Renovation shows can shove it up their...

Yearly rant about 'renovation' shows here in Australia:

THEY DON'T DO ANYTHING THEMSELVES. All they do is have attractive men and women who fight amoungst themselves and every episode is one of the girls standing tearfully in a stairwell complaining about how another couple have stolen something of theirs AND THEN they go and do a challenge whereby the couple who builds a scarecrow the fastest wins $10,000 towards their renovation. 

Now. Ima tell you how renovation actually works. It's a public holiday. You notice that the ground has slumped in the corner of your backyard near the laundry. This draws your eye down the side of the house. The cover from the back of the toilet has blown off and there is POO everywhere. There is one comically lying on top of some concrete like some bizarre modern art installation, or a beached whale.(And then the pair of you stand there cacking yourselves laughing).

And then you have to clean it away, and dig it up, and it smells, oh boy does it smell and the flies are like flies you've never seen before, and the mosquito's are enormous and oh god now it's started raining as well. You dig holes, four of them by them time it's done. And they are deep holes. And the soil is so effing hard. And no television presenter appears and tells you "IF YOU DIG THESE HOLES IN LESS THAN 5 MINUTES WE WILL GIVE YOU 10,000 DOLLARS TOWARDS YOUR RENOVATION". No, in fact, what happens is you examine the sewage plans and observe that the blockage is likely in the section that runs under the entertainment area which is very, very concreted in, and oh shit, we're going to have to pull the whole thing down and rip the concrete up and this is going to cost a fortune. And no one cares when you cry in the stairwell. We don't even have a stairwell! 

So we dig. We rope Badger in again and try and find the blockage. This was odd, because a few months prior we had replaced the root damaged terracotta pipes up the side of the house with poly pipe, and the next section of pipe had appeared clear. So Badger and Puffin dug two holes out the back. Nothing. 

Then we dug a hole out the front all together, and used the opportunity to take some plumbing selfies. As we were all pretty tired at this point, sometimes it felt like you were digging a hole with a spoon this size.

...

The door to Narnia! Covering the nearly 6 ft hole in our front yard. which I forgot to take a photo of. Which we dug in the wrong spot. Which we knew in the first place but we thought we might have come across the offending pipe a bit further up. We didn't.  In the end, we had a bloke come with a pipe cleaner thing that looked like it belonged in The Matrix, and he fed his cutter through....a length greater than the length of pipes we had?! It would appear that our blockage was *just"* prior to the main. Thankfully, this exercise ended up costing us only $70 and the entertainment area is still standing with concrete intact.  Since there is no real way to prevent this happening again we thought we would install one of these out the back.

 

Called, in plumbing circles, an 'Up Periscope'. (Not actually called an Up Periscope). It's buried just below the surface to make identifying the point of blockages easier. We will do another one of these just before the main as well, when we do the garden. We then filled all of the holes, with sweat pouring down off us. Badger really is the best Dad. 

In non house news, this week has seen Squirrel enjoying her 15 minutes of fame. As mentioned previously on this blog, Squirrel kind of over did it on the holidays by taking on a lot of additional work, including working with a local GP to organise his annual health night- the Pub Clinic. This year he used his contacts in the state media to get coverage on the 6:00 News... this then lead to being picked up by the national (yes, national) morning show, which then led to emails from interstate asking for further interviews... wow. While the night has been hosted before, if has never been this big, nor this slick and successful. Health Promotion? Big Tick. If you feel like checking out more, hit the links below. 

(That's Squirrel in the left corner, skulking!)

Sunrise (Features a shout out from the GP to his organiser - me!)

Channel Seven News (Features footage of a Squirrel skulking in the background!)

We have another project on the go of the gardening variety which should be up in the next fortnight so bloggers, stay tuned, and stay cool.