We moved back to Ambler Ave in early 1974. I’d quit teaching, and for the next few years Heather’s burgeoning craft business became our main source of income.
“…And with only two kids, did we really need three bedrooms?”
The fact that for the next few years I earned very little, gave me a bit more insight into the fragile male psyche, as if any more was needed. Whenever conversation came close to what I might be doing personally — “Gidday, what’re you up to?” — I always thought that what people really wanted to know was — When are you going to get a real job?
But at least I was by then a confident bush carpenter, so this was also the beginning of our history of what can only loosely be described as home improvement.
Ours was a typical kiwi house of the time — small, in other words — and cramming three bedrooms, a kitchen, lounge, toilet and bathroom into about 900 square feet (84 sq. m) meant that some of the spaces were necessarily tiny. Besides, to our eyes the internal passages that gave access to them, and to the front and back doors, were offensive wasted space. We resolved to remove some of the interior walls and go “open plan”.
We were practical people, however, and there were two practical considerations — to spend as little money as possible, and to not remove so much of the structure that the roof fell in.
First we knocked a big hole in the wall between the kitchen and lounge, made it structurally sound with finished 6×1 pine, and replaced the existing lounge door with elegant grey double doors. Soon Heather was busy painting and decorating.
It was fashionable at the time to spray one’s ceilings with a material that gave them a frothy cloud like appearance. You could even add glitter. Heather liked the idea but preferred to daub the lounge ceiling in white plaster, using her hands. Adrienne had been doing something similar a year or so ago — finger painting.
The final step was to lay milk chocolate coloured wall to wall carpet.
The results were very satisfying. In the kitchen we could now enjoy the morning sun, the view across the road, and our snug lounge fire in winter.
Directly across the road lived an old gentleman in a tidy little fibrolite house, easily the oldest in the neighbourhood. He was friendly, older than our parents, part of a New Zealand already disappearing. Heather would drive him down to Waikumete occasionally to visit his wife’s grave.
Our success with the lounge got us thinking. The master bedroom was a reasonable size but the other two were tiny. And with only two kids, did we really need three bedrooms?
We built two bunks into the bedroom at the end of the passage, next to ours. The lower one was under the window, the top one overlapping it at right angles on the opposing wall. This worked well, and the kids seemed to enjoy it — except one year when someone rearranged the contents of the Christmas stockings.
We then began knocking out more walls. The other little bedroom, at the front of the house, became part of the open space, although we had to retain a section of wall next to the front door in order to hold the roof up. I stripped the gib board off it for some reason, and never got round to replacing it. One day, since I was now working from home, I nailed a veneer drafting board on to the old rough-sawn rimu framing, and it stayed like that until we went to the Solomons. Stephen remembers things differently, saying I had a cramped working space at the back of the house where the original bathroom was. If so I can’t remember.
This was all rather eccentric, shall we say, but it worked well.
We made some progress resolving some of the house’s other peculiarities. Originally you had to go out the back door and through the wash house to visit the lavatory. If that seems hard to believe I must agree, but there’s no denying it. What’s more, the wash house and toilet doors opened towards each other, so if you carelessly left the wash house door open while someone else was in the loo you could lock them in. Stephen got trapped in there more than once.
One thing I do remember is our pièce de resistance — turning the passage itself into a massive ferrocement bath and shower. It was built of mesh stapled onto ply, plastered like a ferro boat and finished with dark blue epoxy paint. The walls above were tiled, with a stained glass window to let the light in. It was big enough to be sociable, but filling it drained the hot water cylinder, so we used the shower most days. The kids loved it. So did we.
According to Stephen I managed to organise indoor access to the toilet as well. He has a pretty good memory for doors, having had his finger jammed in one, so he would know, I suppose.
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Of course the goings on in the house were just a sideshow. Out back, behind the old garage, was the massive boat shed, towering over the neighbours like a jerry-built watch tower. We also turned part the old garage into Heather’s first craft workshop.
Our last project, after the boat was gone, was to demolish the boat shed and old garage, put down a concrete pad and erect a double Skyline garage to expand Heather’s workshop. Finally, we built a timber fence and gate for privacy in our back yard. Dad came down to help build some work benches out of yet more car case ply. Some of them are still in use at Queensberry.
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Thinking back, did we apply for permits for any of this? No. Did we think about it? No. Did the neighbours say anything? Or the Town Clerk next door? No.
Did we hire qualified tradies? I suppose so, although I guarantee we plumbed in the new bath and shower ourselves. We used isolating transformers and extension leads in the boat shed.
How times have changed. How the West was won.
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There’s another incident a few years later worth recalling. When we moved to Glengarry Road in 1981, the downstairs area — created by raising the house and building a basement underneath, quite common in those days — was what we called a dog’s breakfast. From the front door you could head up a rather steep, narrow flight of steps to the main living area, or down to the basement. The area near the road was originally part garage, part workshop, but we replaced the garage door, and that became Heather’s busy workshop.
The rest of the basement was rather ridiculous. You stepped down into a claustrophobic, sunless little space with doors left, right and centre — the workshop to the left, a rumpus room at the back and, straight ahead, a little room that Stephen, by then a teenager, had claimed as his bedroom.
What frustrated Heather was how difficult it was to get into our small, but quite pleasant, garden — whether through the workshop, or through the rumpus room, or through Stephen’s bedroom. In fact i frustrated her so much that, when we decided to move away from Glengarry, her top priorities were a view and being able to walk straight out of the house into the garden.
This frustrated me too — so much that one day, a few years in, I phoned Heather and said that I wanted to deal with this the same way we’d done at Ambler Ave. We’d move Stephen somewhere new and demolish his existing bedroom wall so that you could walk straight out into the garden through the ranch slider.
She thought that was a good idea, and I thought, why wait?
I grabbed our big sledge hammer and took to the gib board with it — wham! wham! Unfortunately Stephen was by that stage not just a teenager but a university student, and he was asleep in bed. The onslaught startled him, to say the least.
But at least we had access to our garden courtyard.
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I’ll describe my disappearance down the ferro rabbit hole later, but the more significant story long term was the development of Heather’s business over the next few years.
There is little for me to add here, Ian other than to say that my memories of the building freedoms and specifically building the huge shed, a magnificent boat, and in particular memories of the car case homesteads remain amongst the most fond days in my life. The pervading spirit surrounded us, anything and everything was possible. Comradeship and happiness pieced together from so very little. Your words help to restore in my mind a sense that in building huge boat was not entirely a wild dream, we were an integral part of social change sweeping the community, nationally and internationally.