Today marked a significant milestone. The door for the kitchen corner cabinet was reattached. So beautiful to use now. Amazing to experience. Silky smooth! There’s now even a felt air pressure differential upon opening! Three years It’d been broken, but was still just kind of hanging on in there, literally. There’s a weird point when something is busted, although not quite thoroughly enough, and so it continues to be used. And that was the cabinet door.
Most kitchen cabinets are square boxes. The hinges are simple and the doors sit at 90 degrees to the wall. There may be a single door, or even double doors, but the simplicity is lovely. They work. The hinges are never stressed, and so have a long lifespan. Corner cabinets are different. The door sits at 45 degrees to the wall of the cabinet. It takes a special hinge to cope with that. And this one had a heavy door which was 2100mm / 7ft high. Weighed around 22kg / 48 pounds too.There was a lot of pressure on those hinges, and after fifteen years defying gravity, they slowly began to fail.
Of the five hinges, the top one broke first. Then the next one down self destructed. In anticipation of replacing the lot, I’d bought some at the big box hardware store a few years ago. Turns out, I’d bought the wrong type and where was that receipt again?
The door with the damaged hinges, would require a strong upwards lift on the handle, otherwise the bottom would scrape over the timber floor. There were decent scratches in the hardwood.
The time had come to repair this monster! Sandra headed into the big smoke one afternoon to have dinner with a friend. A rather convenient opportunity to drop into the big box hardware store along the way. Purchasing the correct 45 degree hinges this time, was easy. The nice website provides aisle and bay numbers for stock items – a fine use of computing grunt, and suddenly confusion becomes a thing of the past! In the shop, they were sold in packs of two, so we ended up with six, and were left with a spare. The new hinges were quite well made, you could see the difference at a glance. The sheet metal was now secured in three spots. The broken ones were not that solid, and had actually twisted over the years due to the weight of the door. It pays to be alert with this stuff.
When fixing the new hinges on the door to the cabinet, none of the holes lined up. Being a canny and resourceful bloke, an inspired dose of Ikea hacking struck the imagination! We emptied out the contents on the shelves, I positioned myself inside the corner cupboard. Sandra then propped the door in the exact right spot with the door closed. They tell me that working in confined spaces requires a special permit, but I won’t tell anyone, if you lovely readers don’t! The hinges were attached to the cabinet, and the door now works beautifully. Easy!
The door slowly failing got the old brain thinking about how easy we can adapt to broken circumstances, if that’s what’s needed. I read the news. You’d have to be living under a rock to not have noticed the loss of around 15% of the world’s oil supply? That looks like a broken system to me, and where things will go from here is a very interesting question. Right now, in this country, metaphorically speaking, people seem to be giving the door handle a bit of a lift upwards so as to adjust for the broken hinges. Hmm. Here the situation annoyed me enough, that I finally fixed them, but this messy oil business, probably isn’t all that easy to sort out. There is a human dimension to this story though, and it’s the ability to believe a delusion. Maybe I’m too cynical, but few people in this country seem to be considering the longer term implications. The general vibe is that we’ll get back to the previous normal sooner, or later, but maybe with some broken hinges. Seems to be very much a case of: lift on that handle if you want the door to work, baby!
Delusions are a strange thing which you’ll eventually encounter in my profession. As a young bloke, with no confidentiality restrictions at the time, I briefly worked for one of the fastest growing companies in the country. It was a senior accountant position (one below the boss). The five people at the interview should have been a red flag, for clearly three of the folks had nothing better to do with their time. I asked about the businesses cash flow, and they lied. So many missed warnings, but hey, I was the young and desperate.
My boss was a good looking bloke, and his image featured on many of the swish looking marketing material. We never spoke much, he sat in the corner office. The first day on the job, I was introduced to the accounts team, and a sorrier looking crew I was yet to meet. Their little eyes implored: Are you our saviour? They poured their hearts out about the realities of the business. Surely it couldn’t be that bad? With no instructions or guidance, I spent the next three days trolling through the accounts. The situation was even worse than the accounts team believed.
Playing the politics has never been my strong suit, but I knew enough that it was probably best to speak with my boss firstly regarding the situation as it appeared to me. We spoke of boring stuff, like debt covenants, loan repayment schedules, payrolls, supplier credit etc. Really fundamental stuff to a business that size. And his reply approximated: “We’ll figure out something”, with an instruction for me to get back to work.
Naivete allowed me to be more pushy and over confident in those days. Now with more experience I’m kind of more accepting as to what will be. Back then though, I gave the alarum another ring, and made an appointment to speak with the owner. My boss caught wind of this, and cancelled the meeting. There was nothing more to be done, so I resigned, and informed my boss and separately the accounts team, that my best guess was that they had probably another months trading. I may have even mumbled a heartfelt: “sorry”.
I was wrong, they had two months of trading left, and didn’t pay me for the work I’d done either. Often you never get to find out how things turn out, this one was different, I read about in the news. An epic crash. See, sometimes it pays to keep abreast of the latest events. I was still sore about the lost pay though, and whilst I like repairing and maintaining things, sometimes, a person has to dig deep and find the good grace to just sit back and ride the splat which eventuates from a bad situation. Prescience without action, is pointless, and maybe even worse.
For most of the week, the air was so thick with humidity, it felt like a person could swim over the valley and across to Mount Bullengarook and Mount Blackwood.
Monday was sort of nice weather though, and we constructed another steel rock gabion cage. This one was half sized. It had only two compartments as distinct from the usual four.
The plan was to install the short cage on the third layer of the long line of gabions uphill of the Cantina and new firewood shed. A lot of soil had to be dug away from the area where the cage would be placed. The dirt was shovelled uphill to provide a smoother garden bed surface. Eventually that will be covered over with rock crazy paving. Should look good.
Regular readers will recall that a full sized cage was made last week. Both gabions were installed in their final spot on the third layer.
We sat these cages further back into the hill so that there is a decent width walkway on the downhill side. This will make filling and sewing them up easier. You can see the walking path more clearly in the next photo:
It was a good idea to load up the cages with a few rocks on the day. This weight keeps them fixed in place.
Half a day was spent later in the week hauling rocks back uphill, then filling the cages. The smaller gabion, is now almost full.
We’re only a couple of weeks into winter, but it’s been remarkably warm and wet. More like early spring. Some of the the plants are adapting to the conditions. Earlier today I spotted bluebell leaves popping up through the soil. Looking back at earlier years photographs, that’s about three weeks early.
The young citrus trees in the large enclosure were fed with wood ash and left overs from the bags of soil amendments used in the restoration of the greenhouse raised garden beds. As a side note, I spotted that the thermometer in the greenhouse today was 14’C / 57’F, which is rather warm for winter. The more established citrus trees don’t seem to require regular feeding.
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 11am is 10’C (50’F). So far for this year there has been 497.6mm (19.6 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 475.4mm (18.7 inches)
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