DIY as Lifestyle

I was once at the rather palatial new home of a friend (their polished granite kitchen counter-tops cost more than my house) and they had just moved in from living in a large shed on the property.  In a room of its own was the largest size of slate pool table ever made, where the far pockets would have disappeared in the smoke haze of a 60’s pub.  Must weigh a respectable portion of a ton.  “Gee, how did you get this down here?” I asked. “With a telephone” she replied.  Even considering the widest mechanical applications of a telephone, I could not see how it would help.  She waited patiently until I finally blurted out “A removalist!”

I was so slow to catch on because I am so used to doing everything myself, I don’t even consider the possibility of getting somebody else to do it.  This comes from being penurious for most of my life.  Sorry about the big word, but skint got rejected with a wavy red line.  This is the great divide between the country life and the city life.  Perhaps I carry it to extremes.  In a city, somebody else is responsible for just about every service and function that modern life requires.  If it goes wrong, pick up the phone and complain.  I can complain all I like here, and I do, but nobody is coming to fix my problems.  So DIY is not an interesting hobby in the sticks, it is a survival technique.  If you have a property 600kms east of Alice Springs, forget getting a plumber.  As an aside, I have just had the most bizarre suggestion from spell-check.  How did 600kms prompt it to suggest “sikhisms”?  And then underlines the word it has given me???   ???=WTF

What necessitates DIY as a lifestyle, is poverty and remoteness, in that order.  The downside is that you have got to get out there and fix all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.  The upside is that you do.  It is empowering and you acquire skills, save money and get some satisfaction overcoming problems.  And it gets easier with practice.  And you become more independent of ‘the system’.  And you lose the anxiety that comes with other people having control of your fate.  I can’t be fired, I can cope with fluctuations of income, collapse of civilisation etc.  Until recent times, Aboriginals had that freedom.  They could go bush in a small group and not be reliant on any infrastructure.

On the whole, I prefer the freedom of self-sufficiency over the convenience of services.  This will change as I age and become less competent.  Until finally I am thankful for someone to feed me porridge in the morning.   Until then, I battle on.

Which brings me, with no discernible segue, to my topic on the disadvantages of DIY.  A few weeks ago I had a half ton branch drop onto the transmission lines down to the sauna, breaking the wires.  The connections broken were up a pole about 8m high.  My extension ladder would just about reach that height, but I found that my courage wouldn’t.  As I went up the ladder it started shaking, I started shaking, the pole started shaking and we all hit a harmonic frequency of seismic proportions.  I carefully retreated to the ground.   A decade or two ago I had climbed the ladder to attach the wires but I was no longer game to do so.  In traditional British style, I went for a cup of tea.  Plan B.  I would tackle the problem from terra firma.  The more firmer, the less terror.  With the aid of ropes, wire clamps, long sticks etc, I was able to hook on the wires from the ground.

Last week, the same bit of line was brought down again by a very large twenty ton tree.  I could see immediately that it was too dangerous to chainsaw out of the way.  It had snapped the trunk 5m from the ground and tangled with other trees and supported by a mess of branches, and still attached to the 5m stump.  So hard to see what was supporting what.  Even if I had a cherry picker, which I haven’t, some branches could break up rather than down.  So it is staying there and the wires are going over the top.  One 9m pole was snapped off at the ground but I will recycle it in another location.

So I have pulled out the wires from under the tree and with some difficulty pulled them over the tree.  When I reconnect the power the wires will be touching the tree, but I have found this is not a problem.  There may be some minor leakage of electricity, but no real problem.  I will wait until I have no guests before I continue as I need to use the chainsaw and my old ute to re-erect the power pole.  The ute still has the remains of a muffler, but alas not connected to the engine.  It sounds like a phalanx of Harleys cruising down the road.  I will spare my guests that.

So city dwellers can fix just about anything with a telephone and a chequebook.  Out in the sticks, we need a whole heap of tools and more than a little effort.  Maybe next post I will show you how I pick up an 8m 300kg power pole, move it 20m and shove it back in the ground.  Don’t expect bulging muscles and Schwarzenegger  torso.