Unexpected help

A couple of months ago, I cleaned the chimney of my house with my new brush. It scrapes the inside of the flue with stiff bristles, and is long enough to reach all the way down to the firebox.

I was well pleased with myself, first for getting onto this before winter, and then for doing a job that had in the past cost me $150 and taken a couple of blokes twenty minutes. The complicated part turned out not to be cleaning the flue, but taking out the baffles inside the firebox. The putting them back in.

With the ladder out, I thought I would have a look at the roof over the kitchen in the Studio. I’d had Paul the Plumber try to fix the leaks, to no avail. What was actually going on?

Standing on the ladder, looking directly along the line of the roof, the problem was plain as day. Water didn’t run down the sheets: it gathered in a sag in the roof and found its way under the sheets and into the kitchen. It shocked me that it had taken me so long to have a proper look, and that I had spent a decade making the inside look terrific, without securing the basic condition of a roof that kept rain out.

I was on the phone to a local builder the next day. He came and had a look, had a few ideas about the fix, said he could do it in three weeks. Three weeks later, he thought maybe a couple of weeks. The job he was on was taking longer than he had anticipated.

Over coffee with Michael Baxter, my new neighbour, I lamented the difficulty of getting hold of the builder. The autumn rains were coming.

‘Let’s have a look’, said Michael.

The next day, the sagging beam was propped. A week later, Michael arrived with the necessary materials and by the end of the day, the roof was 35mm higher in the dip, the sag was gone, and the beam reinforced so that it will not sag again.

The living room looks so good without the fear of leaking roofs

Michael, it turns out, had spent the last 10 years with Circus Oz, doing things like making sure tightropes were set up good and tight. Just the person for the job. So I have a new beam, and Michael, who needed a workshop, is now installed in the Studio’s artisan workshop.

James was the first, and now Michael is the second, both woodworkers. It’s a happy space, pieces of rough sawn timber stacked on shelves on one wall, a big saw on the side and an all purpose steel workbench in the middle of the floor. I like getting up from my desk, walking out to the road and if Michael’s ute is there, finding out what he’s up to.