Saturday 24 January 2009

Renovating, country style

Some friends of mine used to own a fruit farm in rural WA. This is the kitchen in their farm house. When they bought the place, the house was a flea infested dump. The previous mob had dogs, and the dogs had fleas. All the carpets had to be pulled up and burned. Everytime I visited, they had not gotten around to replacing the carpet, so the floors were bare concrete.


Trendyman renovated the kitchen in his usual fashion. Some rich luvvie decided she wanted a new kitchen for her McMansion, so the old one was ripped out and thrown away. Trendy, never able to resists a bargain or a freebie, kindly took it off her hands. It was an almost perfect fit for the farmhouse, apart from the bench closest to the camera. It stuck out about a foot too far to the right.

Some people would approach this delicately, carefully marking the wood to be removed, cutting it with a circular saw and then sanding back the edges before restaining the wood.

Trendy hacked it off with a chainsaw. If you walked past the bench and nudged it with your arm, you collected splinters. He was too cheap to hire a plumber, so he also did all the pipework for the plumbing - instead of welding or soldering the pipes, he used superglue.

It was bloody perfect, if you ask me. I thoroughly enjoyed sitting at that bench and drinking a few beers after a hard day of sitting on the verandah and watching the Swedish backpackers pick fruit in their bikinis.

2 comments:

Col. Milquetoast said...

Something tells me he may not have taken the bench outside to cut it but just put something atop his beer to keep out the sawdust and started the chainsaw up in the kitchen.

Boy on a bike said...

Something tells me you are correct.

I visited a week after he made the cut, and the sawdust was still on the floor.