Land Escaping V

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.

Land Escaping III

          Although I had a workbench capable of all manner of extravagant tooling (and a router which was yet to be unpacked), I decided to simplify everything down to the basics. This also fit well with my preferred joinery style, which could best be described as “structural obviism” - which abandons traditional joinery techniques in favour of simply hammering or screwing things together. Who needs dovetails, dowels and precision cutting when a couple of nails is just as effective?

Yet, even adopting a primitive, pre-carpentric style didn’t mean making the door/window frames was entirely easy. There was still notches to be cut and grooves to be etched into the dry timber. Actually, I did eventually try to use my router for the groove, but all the heads from my ‘all-purpose multi-head router bits’ set I’d received free with the router seemed to have both a timber allergy and a violent anti- people streak. So I decided to use my trusty powersaw instead.

           Of course, once I’d completed the door frames, they didn’t just slide gently into place. Because although the door frames were reasonably square, the space they were meant to occupy wasn’t. So each frame had to be bullied and pushed and cajoled into place, then screwed into the surrounding framing.

I’ll never understand why screws are made more durable than screwdrivers, especially those of the Phillips head variety. I don’t know how many Phillips headless screwdrivers I now have cluttering my workshop. Either it’s a capitalist toolmakers conspiracy, or I’m making my holes one size too small.

          Once the frames were in, the doors themselves could be hung. Hanging doors is not so much an artform as a matter of trial and error. It might take a few attempts before it opens and closes smoothly, but it will happen ... eventually. Unfortunately, I didn’t consider closing mechanisms before I’d started, so there was some difficulty in finding latches which suited. Because both my doors opened inwards to the left, while all the available latches were designed for doors opening outwards to the right.

In the end, I had to turn the latches upside-down. Which has little impact on the door itself, but the key is now above the handle, and locking/unlocking operates in reverse. A small inconvenience for the joy of having doors opening the way you want them to open!

          In the meantime I was beginning to believe I'd never get my roof finished. I needed two fine days to dry out the pplywood, and two more days to glue the butynol. Five fine days all up. Surely we’d soon be in for a dry spell ...

          Twice in the next few weeks there was almost a false start. As soon as there were two dry days in a row, I’d prepare everything for an early morning start. But both times I woke to the familiar window of grey, so rolled over and went back to sleep. There’d be another time ...

          A week later there was a good, dry day. Then another.

          That afternoon I finished work early in order to get everything prepared, just in case. Two more days ...

          Later that afternoon my neighbour came across to pass on an urgent message from the hardware store. Don’t butynol roof, phone asap. I immediately cycled to the shop and called. The salesman was relieved to hear I hadn’t yet glued the butynol, because during a chat with the manufacturer he’d casually mentioned I was planning a grass roof. The stunned manufacturer had informed him that butynol wasn’t supposed to be used under grass rooves unless the seams were first vulcanised. If they weren’t, the root system would penetrate the glue and simply push the seams apart, causing a serious leaking problem.

The salesman would pick up the butynol rolls the next day, return them to the manufacturer, and they would vulcanise the seams, thereby creating a single, seamless sheet, free of charge.

          All the salesman’s information was second-hand, so I decided to talk to the manufacturer directly. The manufacturers had had experience with grass rooves. They were shocked that the hardware store had supplied their product without checking their specifications. We discussed various examples they’d dealt with (mostly near Nelson). It’s always a pleasant change to deal with someone who is not only experienced, but interested, so our conversation had the effect of dispelling some of my initial frustrations at being again delayed.

          As promised, the butynol sheet arrived a week later - all 60 kilograms of it. It was a huge, unwieldy lump, so I had to wait until John and Allan were available to help me get it onto the roof. The roof was, by now, damp again, but once we’d figured out which direction the sheet sat, and carefully unfolded it, it created a huge tarpaulin covering the entire roof. Of course. If I could just keep it in place for a few days, my entire roof would dry out regardless of how bad the weather remained.

          Which was a good theory. But if building paper became a spinnaker in the wind, a 100 square metre sheet of waterproof, windproof butynol was a mainsail. Naturally, a few calm days were outside the realm of possibilities. Even windy days seemed like too much to hope for under the circumstances. But surely the suddenly violent southerlies which swooped down to kidnap my butynol were uncalled for? There was little I could do but grit my teeth and endure the flapping, flopping struggle unfolding (and folding) on the roof. A few times I tried to intervene, dragging up hefty beams and untold metres of timber to anchor my butynol balloon, but the wind unleashed its fury anew and tossed my feeble efforts aside.

          As soon as the wind stopped, the rain would start. It was a conspiracy! The wind flipping back the butynol during the night to allow the rain to soak the plywood again.

Once this occurred while I was awake, so I was able to climb onto the roof and rearrange the crumpled butynol in time to prevent further wetness. But normally the transfer of power occurred in the night’s most secret moments. I berated the weather and God and Penelope (as long as weather presenters pretend to understand the weather, they’ve got to take some of the flack!) for their lack of compassion. Conveniently ignoring the fact that the weather had been my saviour a few weeks earlier, maintaining a protective veil of mist over my house until the hardware cavalry had finally ridden into town, saving me thousands of dollars and a lifetime of leaks and lifted seams. But who could be thankful at a time like this?

          The front was soon glued. Having a single sheet meant I only had to glue the edges rather than the entire area. With my rubber tarpaulin sheltering my roof helped dry out the rest. Apart from the back edge, which remained stubbornly damp.

With three sides securely glued, I thought it was a good opportunity to go to Dunedin for a few days and visit friends. But the next day a call from a local farmer informed me my roof had been “shredded” and was hanging limply over the side of the house. Panic-stricken and expecting the worst, I returned to find the butynol hadn’t been shredded, but the wind had peeled one edge away so that the entire back was blown over the side. The farmer had seen the ragged end draped over the edge from the road, and had assumed it had been torn. I breathed a sigh of relief, but became even more determined to finish the gluing as soon as possible.

          There were another few winds. Even with the edges glued, the wind wasn’t deterred, sucking the sheet high into the air, stretching and expanding it until it looked like a dirigible trying to lift off. No amount of timber would anchor it, but I continued this futile process simply out of fear that without some discouragement, the roof would peel off and sail into the creek. It never happened, but many nights I lay awake listening to loud music with the wind pounding time against the ceiling. Twice I rode the magic flying rubber carpet in the darkness as I struggled to increase the roof’s burden of timber. There were another few wettings, too. But the day finally arrived when I could glue the remaining edge, and confidently state I now had a waterproof house.

          David returned from his expedition overwhelmed by the audacity of the undertaking he was proposing. Establishing an Environment Centre in Dunedin was, he believed, a worthy and worthwhile project. But now that he’d investigated further, it also seemed such a monumentous task, fraught with obstacles, that he was no longer as confident of his ability to succeed by himself as he had been when it was still just an idea.

We discussed his proposal in detail, considering its benefits and its burdens for himself, for Dunedin, and for the green cause. Our strategies for overcoming obstacles and local inertia were diametrically opposed. David believed in intricately plotting every move beforehand to anticipate difficulties, while I believed in simply pushing ahead one step at a time ... as usual, David wanted to play chess, while I preferred checkers. But our thoughts about the Centre’s broader goals and philosophy converged at nearly every point. Suddenly it seemed he was embarking upon a Holy Quest to rid the world of ignorance. The Environment Centre would be the rallying point for the forces of goodness, the staging post from which the final assault on the world’s problems would be launched.

          At that moment, as we basked in the warmth of our momentarily shared semi-religious fervour, David asked whether I’d be interested in joining him on his great Crusade. I accepted.

          We should have known better ...

          Why did I accept? Establishing an Environment Centre had never been anything I’d imagined doing. I’d never even heard of such a thing until David came along. The thought of working in any public place full-time has never appealed. But the thought of doing something positive, of playing a small role in changing the world, even if the world was limited to Dunedin, of becoming an active member of a community after so many years of isolation, was an offer too tempting to refuse. Besides, my level of frustration with the world had reached saturation point - I either had to do something to change it, or stop complaining about it.

          That’s the community-minded, positive, charitable version, and I’d like to believe such sentiments were my prime motivation for making the decision to go to Dunedin and devote my immediate future to such a noble cause. But the waters of truth are always murky. So I can’t claim such purity of purpose.

Later, after the project had baulked at the starting gates, after it had stumbled and fallen at every hurdle, after David had torn up his betting slips and left the track, after it appeared permanently hobbled, destined only for the glue factory, only then was I truly gripped by an evangelical zeal. Only then, as I sat alone astride the lame creature, did I become determined to nurse it back to health. Only then, did I truly believe the project had to gallop again, that it had to win, not just for me, but for everybody ...

          But, at the time, I wasn’t so much going to Dunedin, as leaving Millers Flat. Leaving my house. The truth is I didn’t really care what the reason was, as long as it was reasonable. As long as I could persuade myself that it was worth leaving for, that I wasn’t just abandoning my life or fleeing from myself. I couldn’t have asked for a better reason to leave than to start an Environment Centre, because it seemed like such a positive thing to do. Such a positive excuse.

          So, despite my reservations about leaving the house in an unlockable state (with only a thin sheet of plastic between the world and all my worldly goods), I packed a bag of essentials and moved to Dunedin.