Paying Rent with Usefulness

Well that's the plan - reality may be a diversion from the plan. This kind of follows on from posts about van reconstruction but my train of thought was interrupted by trips to the north end of the island.

Days in the workshop end about 1800 depending on the heat in the day.  Van and bikes aside I have tried to be useful to everyone whose life is disrupted by me being here longer than your average guest.  I started out sharing prep of evening meals but it morphed - these days I do about 6 meals a week when I'm here.  About half of the time there will be an 'extra'. There is a kind of open house policy that feeds anyone who is here at meal times. Halal is observed about half the time. Vegetarian options are always available.

After dinner the k9s join us for a leisurely stroll to ensure the chooks have all gone to roost and shut the door on their house. Chooks here recognize 'the red bucket' and and stragglers can be easily enticed in by waving the scrap bucket about before tossing the contents on the coop floor.  Eleven chooks. 9 eggs per day. Lots of eggs get given away.

Vegie gardening gets a bit of my attention. 

SiL's craft and sewing room (half the industrial sewing workshop) has been in use by me.  I've done mending for Bro and Niece, made a sort of shoe filing system of hanging bags for Niece, and have sorted out the stored remants of my late mother's belongings to free up some space. Bro asked me to make canvas covers to tidy up seats on various tractors, trucks, diggers, ride on mowers, and the fork lift. That has been an exercise in wrestling with unfoldably tough fabric.

However, all this is nothing compared to what family are doing for me - after the van there came my little caravan; bought by me when I realized I couldn't fit out my van in any sensible way in any sort of record time. It seemed a good 'un when I bought it, and it is structurally, electrically and in plumbing sense sound. It's just the catalogue of little things...

Leaking roof hatch that needed replacing

Ceiling needed a bit of renovating from that leak

Shelves in lower cupboards had collapsed

Needs a spare wheel

Needs a gas bottle

Needs a pullout bed to be remodelled to provide access to one of the biggest storage lockers in the van

Needs the curtains shortened (goodness knows where they came from but they cover the windows and the beds)

.... and so it goes on

Bro does love a project. He was with me when I bought it and encouraged its purchase. (I think he was doing a gleeful little dance inside.) He immediately built a new aluminium roof hatch.

Spare wheel turned into a saga - existing rims/hubs matched nothing available anywhere on t'nternet. Bro (again) drilled new studs into the wheel hubs and turned the hubs on a lathe to fit a common rim type of which he just handily had three lying about. They then got sand blasted and painted.

Ceiling got the Bro treatment - he might be a tad inclined to over-engineer the fixes. If he built a caravan you could probably send it into space and it would survive re-entry.

I haven't exactly been a bystander and have graduated to using a cross cut power saw, but I really am better employed shortening curtains, renewing sealant on the outside, making new plywood shelves and vacuum cleaning out the copious quantities of mouse droppings and the mouse nest under the sink. (Mice had relocated earlier.) 

And making seat covers.

Maybe I have usefully provided him with something to do that doesn't feel like work.  He really loves a design problem to solve and things to innovate on.