioned woolly socks and other soft and slouchy clothing, my brain is bursting with writing ideas and straining at the need to get at least some sleep in each 24 hour period when all I want to do at times like this is arise, gulp down hot coffee or endless cups of tea, and then write-write-write for as many hours as I can hold my eyes open per day.
It is a return to the fruitful darkness — the time when the seeds of future growth sit and percolate quietly in the colder temps, darker days, longer nights. I usually do my best writing at this time of year when that hot and all-too-bright Australian summer is no longer stunning my brain cells into inactivity. Another blessing is that I have never been affected, as many of my friends seem to be, by SAD — Seasonal Affected Disorder — where they crave the sunlight or need to supplement the lack of it with colour-corrected indoor lighting that simulates sunlight.
It is a very personal issue for this former resident of the Northern Hemisphere and I know that these sentiments are not universally felt by others who have fled the icy snow-filled winters and migrated here from Europe or North America or Northern Asia, but I feel more alive in these particular months than I ever do during the sun-parched ones. The leaves may have fallen from the trees and most of the plants are moving into dormancy, but we have one very particular thing right now that we don’t have most of the year.
Green — the colour of growth and renewal and, to my heart at least, hope. I truly miss the all-year-round shades of green in the Northern Hemisphere — so this colder, darker, greener, cuddlier-cozier time of year simply sets my heart alight and my brain is recharged and ready to write once again.
Wherever you may be in the world — may YOU feel similarly inspired right now!
Hearth and Home
Posted on | May 19, 2010 | No Comments
Sometimes the days, weeks, heck — a month slips away and although you know you have been quite well occupied, it is startling to discover that you haven’t done any concrete writing for awhile.
I can happily announce that a story was submitted and accepted for a regional anthology of writing which will be published in August 2010, but unfortunately that’s about it on the flying-fingers front.
Apologies to my regular readers and no, nothing is amiss. We have been quite busy with hearth and home issues as we continue the refinements on this less-than-a-year-old cottage on our small farm in Australia.
I shall be back soon — I promise — with new photos and new areas of musing for one and all to ponder.
Are We Past Saving?
Posted on | April 14, 2010 | 5 Comments
The people in my inner circle are all folks ‘of a certain age’ — full of life experience, hopefully a bit of wisdom, and most assuredly past their 20s and 30s. And although wars and recessions have touched all of our lives during specific time periods, we have primarily been infused with a belief-system that included a firm optimism in our individual and global futures.
I’ve read several articles in the last 3 or 4 years written by the youngest adults around — the early 20s folks who are facing quite a different world than the one we emerged into after university, fresh-faced with hope and the sensation that we could be anything that we wanted to if we applied ourselves diligently. And of course we all simply knew without questioning that we would own our own homes quite quickly. That world frequently doesn’t exist for today’s emerging adults — and there is a growing resentment about that accompanied by quite a bit of finger pointing.
The global epidemic of financial and personal pessimism isn’t limited to the young though. Even amongst people who are middle-aged or older, I personally know of quite a few adults who have been wiped out financially by the last recession and who have lost their homes and jobs. I also have both friends and family members who are retired folks that conscientiously set aside money during their years of employment for month after month, year after year, only to retire and discover that the longed-for pension was now worth 50% or less of what they had put in. They might as well have set those US dollars or British pounds alight in a bonfire. Or even better, they might have had rather a lot of holidays that they postponed in the belief that they would do all of that once they were ‘safely’ retired with lots of time on their hands.
What concerns me about articles like What On Earth Is To Become Of The Next Generation is that the young writer, viewing the daunting and diminished prospects that his generation faces with clarity and a fortunately-moderated anger, still engages in stereotypes that simply do NOT apply to all of us who are over 45.
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Deborah Harmes, Ph.D.
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DARKNESS FOLDING INWARD: Print Version
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