Why I sometimes Actually Do Not

There's a nice picture of a positively HUGE garage in my article last week titled "What Do I ActuallyDo?" and it's one of (and connected with) what I do and don't do. And that makes about as much sense as everything else I write, I just realise. Anyhow - here are some reasons that 

Sometimes I Just Cannot Even

This arrives after the eleventh real life anniversary and twelve years after the Facebook anniversary of our wedding, my wife and me. In the times before that my life was highly changeable and sometimes chaotic and sometimes copacetic, but in the times since, it has also been the happiest I've ever been. 

The last twelve years include four moves, the last of them six years ago to a coastal-adjacent town in Victoria's Bass Coast region, where we can almost throw rocks at Tasmanians, although we shouldn't do that as the wife's family came from that island to Melbourne. 

But the last move has been one of the most conflicting and difficult periods, not least because a certain coronavirus made an appearance, but also a helluva lot of other things happened. We were offered a long-term rental with a rider to "make the place your long-term home" and so we spent our savings doing that - a tall fence to keep the cats controlled, a gazebo in the back yard, a small but new shed for me in the back, raised garden beds, a gazebo and outdoor kitchen. 

I have to also say that this was not tens of thousands of dollars because I did much of the work myself and recycled and used salvaged materials where we could, but still - it was our savings, eagre as they were. (four figures not five, m'kay?) 

Demolition And Pandemic

And across the HIGHWAY from us was a motel, caravan park, and pub/club that had been the focal point for shadiness in the lovely town, but the land was slated for new building works. Long story short, by our second year here there was demolition work across the way for several months that kept us on the ragged edge of our nerves. Then COVID-19, and our landlord had a marriage breakdown and sold the house. 

A House Sold World

For almost a year, the real estate company that managed it kept us on tenterhooks and the ragged remains of our last (or so we thought - but we were ever the optimists) remaining nerve, then a new landlord arrived on the scene and was happy to keep us on - but then split the block en twain as the Twelfth Century English used to say. 

So our nerve was restored, then shredded en twain again, and of course almost our entire outdoor life was in that back yard so we had to strike nine (or was it ten? I honestly can't remember) garden beds and put the best six of them into the front yard. The "front yard" had been a pocket-handkerchief sized patch of lawn that had no fence between it and a footpath which formed a major walkway into the town centre, so we'd actually never left anything on the veranda or lawn. (At least, not after some rotten bastard stole a quite large and beloved plant in a fairly valuable pot from the veranda...)

So that had to wait until the landlord, realising we'd erected a cat fence of considerable size and now had nowhere for them, and had lost our entire vegetable gardens, so he very kindly put a 1.8m paling fence around it, in the process reducing the pocket handkerchief to a ladies' lace hankie. But we loved it, I added cat retaining wings and then moved those six garden beds, and there are articles on these blogs about how I improved them to make them more productive. 

Which Occasioned A LOT Of Work

My by then only just over one year old shed had to be taken apart, hacked and re-shaped to fit the new space allotted, and so 2020 and 2021 were spent doing those things. Then in 2022 when I finally had things going, the local Shire kicked up a fuss. Because there'd be two driveways on one block, the front fence would have to be moved back a metre from the footpath for pedestrian safety. The lace hankie is soon to be a ribbon and more than half to those six garden beds will have to be uprooted again and moved.

Also, a hew hardware store started construction on that newly-cleared land (remember that land? yeah . . .) and if we thought demolition was shattering, we hadn't seen anything yet. This was almost eleven months of unmitigated hell, and it's only because there's now a huge Bunnings almost across the road that kept me out of serious loss of mind, I think.  

Anyhow - among other things, the new split block also required a garage and two carports. The garage is, as you'll see in the photo if you go look at the article linked in the lede, huge. And it turns out that the landlord made it that huge because he was well aware that he'd caused me to have to pretty much destroy my existing shed, and was also tearing down the existing garage (which had never been usable as a garage as one door was rusted shut and it had builder's trash on the ground) that I'd been using to store materials for the work we did and future work. 

The Best Of Best Things Happened

So it turns out the whole huge thing is ours, not the other house on the property. I basically have a 6m x 8m area to become parking and also my new shed. The trade-off is that my old shed becomes so much scrap materials, the parking garage shed we bought for my wife's mobility scooter will be sold or given to a friend. 

But it means also that I have a chance to make a first real workbench, and so I decided to build it A) to match a plastic folding bench I bought secondhand and which is an easy height to lift materials onto, B) to be similar-sized modular units, C) to be mobile and D) for at least one module to become a "multi-tool table" which had interchangeable inserts with a converted had circular saw, jigsaw, router, and later a grinding/sanding machine and finally, E) that it had to be modular so that I could lock benches together in order to make a larger work surface when needed and store the units compactly when not needed. 

And That's Where I'm At

So right now all my other projects have to go on hold because I have to make some slightly better workbenches as mentioned above. Then I'll have to move all the tools and materials and projects into the new garage, which will also mean making storage like shelves and racks for the space while also leaving room to back the car in, the garden equipment, and of course the mobility scooter.

You can understand perhaps that this takes priority over blogging and recycling and other projects. (The garage will offer me the space to set up a modular bench for plastic recycling, for example. For building the mechanical parts of other projects. And for at this stage unimagined new projects. The rewards are considerable.)

One other thing will take priority, moving the garden beds when the front fence has to be moved. We are reliant on the vegetable garden to offset our food bills so this will also be a priority, and having workbenches available will allow me to make anything needed.

What no amount of my effort will solve is the finances. Our philanthropic and very kind landlord will nevertheless stop short at financing materials for shelving and racking, or the cost of a handyman to move garden beds (since I can only do a limited amount of heavy physical work any more) and that will make things very tight - to downright impossible - for keeping up all the online costs involved, and leave nothing in the kitty for desirable projects like building recycling machines and facilities etc.

And so, you know, one of the best things you can do is to hit the KoFi cup or the Paypal logo and make a donation, and better yet, make it a small monthly one. Also use the newspaper to go to my News Stand where you can sign up to my once-a-week newsletter to stay up to date, and share the link to this page with your friends and social network - the more people this reaches, the better the chance that someone will help us with our projects and (in my very artistically talented wife's case) artwork which I'll also post here.