Becoming a generalist

Part of the BGS ethos is the idea of becoming a generalist. There are three links in that last phrase, don’t miss any of ’em.

My sweep (we’re all chimney sweeps here, despite the rest of this blog) is not a manual one, and I’ve made a life’s work out of never having to resort to manual labour if I can avoid it. In fact, at the start of this journey, I found that I’d made a vow in my teens that pretty much guaranteed that my life would go that way.

Well, I’m stepping up.

We’d been empty nesters for little while, and then due to various economic circumstances, our oldest son, his wife and their little boy have come to stay for a bit. That’s not a problem, but they brought three cats with them. Added to our two, that’s a lot of cats. All boys (thankfully neutered), and all inside cats. The combination of having all five of them together, with a little boy running around, chasing them (with a pool noodle as often as not), has made a our home very unsettling environment for them. So they’d started to pee all over the house.

Urgh.

We had a family summit about “the cat situation” and it was resolved that we’d put a door in at the bottom of the stairs. Ending any of them wasn’t an acceptable option; no-one else was keen to foster any of them; and letting them go outside wasn’t an acceptable option either. So we’d add a door and our pair of cats would remain upstairs, their three would remain downstairs, and the groups would never physically interact again.

To implement this plan, we obviously needed a door. Fleur said that she’d call a carpenter. I said, no, that’s OK, I’ll do it.

“No,” she said, “seriously, I appreciate the offer, but …”

“No, I’ll do it. I want to do it.”

“OK,” she said, and I went about it. I measured the space, drew up a plan, acquired the materials, and put it all together. Just like that. Ha! As if.

I’m going include the photos through the rest of the post, but these are the before and after shots. Yes, there’s still a bit of work to do, but I regard this as success.

OK, so I wanted it to be strong. I didn’t want to do a shoddy job, so I specified it to be solid. I wanted a solid timber frame to put the door in, and I wanted it to match the style of the rest of the house. I also wanted to be able to see through the door, and we needed to provide airflow since the intake for the ducted air conditioning is upstairs.

I picked the door from Bunnings’ web site, and ordered it. It took the better part of five weeks (!) to arrive, because I ordered it a week or so before Christmas. I also bought the frame and jamb and put those together as much as I could without having the door to work with.

Oh, the timing was awful. I was going to take a couple of days at the end of the Christmas break to work on it. Remember I’m in Australia, and this is our summer break. They said the door would arrive on January 16, so I allocated a couple of days to do the bulk of the work then. I checked with them on that day, but they said that it was likely to be delayed, so I went back to work on the Tuesday, pretty disappointed about it. The work had been relegated to a weekend endeavour.

The door arrived the next weekend, so I picked it up and got started.

The second last bit of the frame was to put some spacers (noggins?) in there, and also to add the louvre I’d built to exclude cats but allow airflow.

At the end of the first day, I had the jamb and hinges in place, and the door fit the gap. It was surprising how far out of square the house is. I had all the dimensions right, but not the angles. I had to plane an awful lot of door to make it fit.

Up went the Gyprock, and I have my Uncle Jim to thank for secret knowledge here. I’d spent a couple of weeks with him in Canada, and he took me on one of his jobs when he was hanging drywall. He taught me how to measure, cut and hang it. Have a look at https://leadingedgekayaks.com/gallery/ for some of his non-drywall-related work.

I have to say that plaster is like love. You can’t apply too much. I started off trying to be economical with it (the first panel above), but seriously, it needs to be slathered on. There is no such thing as too much, and if you’re thinking of cutting back … don’t. Especially where one person board rubs up against another person board.

Thanks again to Uncle Jim, who’d also taken me through the process of relocating a striker plate. That gave me enough to be able to figure out the rest of putting the latch, striker plate and doorknob in place.

There is a cut-up plastic garbage bag taped around the base of the walls beside the door because Fleur was concerned that the cats might decide to christen the vulnerable not-yet-properly dried plaster.

This brings us up to date. The paint is not quite the same colour as the existing paint around the place, but that’s because Fleur wants the whole house done in some slightly different colours. Our youngest started on the project during COVID isolation, and bailed as soon as he could. I probably taught him that …

I’ve got the angle to go around the louvre, and a bit more time, cornice, plaster and paint will tidy that up, too.

For now, it’s enough. It appears that the level of cat anxiety is dropping, and that’s resulting in a much less unpleasant experience for everyone.

The job looks a lot better from a distance than it does up close, and I’m OK with that. I’m becoming less of perfectionist as I get older, and while I’m proud of the work, and it’s solid, I’m also OK with it being it a little rough around the edges. Visually. I’m OK with it being rough around the edges visually. All the actual edges are smooth. Beautifully smooth …