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.