Our first house, in Brunswick in inner city Melbourne, had suffered at the hands of a succession of renovators. The main problem was that it had been concrete-ized, probably in the 1970s. The charming Victorian facade features such as scroll work, cottage name on the parapet and plaster flower pot decorations had been chiselled off and sandblasted. All curves had been ruthlessly squared and the whole thing had been cement rendered and painted pale green. This left our semi-detached house with a ziggurat like stepped parapet front, all in stark concrete.
Rising damp infested the cement rendered bathroom walls but we couldn’t face that problem straight away. We decided to start the renewal of Number 14 by renovating the laundry shed. This was at the end of the backyard, down the cracked concrete path bordered by cracked concrete garden beds. The laundry shed was huge in comparison with the house itself, spanning the full width of the block. Why was it so big? Had the original owners been obsessive compulsive about clean clothes? Had they used it as a laundry for the whole street, a Victorian era laundromat? Had they employed local children to work in the laundry for a penny a day, like apprentice slaves? Inside the laundry was a badly cracked concrete floor, concrete rendered walls and a double laundry tub made of course from concrete. It’s amazing how many household items can be made from concrete or covered in concrete if you put your mind to it. We knew some people who had put their old concrete laundry tubs out in the garden and then grew vegetables in them but we just couldn’t stand any more concrete. So we dragged the tub outside and smashed it to bits with a sledgehammer. Somehow the smashing expressed our feelings of fighting back against the concrete tyranny of Number 14.
We replaced the concrete tub with a stainless steel laundry tub, which began to move us forward from the Concrete Age into the Steel Age.
The laundry also contained a large gas fired copper for boiling clothes. It was in full working order with gas and water connected and an elaborate flue pipe going up through the roof. We decided to have a go at the ancient art of clothes boiling. You only live once. We wondered whether we would discover that modern washing machines were vastly inferior to old fashioned boiling in a copper. We wondered if we were at the cutting edge of a new Melbourne inner-city trend.
“Are you still using a washing machine? We always use our copper – it gets them far cleaner. We wouldn’t use anything else.”
We filled the copper with water and clothes, lit the gas burner and waited. After an eternity the water heated up and then billows of steam filled the laundry like a pea soup fog. Even with the doors and windows open the steam continued to pour out of the copper like smoke from a dragon’s nostrils. Did it clean the clothes? We will never know. I had to stop it. Enveloped in a curtain of steam, I crawled over to the copper on hands and knees like an escapee from a burning house and turned off the gas. The steam eventually cleared, but left dirty streaks running down the concrete walls and water dripping off the ceiling. The whole place was a damp steamy mess.
We put an ad in the Trading Post, as you did in the 1980s, and we sold the copper to a fellow called Stanislav. He wanted it for making sausages. I was not sure how a copper could be used to make sausages, but sausages have always been a mystery to me. My mother, who grew up in Sydney in the great depression, used to say that sausages were filled with floor sweepings from the butcher’s shop. Maybe that’s why Stan the sausage man needed a copper. I guessed that floor sweepings needed to be boiled to be soft enough to be stuffed into sausage skins. He took away the copper in his massive de-commissioned ambulance. I assumed that an old ambulance would be just the thing for delivering sausages to customers. He probably delivered the sausages to butcher’s shops and collected the floor sweepings all in the one trip. I imagined he could also use his ambulance to take sausage consumers to hospital if their stomachs were not robust enough to cope with boiled floor sweepings.
We had an old Malleys Whirlpool washing machine. On the spin cycle it jumped around all over the laundry floor like a demented Dalek. The cracks in the concrete floor were getting wider. So we advertised the Whirlpool in the Trading Post and sold it for $50 to a young bloke who said “I just want to be able to throw my dirty jeans into it once a week.” I told him I was sure our machine would be just the shot for target practice with dirty jeans. I did mention that as a target, it jumped around a bit. He seemed to be looking forward to the challenge. A few days later we had a call from Stan the sausage stuffer. He wanted to buy the flue pipe that went up through the laundry roof, as well as the cowl on top that kept out the rain. I protested that this would leave a big hole in the roof. He said he would personally cover the hole with a piece of corrugated iron and seal it with silicone. As a rookie renovator I had never heard of silicone except for use in cosmetic surgery. I rejected the sausage man’s offer. Where had he got this silicone from anyway? In the hospital rubbish bin?
At the far end of the laundry, away from the washing machine, was a built-in floor to ceiling cupboard with numerous doors that were faced with fly-wire. Obviously whatever had been put in those cupboards had needed air and needed to be visible. What had the early occupants kept there? Guinea pigs? Rabbits? My father had grown up in that area and had often talked about eating rabbit stew. Had our laundry also been the local backyard bunny butcher? Had the copper, when not boiling clothes, been used for cooking up rabbit ragout? We recoiled at the thought. Our next step in renovation was to pull off all the fly-screen cupboard doors and make a large floral curtain to cover the shelves and erase the memories of the rabbit slaughterhouse.
We painted the walls, ceiling and door, put a rug on the floor and a table, chair and desk lamp and tried to work out whether it was a “laundry cum study” or a “study with ensuite laundry.” We were already thinking of selling the house so we were trying to get into the swing of real estate jargon.
However, being novice renovators we had done the last things first. We had ignored the concrete. We had come to realise that the concrete floor was too cracked to be disguised. We called in Bert the concreter. He took one look at it and offered to pour a new concrete floor on top of the old one. So we moved out the rug, table, chair, washing machine and even the new laundry tub. “With the height of the new floor, I’ll have to take a few inches off the bottom of the door.” Of course he would. Silly me. Unfortunately I had, with beginner renovator’s pride, already painted the door with several coats of glorious canary yellow gloss paint. I thought Bert would appreciate my painting perfection, as one skilled tradesman to another, but he didn’t. He unscrewed the door, jammed it onto the top of his filthy old concreting wheelbarrow, got out his old handsaw, ripped a couple of inches off the bottom, screwed it back onto its hinges and looked at me proudly for approval. I was in a state of renovator’s shock because his wheelbarrow sawhorse had gouged the paint from my pristine door and the lower half looked like it had been gnawed by cockatoos. When he poured the floor slab he left splashes of gritty concrete all over the bottom of the door. After a few days in a state of shock I recovered enough to repaint the door, but it was never the same.
On auction day, like all good Aussie renovators, we baked bread and brewed coffee and put out fresh flowers. It didn’t help. We suspected that the potential bidders were overwhelmed by all the concrete, despite our efforts to disguise it. We didn’t get one single bid. The Concrete Cottage sold two months later, after we had moved out, when it was a bare concrete shell. The concrete had the last laugh.
© Geoff Milton 2019
