Lindy Kato (Writer)

I mention building in my intro but have never made a blog about it. When I am not at work, writing my book – Desperate Times (edited and in the final stages, now working on Bleak Expectations which the sequel) or sleeping (which seems to have improved after grizzling about it in https://lindykato.com/2024/11/01/shut-up-watchy-mcwatchface/ ), I am building. My sweetheart and I have built two homes, the first because we had no choice, no credit rating when we emigrated and just enough cash to buy a small section with a cliff in the middle and live in a caravan and tent. Until the rain caused the ageing canvas to split and dump a ton of water on the toddlers.

New Years Day 1990 The first peg of the first build.

This wasn’t the very first thing, a local drainlayer came on Boxing Day and put a dunny in a little plywood shed that we had built. He said to get away from the family!

The shed had a large hole (window) facing the sea. I loved that dunny.

One day I will write a book about building.

We are onto our third build even though this is still our second house because our extension is practically the same size as the original house and way too complicated. But we have started so we will finish! We have found that many people say they are building but what they mean is they are getting other people to do the actual work. Not us!

At some time I will talk about the first house or the current house but what takes every spare moment is the extension – we are six years into a two year project. I had no idea I would have a bath in a cardboard box for six years. Pretty much I have lived on a building site for more than half my life. Still, skills learned and come the apocalypse I will be useful. Even though my current day to day reality is fixing in windows (who knew how anal I could get about windows), I will confine myself to concrete.

So thirty years on (we are in fact thirty-five years on from the above first peg day, but before we get ahead of ourselves, I am back to the business of concreting on New Years day 2020), what have I learned?

Concreting the piles into the enormous holes got us both fit and I think it would be a job I could have done for a living (if girls were allowed back in the day). I have mixed in bad weather but mostly it has been in the sun, singing and writing in my head because once I realised that if I bought seven one-dollar buckets, I wouldn’t need to count how much had gone in the mixer and my brain could just carry on doing its own thing. The problem is that it gets everywhere. The dust is in every nook and cranny and the mixer can splash concrete over everything and it is really hard to get off. Windows, flowerpots, walls, the mixer doesn’t care.

Our extension has forty-four pile holes. The original house is on seventeen. The holes are big and some are two metres deep and the rest are as big as I am. I mixed the concrete and my sweetheart put it into the pile holes. This hole had to be attacked with a chisel because there was rock in the wrong place. Yes those piles are hideously close together.

We could only manage one pile in a day and not every day. Apart from having to go to our jobs, we physically couldn’t do it (lack of muscles). Not only that but in the New Zealand summer sun we had to start at 6:00am and stop by 10:00. We got better, and the workdays got longer as summer was spent. My bucket number and the load of builders mix per bucket both increased. I was mixing twice as much at a time by the finish which means that he was having to wheelbarrow twice as much at a time.

It took us a year and the last few inaccessible holes had to be bucketed in. You might wonder why not just pay someone else. I wonder that as well…we did get a quote though. Either the outfit thought we were senile or they really didn’t want the job. Of course they would have taken days rather than a year, but when it came to the crunch, they refused to leave my cabbage tree in place (now growing through the deck) and I am not chopping down a perfectly happy tree just because it is inconvenient. Plus, if someone else had done it, I would never have known that I identify as a concrete mixer!