Our Grand Design: The highs and lows of building in a boom

Our Grand Design

The highs and lows of building in a boom

Tangea Tansley

OUR GRAND DESIGN

By Tangea Tansley

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Tangea Tansley

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For Richard with love

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – Let’s Build a House, Darling!

Chapter 2 – The Perfect Block

Chapter 3 – Getting it Right

Chapter 4 – In Search of our Grand Design

Chapter 5 – Plans in Waiting

Chapter 6 – Still Nothing Happens

Chapter 7 – This Is Meant To Be Fun?

Chapter 8 – Expendable Grandmothers

Chapter 9 – The Darkest Night

Chapter 10 – Then Morning Comes

Chapter 11 – An End in Sight

Chapter 12 – What’s in a Name?

About the Author

LET’S BUILD A HOUSE, DARLING!

‘You’re daft,’ said an English friend who was across from Portugal to stay with us for the week. ‘Sell the house? Why on earth would you want to leave this?’ She waved her hand about. ‘It has everything you need. It’s perfect.’

‘It’s got the freeway, too,’ I said a bit lamely, feeling ungrateful. ‘It’s intrusive day and night. In the back garden, out here, we can hardly hear ourselves think. And inside, the floor of the family room vibrates.’

‘Freeway? What freeway?’

I think it’s true to say that the freeway with its ten streams of traffic and a train route scheduled for down the centre bothered me more than it did most people. It didn’t, for example, worry my husband Richard or the majority of the people who came to the many parties we had in that house. I don’t think they even noticed it. And, to be honest, it hadn’t presented so much of a problem the day we bought the property. But it wasn’t long before it began to bother me and it wasn’t that I didn’t try to reason with myself. Having survived five years in a flat in the heart of Hong Kong alongside the raucous noise of the fish market, with a panel beater across the road, motorbikes that raced each other on the road up to the Peak that was level with my 14th floor window, the horses turned up high on Saturday afternoon radio and Chinese opera in the evenings, I told myself that I could get used to anything. I knew that even though you might be convinced you’ll go mad that first weekend, a week later it’s not so bad after all. I know that, in the end, it doesn’t become so much a case of blocking it out as genuinely not noticing it at all.

But, for some reason, it didn’t happen this time. Perhaps it was the visual juxtaposition of the freeway’s rowdy rows of flying steel with our enchanting garden with its landscaped levels, the bright heads of the standard roses staring back at themselves from the quiet blue of the pool, avenues of hibiscus and poinsettia. Or maybe it was because I was older and, heaven forbid, less tolerant than I used to be. I don’t know. I found myself getting grumpy when we worked in the back garden simply because it was impossible to hear each other speak when a road train rumbled past. Ambulance and fire engine sirens were a regular occurrence. The air breaks of the big trucks, the screeching tires of the hoons and the intermittent blasts of car horns overlaid the constant drone. Too often in the middle of the night, when most of the smaller traffic was off the roads, there was the roar of the motorcycle gangs, police car chases. Grey dust filtered over the rose bushes. And lead in petrol hadn’t yet been banned. Besides, situated as it was between the house and the view of the river, the eternal whizzing steel made me dizzy.

It was not until we’d been in the house for a couple of years that I tried to discuss it with Richard.

‘Doesn’t it worry you?’ I prompted finally when he didn’t reply.

‘Well, no. Evidently not half as much as it does you. No, I can’t really say it does. I think perhaps you might be exaggerating it somewhat, don’t you?’

I envy my husband this attitude, this ability to shrug off the relatively insignificant as unimportant. Along with a pretty young wife and my sister Toni’s homeopathic skills, that’s how Dad got to live to the brink of his hundredth birthday: by using this knack of not stressing the inconsequential. ‘Let it go, darling,’ he would say, sitting back in his leather wing chair in their little cottage, shaking his fingers as if he was flicking off drips. ‘It’s not worth worrying about. Just let it go.’ So maybe I was exaggerating. But that’s how it gathered in the corners of my mind: those ribbons of traffic curling around the beauty of that garden.

In the way of women, I had been contemplating change for a while, but I think the exact moment it fixed our lives for the next seven years was late one lazy summer afternoon as we were having a cup of tea in the shade of the pergola. I set down my cup.

‘Richard?’

‘Mmm?’ He looked up, a slight crease between his eyebrows, his finger firmly anchored on the newspaper article he was reading.

‘Let’s build a house, darling.’

‘A house. What for? We’ve got a lovely house.’ His frown deepened for a moment and then disappeared altogether. ‘Build, you say? Build.’ He turned the word over in his mind. ‘Well, I suppose we can certainly think about it.’

He returned to his reading for all of ten seconds before he reached for the pen in his top pocket and, using the white space around the adverts in the paper, started sketching.

It was as simple as that, the moment things changed.

At least, that appeared to be the moment but, looking back, I wonder whether it wasn’t some time before. Was the freeway the only trigger?

At this point, Richard and I had only been together for a few years. We had both been married before, but in terms of our own relationship, marriage was new. This house we’d bought two years before was our first home together and it was, as I’ve said, set in an established garden. We both loved gardening and this was the first time that either of us had inherited quite such a well-thought-out and luscious garden, carefully crafted into a number of levels and inhabited by a raft of bird species including an owl that nested at the top of one of the two Sultan palms.

The house itself was built in the Sixties and rather English in design, with a steeply pitched roof and dormer windows. It had a small but elegant carriage lamp to light the garden path and its street number was artistically wrought in a cursive font and set under this lamp. It had had only two owners before us which I’m sure contributed to that loved look that some properties are lucky enough to portray. Or with houses, too, is attracting the right people something more than luck or chance?

As it happened, we are both handy types, Richard through a natural affinity, and I, I suspect, because I had no choice. Most of my fix-it skills were gained between marriages when I purchased one of the oldest weatherboard cottages north of the city—simply because it happened to be the cheapest house for sale in the Perth metropolitan area at that time—and proceeded over the next few years to make it livable.

Renovate would be too sophisticated a word. Besides, renovation takes cash or at least something in a savings account, and I had neither. The cottage had been badly damaged by termites; in places, the plaster had been torn off to expose the wooden lathes; electrical wires hung out of the broken walls in multi-coloured streamers; skirting boards had been ripped off and the floor sloped like a listing deck. The termites got to me too when one kind soul told me that you could never really relax your vigilance and that they could decimate a house made of wood virtually overnight. So terrified was I that I would lose my home that I spent many an evening with my ear fixed to a glass tumbler, using it as a stethoscope to listen for sounds of chomping behind the walls. Believe me, when you’re on your own, when it’s late at night and when the level of wine in the bottle is low, it doesn’t take much to imagine chomping.

Over the next few years, I learned to install partitioning, tile a splashback, hang doors, replace skirting boards, repair sash windows (takes a lot of patience, that one), change taps and drill doors for handles and locks. I built in a bookcase, lined an open staircase, bricked and cemented a set of steps and installed ceiling roses, picture rails and got to know every salvage yard in the State . . .

I painted the cottage throughout in varying shades of my favourite oaty yellows. I sewed bleached calico into frothy curtains for the lounge and bedroom windows. My stepbrother, Chris, came round and together we restored the nineteenth-century façade by jacking up the roof and hefting at the uneasy brick extension with sledgehammers.

The house lacked doors throughout, including—once the front extension was demolished—a front door, and I sifted through the salvage yards until I found more or less what I was looking for in one store and a suitable handle and lock at another. Once locked, though, the door wouldn’t unlock. So I learned how to use Allen keys. And then when I chanced to investigate under a piece of wood over the door, I found it hid a beautiful stained-glass window and this set me off working on the rest of the facade. I tracked down turned timber posts at another yard, installed missing weatherboards, mended others and put up a lace trim to finish it off. When it was all together, I painted the front, again in yellow, with cream for the trim and the verandah posts. My father bought me a hammer and a set of saws. I saved up for an electric drill. Gradually my tool box grew. And then I worked on the garden by moving the compost heap from the newly restored front of house, putting in reticulation, building a lattice fence and, with my father’s help, hanging jarrah gates to keep in my two Ridgeback dogs.

I’d had old houses with lots of doing-it-myself before, but there’s no doubt that it was at Corkhill Street that the infinite variety of the tasks made each job more challenging than the last. Mending the heavy sash windows demanded three hands and a deal of caution to avoid losing one of the two I already had. It took me a week of flying glassy splinters to get the broken tiles off the kitchen chimney. In the end, the only way to tackle this job was to dress in goggles, my old riding cap and boots, revert to using a sledge hammer on a cold chisel and resign myself to re-plastering the whole mess before re-tiling. I can only say that the fall-out from the pain of a failed relationship helped enormously with this task. But perhaps one of the worst jobs of all—because it was achieved in a sea of sweat and frustration and was so painstakingly slow—was removing old wallpaper from the fragile lathe and plaster walls with a steamer on what would have to be one of the hottest days of that summer. Oh! the joy whenever a large piece peeled free without damage to the plaster.

The house in Lockhart Street that we had bought together was quite different. It needed some painting and updating—and, yes, there was a lot of peeling wallpaper to be removed there, too—but overall what had been added over the years had been done thoroughly and with a degree of sensitivity.

We had stamped our own memories on the place by getting married in the front garden in an extraordinarily beautiful ceremony presided over by a minister who had been granted special dispensation to hold the ceremony off sanctified territory. He was Michael Rowdon, at that time the minister for the chapel at Rottnest, a much-loved island retreat just off the coast of Western Australia. I don’t think of myself as a church person, but I’d travel a lot further than Rottnest to attend one of Michael’s services. His sermons were real and engaging. He talked about the difficult stuff we face every day like grief and jealousies and impatience. His congregation didn’t just sit and listen, but gathered about him, an integral part of the service, so when you stepped out of the chapel at the end of it all, that power that sits so thickly in every place of worship had become a part of you; you stood straighter, felt somehow more substantial and better able to cope than before. I went there quite often in the years after my husband died, at first just to sit in a corner trying to hide the tears that I somehow couldn’t stop, later to realize that there was sunshine actually streaming down the aisle from the open door and that there were welcome swallows swooping in and out and playing hide and seek in the rafters. Later, I learned to listen to Michael and sometime after that to finally join in. It was a truly Godly place. We lacked the necessary connection to Rottnest Island to get married in that lovely chapel, but next best was to be married by Michael in our own garden. Quite aside from that, the house was the setting for several Christmas parties and both our daughters’ engagement parties. And the much-loved Ridgeback brothers who had passed on in their thirteenth year were buried beside the lemon tree in the back garden.

So Lockhart Street had memories and it was ours. It was ours, split equally between us, and we didn’t even owe the bank. It had a picture-window view across the river from the family room and, facing West, we were privy to some outstanding sunsets which went a long way towards compensating for the glaring summer heat. It had a large lounge and separate dining room, three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a huge dressing room. It had a smart kitchen with jarrah cupboards and plenty of them. It was ours and we were lucky to have it. So what is it about humans that we find ourselves compelled to change things that are working perfectly well? My American boss used to say: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ I learned a lot from Jim that has stood me in good stead, but on this occasion I was going to override his advice.

The traffic was one thing that sooner or later was going to cause us to move, but there was another strong urge that came into play. It could easily have been acquisitiveness, but in this case it wasn’t. I think it was something more basic. More primal. Something like even though you’re getting married later in life than usual or you’re mate number two or three or four, you still have that urge to get it together in a more knitted sort of way. Like threading dry grasses to make a comfy nest. Or procreating. Most newly marrieds go ahead and have kids. But Richard was my third husband and I his second wife. We already had a house and dogs and there was