Fynbos (small) by Nick Baker
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Globe by Nick Baker
Time for a change, thought I.
With a few practical skills and an urge for a new challenge, I taught myself to weld. The clouds parted and the sun shone through, in a faintly Monty Python-esque fashion.
Beginning with some racking for a friend who owns a vinyl record shop, I found I really enjoyed building stand-alone pieces. Before I knew it, I was making metal-framed furniture and the like. With my background in carpentry, glazing, tiling etc I found myself experimenting with different materials and finishes. In a spirit of honesty, I should admit that not all of these experiments were entirely successful but I was enjoying myself and (almost) paying the mortgage.
Floor joists run in parallel and it should be easy to run new pipework through the spaces between them. But no, some plonker (no doubt an “arty” type) decided to hang a cast iron chandelier in the room below and your joist-spaces are blocked up with reinforcing noggins. Now, in order to get your pipes to the correct place you have to think laterally (literally!) and inventively. Perhaps you run pipes through another room, chase them in a wall, come through the ceiling, up from below…anything but the straightforward route you had imagined. I won’t go on but I trust you can see how simple plumbing calls on your innovative side, forcing on you to be more creative than one might imagine. It was this aspect that I enjoyed, not so much the unblocking of things.
Plumbing, as we know, also commands universal respect and admiration amongst the population. Nobody ever thinks you’ve ripped them off or that you spend most days dribbling egg yolk over copies of the Sun. That said, it has a down-side which can be summed up in two words: knees and back. Both end up somewhat broken after enough years of crawling under baths and through lofts.