Chapter Four - Foundations for Divorce

You’re standing in the middle of your section, a tiny patch of trammelled grass the only indication that something is going to happen, something which will change the complexion of the land, the complexion of your life, forever.
An image of your house suddenly flickers in the warm sunshine. Your house. It’s so clear, so disconcertingly clear, that you momentarily feel like Rip van Winkle, woken after a hundred years (or maybe just two) to find your dreams made solid. Your dreams. The air wrinkles with the sound of laughing chickens and clucking children. The grass whispers its respectful welcome, inviting you forward.
You take a single step ... and cold panic grips your ankles as it suddenly dawns on you that you’re standing in the middle of a minefield. Ahead, between you and the flickering, melting image, are a thousand rules and regulations (both written and unwritten), building codes and standards, all primed to blow up in your face when you least expect it.
Not to mention the booby traps you’ve set yourself - all those murky motivations, unrealistic expectations and unresolved emotional issues. How foolish you were to believe you could simply waltz through it all. How naive to believe the worst was behind you, that you were almost there. You want to turn and run, but you’ve burnt too many bridges to make escape simple. You want to stand there, still, forever, just waiting for something to happen, waiting for nothing to happen ...
But you also want your home. You want to go forward. You’ve already come so far by simply taking one step at a time, defusing each mine one by one. And here you are still in one piece with your dreams still intact. Surely (you reassure yourself) the worst is over. You’ve been travelling through hostile, unchartered territory (and been virtually blind the whole way), yet you’ve survived. Now you have a map. A plan detailing the reasonably straightforward, well-worn course ahead. It’s got to get easier. All you have to do is stay on track ...
But staying on track is no guarantee that your building project still won’t explode in your face. Because there’s one huge mine lying somewhere on the path ahead which is often difficult to detect and impossible to avoid. It’s not even on the map. Any map. Although it has nothing to do with the building itself, it is often triggered by the building process. It’s called “Divorce”, and it’s effects on the building project can be just as devastating as any earthquake.
Building your own home is an emotional experience. It’s a serious commitment, and as a result often forces you to consider other commitments - a process as likely to result in emotional clarity as confusion. Statistically, couples building their own home have a better-than-even chance of unbuilding their relationship in the process, leaving the home little more than a house at the end of it all.
Marion and I had often worked together. Whether it was counting cars or cutting onions, we always tried to make the most of it, to enjoy it, regardless of the work, the workmates, the boss, the boss’s wife ... We were an efficient, competent, honest, hard-working team - so we seldom fit in. The chef might have appreciated us not slobbering into the potato salad, but the kitchenhand just thought we were being snobs. The boss might have appreciated us not sucking expensive schnapps from the bottle, but his wife just forbade us drinking orange juice. Efficiency was rewarded with more work, competence with disdain, and honesty provoked hostility. We were skilled workers doing unskilled work, and as such, focus of much suspicion.
It didn’t bother us. We had each other, and we could always leave.
We thought building our home together would be like that. More enjoyable, even, because this time there were no bosses telling us what to do, no colleagues begrudging our efforts, no politics or personalities. This time there was only us. This time we were working for ourselves ...
So once we had our permit firmly in our hands, we were anxious to start. But there were still a few minor details to sort out - like a power supply and power tools and, well, something to build with.
We wanted an independent power supply. The thought of windmills and solar panels, of independence, of no power bills, no blackouts (though I have fond memories of the giggling scramble for candles and squinting games of scrabble in the half-gloom of the annual blackouts when ‘strike’ was still a familiar word in the Queensland power-station workers’ vocabulary), no meter-readers (with their friendly anoraks and jolly indifference... Actually I have a lot of sympathy for meter-readers. The mail-delivery-person may be greeted with semi-reverent anticipation almost in the same league as Santa Claus - because at least there might be something good in that bag of mixed blessings. But the meter-reader is always a prophet of gloom and a harbinger of dark tidings. Nobody’s ever glad to see a meter-reader ...), and no guilt, imbued us with a warm glow.
We soon discovered that maintaining that glow was going to cost us $22,000! Of course for that price we’d get a comprehensive system which not only generated enough power to run everything, but converted it into a regular 240v supply, with potentially enough left over to feed back into the national grid. Impressive, but it was exactly $22,000 more than we had, which meant some serious reconsidering.
We had to be rational about it ... but that didn’t mean we had to be fair. The independent supply already carried an enormous financial handicap, so it was only right that the normal supply had to jump all the hurdles. We calculated our likely power needs using different formulas (under normal conditions we’d obviously have everything running all the time, while with an independent supply we’d surely only need one light and a radio for half an hour each day in winter). We investigated cost-efficient alternatives to electric ranges and power tools. We discussed back-up generators and micro-hydro systems. We analysed our friends’ power bills. We compared costs, depreciation, savings and interest using only helpful figures. We assigned monetary values to every drawback of the normal supply (including imaginary ones), while the independent supply remained above reproach (factors such as extended set-up time, the vagaries of the weather and our complete lack of technical expertise, judged too trivial to consider). But no matter how we looked at it, one fact remained unchanged - an independent power supply just wasn’t economically feasible.
Of course, getting normal power wasn’t going to be cheap either. When choosing our building site we’d given due consideration to the direction of the sun, the prevailing winds, the degree of privacy and the view. We hadn’t considered the fact that the power board might charge $20 per metre for their cable.
We also hadn’t considered the ancient kiwi tradition of choosing a site solely on the basis of its spatial position in relation to the road. According to this tradition, building a house 60 metres from the front gate is bad. Building a house facing away from the road is very bad. A house built close to the road allows good vehicular access - meaning you don’t have to walk vast distances between car and house; you don’t have to carry anything far, especially after a tiring workout at the gym; and you’re not exposed to undue fresh air. A house built facing the road not only looks right, it’s good security - meaning rather than constantly getting up to find out whose car has pulled into the driveway, you just have to look up from your sausages and casually glance through the window above the television. Our house had failed on both counts - access was down a narrow grassy path, and it was impossible to even see the front gate. Despite the urgings of incredulous neighbours, we had no intentions of ever building a driveway to our front door, or installing a closed-circuit camera to allow surrogate surveillance of our intra-accessual security zone.
The power board gave us their quote, but we couldn’t think of anything polite to quote back to them. We were speechless! Sixty metres of mains cable at $20 per metre, plus another 60 metres of sub-mains cable back to the shed at $3.50 per metre, plus labour, plus the temporary fuse box, plus the wiring of the shed, plus a digger ... giving a grand total of almost $2000. Once we gave the go-ahead, they could have power on in less than a week, but we hesitated - $2000 was a lot of energy-efficient light bulbs!
We mulled it over for a few days, not because we thought there was any other solution, but simply to get used to the idea. If only our house had been another 50 metres from the power lines, maybe the solar/wind system would have been feasible ... I decided to at least try to save some of the cost by digging the trench myself. After less than five metres, I had to admit that digging a 60 centimetre deep by 60 metre long trench with a shovel wasn’t fun in anyone’s language ...
So we got our power supply.
But we still needed tools.
I like hardware stores. For me, they’re not simply shops full of tools, they’re stores full of potential. With the right tool, you can do anything. The trouble is to find not only the right tool, but a good tool. I certainly felt I needed good tools. Not necessarily the best tools available, but something reliable, something that did the job. Unfortunately, I didn’t know anything about tools, except for the basics. I knew the difference between a hammer and a spanner, for example, but not the different types of spanners or hammers available. For that, I relied on the advice of hardware salesmen.
Although I like hardware stores, I rarely like hardware salesmen. I’m not a toolguy - I know that and they know that. It’s not the tool that gets me excited, but what the tool allows me to do. Hardware salesmen are toolguys, and it’s the tool that turns them on ... which is always vaguely disconcerting. I don’t think they ever do anything with the tools, except maybe hold them or polish them or read the manuals over a cold lemonade, but they certainly know everything they could do with them. Problem is, they don’t like us non-toolguys. They don’t want us to get the tool which is best for the job we’re doing, they just want to sell us any old crap.
But I’m learning. At first I tried to act like I was a toolguy (or at least an aspiring toolguy), but they quickly saw through me. I just didn’t look like a toolguy - no matter how many fancy pens I crammed into my shirt pocket, no matter how many keys I had dangling from my belt, no matter how loudly my pockets jangled with metallic potential, no matter how fast I nodded. And pretending to be a toolguy is a risky ploy, because there’s so much pressure to buy things. Things you don’t need. Things you don’t even recognise. But it’s easier to buy than to confess your ignorance.
I know it’s a ‘guy thing’, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m still not immune to such social pressures. Tools are, though, my only guy weakness. I long ago developed an effective defence against engine guys - I just shrug and confess I don’t even drive. Hushed silence follows. Then casual enquiries about my manly peculiarity - so you lost your licence ...? No, I never had one. Never? Before you can say overhead cam V8 manifold sparkplugs, I’m ejected from the pits and back in the grandstand ...
Actually, I must confess I’m still a bit of a closet sports guy, though. How many men in our beer-and-rugby culture aren’t? I was even a sports reporter for a while there, so sports talk still triggers a response, and I haven’t yet developed an effective way to tackle it. It’s getting better, though. I’m only drawn into discussions concerning internationals or finals now. The rest of the year I manage to avoid sports talk by simply confessing that I’m Australian ...
Little wonder, then, that in my single outing as Mister Toolguy, I came home with a little more than I really needed. There was a circular saw (a strange name for something that can only cut straight, so it’s probably better to refer to it as a ‘powersaw’), a jigsaw (in case there were any wavy bits on the plan which I might have overlooked), a drill (holes are an integral part of house-building), a router (OK, say I got carried away ...), a hi-tech workbench (including a complete instruction manual on video, though we didn’t have a video player), a handsaw, a hammer, a level, a square and a measuring tape.
It’s a shame all tools don’t have self-explanatory names like level and square instead of ratchet and Phillip’s head and monkey wrench ... English is a strange language, or should that be colourful? Take the pineapple, for example. In most other European languages, it’s called by some derivative of the Latin - ananas ... which isn’t to be confused with ananas horribilus which is a peculiarly astringent fruit eaten mostly by Royals ... But in English it’s a pine apple. According to my dictionary, the name originates from the perception that it looked like a pine cone. But why not call it pine-cone fruit? And why does everything seem to return to the subject of apples anyway?
I should have gotten one of those angle thingees and that chalk whatsit, but I was too embarrassed to ask. Together with some cycle repair tools we already had, that would do for a start. Everything else we could probably borrow - if we could just find out what they were called.
Over the years I’ve tried various approaches to tool-buying, with varying success. I’ve snubbed hardware salesmen totally - wordlessly gathering together what I think I need, and taking it to the register. No questions asked, no advice given. But if your basket’s bulging with everything you thought you needed to repair that little leak in the roof and the salesman asks if you’d like to see his model aeroplane collection, it’s time to consider another approach.
Next I adopted the ‘all-tools-are-the-same-anyway’ strategy. As soon as I was through the door I homed in on the bargain bins. That $2.95 angle-grinder was just as good as those other $295 models. And the boxed set of 1001 tools for an incredible $19.99, were a definite must buy. And look at all the money I saved! But I quickly discovered that all tools weren’t created equal. Cheap tools aren’t really cheap, because they’re not really tools. They’re imitation tools. Tool substitutes. A cheap hammer doesn’t hammer in nails, it only bruises them. A cheap saw doesn’t cut wood, it only watches you trying to cut wood. A cheap spanner is never the right size... for anything. They simply don’t work, and 999 of those gizmos in a boxed set don’t have any use whatsoever, except rattling around your toolbox or cluttering up your workshop.
So that strategy quickly gave way to the ‘only-the-best’ approach, which is the strategy I continue to use. Not that ‘the best’ necessarily means the most expensive. There’s a distinct gap between budget tools - ie fake tools - and real tools, and generally everything above that gap is good, while those below should only be bought for children or fathers-in-law. But the easiest way to tell a good tool, is by the packaging. Manufacturers of good tools seem to believe their customers are already well-equipped, so if you need to use at least three implements to open the packaging, you know you’re on a winner.
So we now had a power supply. And we even had some power tools. All we needed now was some materials ...