Before I started designing my house, I’d never really paid much attention to windows. Our family home in Banyo had been a simple, many-windowed box on stilts, looking like a martian invader from War of the Worlds, or an incongruous stick-insect.
Of course, that was before the entire ‘basement’ was closed-in to create the euphemistic ‘poolroom’, with its mini pool table dodging the elephant-leg piles like a green-felted mouse, and the collection of truncated cues to compensate for the intrusive walls.
The house, squarely aligned with the road, had consisted of rooms down each side of a long hallway (bedrooms on the left, conveniences on the right), and the windows, placed at the centre of every external wall in each room, served no other purpose than to let things in - light, rare summer breezes and flies. Otherwise, they were more things to look through than at. So I never really considered any of their other functions, or contemplated their construction.
Now that I had to design my windows myself, I was completely in the dark. The specifications had indicated awning-hung windows (opening from the bottom) but these seemed somehow inappropriate to the character of my home, so I returned to the stone cottage. The windows there were in three parts - a panel of coloured glass above two sashes, each divided into three panes, opening outwards in the centre. That seemed not only more suitable (particularly if I substituted the coloured glass panel for a stained-glass window), but within the realm of my capabilities.
Light wasn’t an issue when considering the window design, because the front of the house contained five large and four small windows, and faced north-ish, while the east and west sides contained two large windows apiece (plus an extra east window in the bathroom), and the south only one.
In summer, this arrangement combined with the protective verandah overhang would allow ample light inside while keeping out any direct sunlight, while in winter, the sun would drop below the line of the eaves and verandah roof to pour its warmth into the house. A bigger consideration was keeping the warmth in during the winter by making the glass surface as small as possible. The three-panel design seemed to fit every criteria, as well as being aesthetically pleasing and matching the style of the house.
But a window is not only expected to look good, it’s also supposed to be rain-and-wind-proof. Many people would also add clean to this list.
For me, draughts aren’t such an issue, because I don’t want to live in a vacuum, and I’m not German. Germans have a culturally-ingrained fear of draughts. What we call a gentle, cooling breeze, they call the breath of death. What we call letting in some air, they call inviting in disease. No matter how hot the day, nor how cramped the bus/tram/train/car, air movement inside a confined space is to be vehemently discouraged.
So, while they’ll heroically battle blizzards outside, once they step inside and that door is closed, they’ll pale at the mere flutter of a teatowel. One draught they particularly fear is the one which creeps up and tickles the back of any foolishly exposed neck. Such draughts are not only harbingers of colds, flus, bronchitis, asthma, emphysema, smallpox, AIDS and mad-cow disease, but are largely responsible for the plight of the Third World. A draught-free environment is the key to economic success - just compare those healthy, prosperous Asians living in their hermetically sealed high-rises to all those poor, starving Africans living in draughty mud huts. If we really want to help, we shouldn’t be sending food or money, we should be sending windows!
German tourists aren’t so much holiday-makers as cultural missionaries bringing wondrous tales of ‘good’ coffee, ‘proper’ beer and ‘real’ bread to impoverished backwaters such as New Zealand. And they’re very forthright when it comes to exporting such modern, post-industrial, health practices as draught-prevention to under-privileged lands, boldly depriving the local citizens of ventilation on stuffy public transport in the name of progress.
It was fortunate I wasn’t obsessed by draughts really, because creating draught-proof windows was not only beyond my capabilities, but also beyond the material’s range. Wood is a joyously flexible material capable of accomplishing many wondrous things, but keeping out draughts just isn’t one of them. No matter how precise the workpersonship, there’s always going to be a hairline gap wherever two pieces of timber come together. And the wind, like men, are highly attuned to hairlines, and capable of exploiting them to devastating effect.
Of course there are modern, hi-tech draught solutions no matter whether the window is wood or aluminium, but it’s usually necessary to plan ahead if you want to use them because they require space, and such spaces have to be incorporated into the window design itself.
Naturally enough, I didn’t know all this before I built my windows, so I didn’t plan for such solutions. Nor did I realise that where the wind can go, the rain can follow. Instead, I simply cut the pieces for each sash and nailed them together (they would be painted anyway, so any gaps could easily be filled and hidden beneath layers of paint) to form a stack of roughly-equal rectangular frames.
A dating agency in Bosnia would have less trouble finding compatible couples than I had attempting to match sashes to frames. All those ‘slight’ variations in size and vague differences in the relative ‘rightness’ of angles suddenly escalated into a major conflict requiring a great deal of adjustive intervention, mediation, swapping and trimming before complete matching sets were finally found which could peacefully cohabit.
Of course, such an enforced peace only remained as long as a horizontal aspect was maintained ... which also sounds very much like dating. Once I’d manoeuvred the frames into their final, permanent, vertical positions, the sashes seemed suddenly reticent, and further coercion, adjusting and trimming was necessary before my windows willingly performed their chosen function - ie they opened and closed.
I’m still unsure whether this friction was due to the few millimetre thickness of paint I’d since added. (I opted to paint the sashes and frames before I attached them.) Or a mix-up in my matchings. (I admit this is possible because I’d painted over my scribbled references and I can’t be entirely sure they were kept in the correct order.) Or the natural variations between hung and un-hung windows. (Plus the distinctions between badly-hung and well-hung examples.) Or even some strange swelling caused by the glazing putty. (I could have used beads, but with my uneven cutting, I was concerned about rattling glass.) Whichever it was, I eventually had all my windows installed and functioning, though it remained to be seen whether they fulfilled that other somewhat important function of keeping out the rain ...
I ended up faking the stained-glass because finding appropriate-sized panes was unlikely, and I have no abilities whatsoever in the stained-glass arena - or any other artistic endeavour, actually. So Marion designed a simple pattern, and using ‘leadless lead’ - basically coloured glue - and glass paints, duplicated the effect.
As for the issue of weather-proofing, most of the large windows were sheltered beneath the verandah, and the smaller ones tucked under the roof overhang. Though weather-shields were installed, on the two windows exposed to those southerly storms when it often seems to be raining more up than down, they proved entirely inadequate to prevent water entry.
No amount of water-proofing seemed to have any effect (though the degree of success only became obvious during each subsequent storm), and my frustration continued to mount until I finally realised that it wasn’t absolutely essential that these windows actually opened. After that, their Fate, along with their sashes, was sealed - the worst culprit being entirely, permanently closed with silicon, while the less recalcitrant of them had only its wayward half sealed.
So now I had at least two windows (well, one-and-a-half) which were not only water-proof, but draught-proof as well. Suddenly my house was sealed from the worst of the weather and unwanted intruders. Though most intruders would have little trouble breaking in. Living in such an isolated location means you only lock your doors for the insurance company’s benefit, because any thief isn’t going to be deterred by a locked door when nobody can hear a window smashing.
Well, perhaps that’s not entirely correct, because a locked door might have discouraged the inexperienced thief who did violate my house. I assume he - and statistics support the assumption it was a he - was inexperienced, not to mention stupid, because he’d come at night without bringing any light.
Maybe he’d assumed he could just flick on a switch, but of course I not only had no locks, but no electricity. At some point he’d found a candle, and the wax trails he’d left behind revealed his grubby intrusion into every corner, every cupboard and every box, until he’d eventually found my torch. Fortunately he didn’t value many of my possessions, and his musical preferences had probably never evolved beyond the heavy metal swamp, so my CD collection also remained.
Unfortunately, some compensation was obviously necessary to reward him for his courageous ignorance, so he rewarded himself with a bag of chips and half a packet of cookies before taking my camera and leaving, his way now brightly lit by his newly acquired torch. I often wonder whether his vile arrogance would have faltered at the first locked door, or would it have simply unleashed his destructive zeal?
In the meantime, after months of fundraising and disappointment, the Environment Centre had opened. It was a registered non-profit Charitable Trust, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t expected to be profitable. No government money was available unless the operation was deemed to be financially viable. This meant the Centre’s focus was forced to shift from environmental awareness to environmental retailing.
Retailing requires a viable location, and viable retail locations are expensive. So, instead of a cheap, low-key, central city space, we ended up in an expensive, high-profile, central city space in one of the few historic buildings remaining in Dunedin. Instead of slowly establishing a resource and drop-in centre, we suddenly found ourselves, out of sheer necessity, operating a struggling shop.
Soon most of my time was devoted not so much to development or projects as merely keeping the place afloat. Retailing was a vast treadmill powered by ‘turnover’, and our efforts to generate sales and enthusiasm in our under-stocked, under-funded, unprofessional, unadvertised, unwanted shop failed to even maintain our financial footing, let alone power us forward. Crisis meeting followed crisis meeting with no positive resolutions, no solutions. Funding sources were non-existent.
A peculiar aspect of fundraising is the funders’ bewildering addiction to ‘projects’ and aversion to ‘running costs’, as though one is not entirely reliant on the other. Potential benefactors had fled to their Pacific Island tax havens and weren’t accepting our calls. I should have known we were in trouble after the opening ceremony, when all the invited dignitaries, their chins plastered with croissant crumbs (looking like escapees from a pastry world where they shaved with baguettes and used croissants for toilet paper), detoured around the large, prominently-displayed donation bucket like weight-watchers around scales.
If squeezing a few dollars from the city’s wealthy was such a task (even after an entire clan of virgin pastries had been sacrificed on the fundraising altar), our days were surely numbered. No amount of ‘good lucks’ was going to pay the bills. No amount of negotiating was going to relieve our crippling rental burden. It wasn’t until we abandoned retailing and fled our street-front location for the relative calm and prosperity of an upper-floor ghetto that the financial stranglehold loosened enough for us to breathe a single sigh of relief.
By now I had also abandoned my flat for the social oasis of Waitati. Marion had again returned to Ettrick for yet another apple-picking season, and I had taken up residence in her house. It was an arrangement which suited us all - Marion, me, and most importantly, Momo and Dudley. Perhaps it’s a result of their isolated, rural, sparsely-humaned ‘kittenhood’. Perhaps it’s an instinctual response to humanity itself or the complexities of urban life. Or perhaps it’s simply a basic personality quirk.
Whichever of these it may or may not be, the simple fact is that Momo and Dudley were two anti-social (if not completely paranoid) cats. The only people they liked were Marion and I. The only people they trusted were Marion and I (and even then Dudley’s trust levels were never entirely constant). So, taking them to live in the picker’s accommodation surrounded by strangers, psychotics and sadists was simply out of the question, as was moving them in with friends or moving friends in with them. My flat had not only proven unsuitable for them, but was also slowly becoming inconvenient for me. House-sitting was the perfect temporary solution.
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