Home Is Where the Heart Is
The Age, Wednesday 26 September 2007
If there’s one thing I have in common with my dad, it’s a distinct lack of skill when it comes to building anything with my hands. I can’t hammer a nail in straight to save myself. Of course, the old man disagrees with me completely on this subject: he reckons the handy-man gene skipped my generation, not his, and that he can handle himself just fine when it comes to home improvement. As far as he’s concerned, all it takes is a bit of elbow grease and a healthy dose of DIY spirit.
I admire my dad’s faith. He really does have good intentions. Although he does have a slight tendency to overestimate the extent of his carpenter talents. I’ve seen the holes in the walls of my sister’s bedroom when he tried installing bookshelves. I’ve witnessed the collapse of the table tennis table in the garage. I’ve even stopped a potentially life threatening chainsaw incident in the backyard. If you ask me, my dad and power tools just don’t mix.
Dad retired recently and now he has a new mission in life: home renovation. “Everything has to go,” he told me. “The light fittings, the carpet, the cupboards in the kitchen… you won’t recognise the place.” It sounded ambitious. “Are you sure about this?” I asked, envisioning another round of dodgy-dad-improvements. “I mean, can’t you spend your time visiting the relatives in Queensland instead?”
A few weeks later I found myself wedged tightly between the walls of the linen closet and the toilet at mum and dad’s place. Dad wanted to save a few bucks on his renovation, and we were re-hanging all the doors in the house. To dad’s credit, most of the work had already been done. The mission brown kitchen cupboards and golden orange carpets, relics from when mum and dad first moved into the house in 1975, lay piled up in the skip on the street. The home my sister and I had grown up in seemed to be vanishing. “What gives?” I asked, closely inspecting the clean, smooth walls for signs of classic dad damage. Dad winked. “I left the tough stuff to the professionals.”
The last time dad and I built something together was when he helped me assemble my first home brewing kit. Back then, I was in my late teens, and he was more into fishing and watching re-runs of M*A*S*H than working on the home. Once a month dad would take over the kitchen and work diligently on what he called his special ‘Elephant Brew’, a prized and potent lager that had an unfortunate tendency to explode in the middle of the night. I used to love coming home to the rich, warm smell of hops.
When dad and I reached the last door and I watched him banging away with a hammer at the little hinges on the frame, his tongue sticking out as usual, I realised how important it was for me to be there that day. Like his own father who had passed away just a few months earlier, dad is a family man through and through. For guys like dad, houses aren’t meant to be renovated for profit, or to prove one’s manhood. As Darryl Kerrigan says in The Castle, “a house is a home”. It might change over the years, but it will always be a sanctuary for the family.
My dad and I will never be gifted handymen. But I’m proud of the fact that I can’t build a table that doesn’t lean to one side, or find a stud in the wall without leaving holes in the plaster. It gives me an excuse to hook up with dad and ask his home improvement advice, and then move onto more important matters, such as discovering the secrets of his infamous Elephant Brew.