One of the last “easy” jobs to complete the living room was to improve the skirting boards, as the existing skirtings were made of cement very roughly and unevenly with no decorative moulding. At the time I didn’t have a angle grinder (and firmly believed I would never own one) and didn’t know the the technique of cutting them off. So when I was making the new step I had to remove a big arc of cement skirting which rose up alongside the steps which was in the way. I began chiselling it off but it started to take half the wall plaster off as the 100 year-old plaster is blown in some places – it was a nightmare. We realised then how hard it would be to remove the offending skirtings without damaging all the walls and ending up having to replaster the whole room. And we were so close to finishing!

So I decided to cover them up with “fake” skirtings. All I had to do was get skirting boards of the right profile with a 100×10-15mm rebate cut out of the back to match the meandering profile of the current ones and glue them over the top. Easy! But when I came to design them I quickly realised that the rebate would reduce a typically 19mm board down to 4mm thick which would be very fragile in such a long piece of timber. It would probably split or warp and one kick could mean a significant repair project when we’d already gone into renotirement and hocked our tools for gin.

So I decided to fashion a matching set of Frankenstein’s monsters from bits of moulding, ply and shims. The 4mm ply would be strong even though thin and I could shape the shims to fit the wandering walls and crumbly cement. On the eco side, I wouldn’t be wasting any wood as I wouldn’t need to route or rebate anything.

I tried using my new jigsaw, one of many reluctantly-bought powertools I reserve for special occasions, flicked the laser guide on and began ripping down the 3mm ply feeling all futuristic and cyborg. I was one with the machime; I had a new limb with magic powers but at a terrible price. It made a horrible mess! The blade wandered and tore the wood into a nasty splintered edge. I needed a dead straight, clean edge if I was ever going to fit this together so perfectly that you wouldn’t know it wasn’t a real single piece of wood. So I reverted to Gen’s trusty old tenon saw and spent hours cutting the huge floppy sheets into 3 metre long strips with incredible manual accuracy, putting the laser to shame.

Then it was a seemingly endless task of making up all the shims and bracing pieces to attach the flimsy ply to the moulding for enough length for the living room and dining room – about 24 metres. Mitring round the chimney breasts was interesting as I had to do the mitres on all the separate pieces in advance of gluing them together, and not get confused between inner and outer mitres. Luckily all the shims were made from reclaimed wood from the demolished Cabernet Monstrosity so any mistakes wouldn’t have the forest animals weeping into their decimated landscape.

But the biggest challenge was the sheer amount of peices to glue together and the sheer lack of clamping options in my toolkit once I’d use both of my clamps plus the mole-grips. So I set about the house searching for anything heavy including paint pots, rocks, bricks, books on surrealist art, my biggest plane, hammers, sandstone and very well trained possums. Soon the living room looked more like a Dada installation at the Tate Modern than a living room.

After an evening of carefully tip-toeing around this rather dangerous assault course of sharp heavy or fragile things, I set about solving the eternal paradox of the four sided-mitre puzzle. The secret of course is to gently bend the wood, like a reed in the autumn wind and be thankful you’re not renovating MC Escher’s house.

Of course the house threw one more dimensional spanner at us just to prove that no matter how hard you try to think things through there’s always another dimension you’ve missed. It turned out that the walls weren’t all straight, I don’t mean plumb or square as I’d checked that – some were actually curved! So we had to fill the gaps behind the skirts with hideous muck from a spray can which I’m sure I will live to regret.

One it was all done and fitted, sanded and painted I must admit it really did look quite smart. I’d matched the profile to the older plaster skirtings in the front half of the house so now there was this sudden feeling of consistency and integration between what had previously been two halves of the same house. It’s like playing music – if you do anything enough times it just starts to sound right.

Gradually over the coming months we came to a different realisation – the house knows what it wants to be. Every time we tried to enact our contrived plans, the house would subtely block our every effort until we were walking its path. Then it would drop us little hints, plant little seeds of design and style in those periods when it noticed us re-evaluating our options.

We started to find encaustic tiles buried in the garden, buried under the junk in the cellar and even buried in the attic. I discovered a beautiful flower pattern high up on a dusty rafter as if someone had just placed it there for a moment a century ago. We started to get a picture of how the house would have looked with chunky rimlocks and encaustic hearths. But we’d already committed to the Victorian restoration and has a shed full of fanciful, ornate and more wealthy looking features that the simpler rustic Georgian vibes we were getting from the house.

The main difficulty we had with this was simply coping with being wrong. We followed the usual pattern of denial, finding other people and things to blame and searching the empirical data for signs of the Victorian theorem we were trying to prove. But in the face of overwhelming data at some point you have to uncomfortably rewire your brain to make your picture of the world match the real one.

Gen has a theory about crying which I think is true. She proposes that crying is a signal to the world that your mainframe is down for maintenance while some of the core concepts are rewired after finally capitulating to the discord and accepting you are wrong. It’s like you need to do a stocktake and re-index your shelves so you can’t take any more deliveries of information until the warehouse is back in order. And so our home design planning ground to a halt as nothing made sense anymore, until after a quick sob and a deep breath we decided to go with the flow.

Originally we had intended to repair the colourful art-nouveaux hearth tiles in the study which had been badly damaged at some point by a sadly inattentive carpet-fitter who, not noticing that the nails were now making a crunching noise instead of the normal soft sound of wood, continued merrily smashing the entire set of tiles across the hearth.

We carefully tapped a broad bladed scraper under the broken tiles to see if we could get the worse ones out, leaving the few remaining wholes in place. However it turned out that almost all of them at best had hairline fractures and just fell apart. So – at least we weren’t tied to the design of these tiles anymore! We could choose from the hundreds of Victorian tiles at the reclamation yards. But then as we cleaned up further, the thin cement screed under the tiles fell away revealing something that surprised us both – a complete sandstone hearth looking as new as the day it was made!

This kind of spun us out a little. Of course we could cement over it and apply the new new nouveaux tiles and replace the Victorian horseshoe register but … what about leaving it as it is? We knew that the house had started more simple and rustic with the living room and kitchen fireplaces being left open sandstone – almost inglenook style. But we believe that the front room was upgraded to serve as the show-pony reception while the carthorse parlour washed in a tin bath in front of the hob grate round the back.

Gen starting researching encaustic tiles and found a great shop in Camperdown called The Olde English Tile Company with a verily greate range of olde worlde tiles. So we spent a Saturday afternoon down there with the ones we had found in the house, playing design-a-hearth-jigsaws.

I went off and researched corbels and mantels and figured out how to make my own mantlepiece. We bought a nice piece of cypress which took two hours to choose! The colour and grain had to match the floor and the future shelves and the corbels which were stupidly expensive in oak so we’d got them in radiata pine. I routed a slot for a strengthening bar underneath which I hid behind some mitred moulding.

After some quick repairs to the corner of the hearth to stop the bugs coming up from the cellar, and a little quadrant beading to finish the floor edge, we sealed the sandstone to keep it looking as fresh as the day it was masonned. Then we repaired the sandstone surround with lime render and a little sandstone paint mixed in to the top layers to blend with the blocks. The round edge to the chimney breast was originally made with a piece of half-inch dowel which surprised me.

What we ended up with was a lovely chunky but simple, somewhat rustic-looking fireplace nothing like what planned but very in-keeping with the rest of the Georgian working-cottage aspect of the house. We do think it was what the house was asking for and the study now feels settled and has stopped showing us surprises.

One day as I’m walking past the 20-foot long detritisaur half expecting it to lift a brick-encrusted head and wail “Feed me Seymore!”, I spot a set of huge giant clams which had once lain buried in our garden. Thinking these potentially endangered relics shouldn’t be doing time on death row, I began rescuing them much to the consternation of the ever-minimalist Gen who had been purging the garden of bedsteads, iron baths, glass and tin roofing.

 ”These are valuable!” I propose to an incredulous and ever so slightly pained looking Gen who is probably imagining me as an old man surrounded by junk in a shed muttering “these are valuable…” to an old jam jar of half-rusty screws.

But my logic was sound. You can’t trade in giant clams anymore but this won’t stop people with no taste wanting them therefore demand outstrips supply hence profit. It was basic economics which we covered at school in geography, for a reason I incidentally could never fathom. The closest I got to an explanation was that anything the teachers couldn’t categorise but which sat on the ground somewhere in the world (such as an economy) was technically a geographic feature and so could be taught by our chronically tired, despondently sighing but defiantly sarcastic geog teach we called Sarky. And like competing sweet shops, it seems giant clams come in threes.

“This is a rare opportunity to get three beautiful giant clam shells – in great condition. They were discovered in a Georgian/Victorian cottage amongst other artifacts dating from the 1930′s right back to the 1870′s. They would make a perfect addition to any nautical themed garden or even bathroom! They are a white to light cream/champagne colour with pink flushes.”

I was slightly nervous about going public with this sale. I could imagine CITES getting the wrong impression and swooping into our house with commandos in the middle of the night to bag themselves an illegal big-game mollusc trader napping. So I over emphasised the antique part – these things were already dead when I found them! Surely re-selling old ones will reduce demand for the live ones, at least in the short term? They are a thing of beauty (mostly to other clams) but perhaps in the long term they should be left forgotten in our garden or returned to the sea to decompose into lime for another renovator in a million years. But it was too late, the game was on, I’d already paid my dollar for the highlight.

A short week later while I was working somewhere in the house and Gen was about half-way through her two month architrave tour of duty, the auction drew to an end. I laid the clams out on a deck lounger in the sun so they could personally witness their 15 mins of fame.

It seems the very original house was made anew – the sandstone blocks were apparently quarried and dressed on site, there’s some impressive ironbark joists in the attic and the windows and architrave were all good quality. Then you notice the rear part of the side walls which “tooth” from sandstone into bricks in a crazy zig-zag boundary. Someone suggested they ran out of stone in the quarry in the garden and finished the house in brick but that doesn’t make sense! The toothed border between stone and brick is vertical, meaning they would have been building the house from back to front not from the ground up, which I’m pretty confident is the sensible direction! Also the sandstone extends further back in the higher courses – surely it would have been the lower? When you look a the bricks you see they are randomly covered in many colours of old house paint indicating they were already recycled themselves. I believe the whole thing was planned from the start. When you stand down the road and the slope of the next door house’s roof obscures our side wall, it perfectly covers the offending cheaper bricks towards the bottom giving the impression of a much grander and more expensive fully sandstone building. This is an amazing and effective cheat!

Over the years the use of the house has changed significantly and strucural modifications have been made to suit. The unexpected bonus upper floor had two boarded up windows and the remains of rooms, panelling and lovely old wooden floor boards. It has clearly had significant use in the past only to be abandoned and sealed up. At one point there were at least eight people living here as Mr Hepburn had five children by the end of the C19th! But there isn’t even a sign of a staircase except that the dining room ceiling is made of panelling rather than the lath and plaster found in the rest of the house. We have often wondered what happened to the stairs and where they would have been – mostly because we want to reinstate them!

One day I was pondering our extension and was inspecting the structure of the rear breezeway and verandah and noticed the roof is made of some rather strange collections of timber. The thin rafters have a rounded finish reminiscent of handrails, the posts have old dowel holes and the fascia beam has these strange diagonal slots at regular intervals. After rotating it 45′ in my head I suddenly realised it was a stringer – the sloping beam used to hold the stairs in a staircase! They rebuilt the new extension roof out of the staircase!

A while later when I rebuilt the ceiling in the bathroom to remove the asbestos and insert insulation I found more bits of the staircase and other odds and ends. Nothing went to waste.

Being a habitual anthropomorphist I love the fact that everything gets a second chance in our house and it’s certainly a tradition I have been respecting and intend to continue.

The hideous Cabernet Monstrosity we removed from the living room was actually really well built by a talented carpenter, and has provided us with almost two years supply of project wood, like some kind of timber organ donor. Luckily we’re just whittling down the supply in time to empty the once groaning cold-store woodshed before we need to turn it into another bathroom!

Very few doorsteps ever get to tell their tale, but luckily I was listening while I worked on our threshold and heard some very strange tales indeed.

You’ve got to give the staying power award to Gen. I was exhausted just standing around with a G&T in one hand taking all these photos.

It was a complex brief – combining the features of both a sturdy stairway taking constant traffic from the hall, but also a trapdoor which can be removed and then locked back into place.

So while Gen got on with finishing the walls in the living room, I put on my woodworking head and got to it.

The finished effect - after sanding all the old floorboards and waxing with beeswax. I also fitted a lip over the top to hold the vertical plate tight against the wall, finished with brass screws.

We have finished this off recently – glazing the bottom two panes and painting and finished it, but I’ve lost my camera with the rest of the pictures! We think it’s probably under a pile of relics in the cellar or the attic. Hopefully not been walled up somewhere and you won’t have to wait a thousand years for its rediscovery…

But as these side-effects aren’t caused by the inventive attitude of humanity, which has hardly changed for millennia, they must simply be due to moral decay. We just don’t care anymore! The Romans invented concrete, but did they build cities of ugly, towering, sick buildings in desperate need of demolition 20 years later? No, they build incredible, elegant aqueducts many miles long and still bringing fresh water into Rome over 2,000 years later.  Charlemagne had an asbestos table-cloth with which he used to amaze visiting kings by tossing it into the hearth and cheerfully retrieving it unscathed. What did we do? Build yet more toxic, budget accommodation.

But of course, those historical types were no angels, all so in-touch with the earth and the gods. The native Americans, so iconic in our modern ‘western’ eyes for their depiction of all-natural one-ness, slaughtered a previous aboriginal population, and of course the Roman aqueducts also watered their slaves via lead pipes.

Despite these barely related meandering points, until one Sunday in my dusty attic trying to get some simple job done, I intrinsically believed we were living in the First Great Age of Spam.

Then I found a letter – a very clever folding letter of the type that falls out of every modern magazine on to the floor, embarrassingly blowing down the platform always just as the train arrives. This letter had our house address written on it in a faded cursive script I didn’t recognise. It was badly silverfished, fallen in half and covered in coal dust but was still in good enough shape to read, and see the stamp with NSW postmark dated 1st April ’86 at 4pm. Now I think I have got pretty expert at dating the types and textures of paper I’ve been finding and this was obviously not a letter from the late 1980′s!

The letter is from a Frederick Arnold, a monumental mason from Chippendale “opposite Mortuary Station” which was originally solely for the purpose of transporting the deceased on the Cemetary line, is now called Regent Street Station and has had a fascinatingly colourful life. The branch works were near Waverly Cemetery which is now huge and a popular tourist attraction for the morbidly curious or fans of the more grotesque catholic palaces of the dead. I wondered whether some of John Hepburn’s work may be found at the cemetery?

As you read the incredibly polite and humble beseechment, it’s hard not to think of Nigerian Princes, especially seeing the “…………………… 188….” date line which hasn’t even been filled in. Mail-merge fail?

“Will you allow me respectfully to place myself at your service for the production of whatever kind of memorial you may decide upon.

I am now paying special attention to the production of really Artistic Monumental [...] Moderate Prices, Specimens of the above which can be seen at the above address; or should you simply require [...] I shall be glad to undertake it.

I can wait upon you with Designs and furnish Estimates whenever convenient.

I beg to remain,

Yours most respectfully,

Frederick Arnold.”

After initially reading this I was under the impression that this Frederick Arnold chap was obviously looking for work and sending out job application letters to the various well known stone masons around the city. But after a bit of research it turns out that Frederick Arnold was actually one of the biggest monumental masonry companies at the time. So why was a large successful company sending out tenders to individual masons? Surely it should be the other way round?

Perhaps this is an advanced long-term, white-labeling strategy – one day those little people may become big people with too much work on and bingo, outsource to India! er… well Chippendale.

A little more research on Mr Arnold revealed he had a close escape while emigrating to Sydney, as his wife’s obituary tells:

The Sydney Morning Herald Thursday 5 April 1934

MRS. C. I. ARNOLD.
The death occurred yesterday of Mrs. Char- lotte Isabella Arnold, widow of Mr. Frederick: Arnold, founder of the firm of Messrs. F. Arnold and Sons, monumental masons, aged 83 years. She left England with her hus- band in 1874 for New Zealand, sailng by the   ship Dilharee. It had been their intention to sail by the ship Cospatrlck, but when they sought to book their passages they found that she was already a full ship; consequently they were compelled to postpone their departure until the next following ship. The Cospatrlck was burnt on the voyage to New Zealand, and several hundred persons lost their lives, there being only two survivors. The couple re- mained in New Zealand only a few months, and in October, 1875, made their home in Sydney. Here Mr. Arnold, in 1879, founded the now widely-known business of F. Arnold and Sons. Nine years ago he predeceased Mrs. Arnold, who is survived by three sons and five daughters. The internment will take place to-morrow afternoon In the Church of England portion of Rookwood Cemetery.

Mr Hepburn was perhaps interested in the proposal as he seems to have kept the letter. Did he reply? Did he ever collaborate with Messrs Arnold and Sons?

Will anyone in a hundred years time be carefully trowelling through my dusty GMail archive and subsequently studying the obituaries of permanently erectile Nigerian princes? Only time will tell…

How did the Pope Become a King in 1851?
Did John Hepburn ever send his complaint letter to the Mayor in 1879?
Why did young Phil discard his poster paints in 1957?

Click through for some of the answers, more questions and fascinating back-stories…