You can see our house from up here Al's footprint shrinks slightly
I see Fionas Brother Al's packrat behavior and raise it with my family's.
I will trump your admittedly-scary story by explaining what I meant by "literally rubbish":
Ok, we don't store actual "already put in a rubbish bag to throw out" rubbish, thats just too obsessive compulsive.
Saturday, August 06, 2005
I spent about half an hour on the roof today, applying a hacksaw (and some rather less delicate instrumentation) to remove part of the guttering. According to the guy that came to give us a quote on restoring the roof, when the extension was built, they ran the new guttering in to meet up with the roof cap of the original house. But what thet seem to have done is lift the roofcap slightly to accommodate the shape of the gutter. So ever since, if it rains sufficiently heavily the water running down the extension gutter, instead of meeting the sloped roof and running off, jets up along the underside of the roofcap and runs down the roof and beams on the other side. This, rather than mere simple holes, has been the cause of our leaks and drips every time it has rained heavily since we moved into the house.
Since this is clearly a result of building efforts dating back to the early 1980's, when the extension was built, this means that the roof of our house will have been leaking in the same place for more than 20 years without anyone actually having done anything about it. Judging from the condition of parts of the roof, nobody with any great expertise in the field has been up there in all that time. Yet another complete non-surprise, given the frequently shoddy renovation and maintenance efforts that have taken place here over the years. I feel better about all the minor bungles that we've committed over the last year – none of them have been anywhere near as stupid as some of the stuff our predeccessors buggered up.
Anyway, I hacked off about half a metre of guttering so that it will drop onto the roof early, rather than running right up to it. The roof guy reckons that will do the job (and hell, it can't make things any worse that having to get up into the ceiling cavity every single time it bloody rains). And it was a nice day to be outside, so – bonus.
Fiona's brother Al is moving back to Melbourne sometime soon, and will need some of the stuff he's been storing in the garage since he left here in January. We spent the morning sorting out which of his twenty or so packing crates are actually useful, and which ones are (in some cases literally) rubbish. Al has one of the most serious cases of packrat behaviour I've ever seen (yes, worse that Simon) and sorting out what stuff is actually going to be of some use to him in what will presumably be a limited space is no simple matter. He's bound to want something that we dismissed back into storage as 'useless crap'.
Still, all this does mean that we will get several square yards of our garage back before too long.
3 Comments:
We keep empty cardboard boxes and plastic wrap just in case they become useful to store more junk in....big boxes, ex computer and tv boxes...with nothing in them. Also under the house are large spare carparts (such as steering wheels with attached rest of steering equipment - don't ask me I'm not a mechanic) for cars we no longer own. At one point when we did own the right car, my dad got a spare car of the same make and pulled off all the functioning parts of it, just in case he needed them at some point in the future.
One of the boxes we unpacked had a plastic bag full of rubbish. We knew it was rubbish because of the empty softdrink bottle and emptyings from a dustpan. Rather than placing it in a larger bin for collection, Al carefully placed it in storage.
