Borrowed Scenery

"Borrowed Scenery" is a concept in landscape gardening and traditional Japanese and Chinese gardens (shakkei) in which the surrounds of your garden far beyond the borders is part of the visual "field" or "impact" of your garden - everything looks more expansive and lusher than it actually is, because you can see the scenery beyond. The trouble with "borrowed scenery" is that people can take it away. When I bought my house two years ago, one of the things that most attracted me to it was the fact that the garden, though small and pokey, was a green oasis thanks to the hedge and trees in the garden behind me. The people who owned the house had filled it with greenery, and that greenery was mine by extension. That house sold a couple of months ago, and yesterday morning as I was getting ready for work I heard the new owners talking to some gardeners about "tidying all this up". I was worried they might cut things back so much that it would let the street lights from the highway cut through. It was dark when I got home last night, so I wasn't fully aware of what had happened. I did notice that I had more light in my house than normal, so I thought they'd cut things back as I had feared. They got rid of the hedge. And two lovely lili pili trees that made it so nice to sit on my porch and look at the greenness. Also, instead of a bank of green things filled with flowers, I now see the side of my neighbours' house - including their sensor lights. Thankfully, I let my own lili pilis get bushy and overgrown, because otherwise the yard would feel completely exposed. As I was standing in my garden this morning, commiserating with the two sunbirds who have been living in the hedge that's now gone, I found myself feeling completely bereft. It wasn't my hedge, but it was part of my garden, and now it's gone and my garden looks so sparse without it. Plus, the birds are now missing a major food source. We both sort of looked at each other as if to say "why would anybody do this?" I know that all things are impermanent. I know the hedge and trees weren't mine to keep. I know that all that I can do now is try to plant something with lots of flowers to give the birds a reason to stick around. I know I should accept it and roll with it... But right now I look at the side of a building when I used to look at a lovely green bush and feel incredibly saddened. Part of me knew this day could come - I just hoped the neighbours would realise the hedge was a benefit to them (not just me) for many reasons. But still, when I got into my car this morning and looked at the side of my neighbours' house, I realised that without that hedge, I probably wouldn't have bought my house.

I don't have great photos of what it looked like "before", but imagine a bank of flowering plants so high you couldn't see the roof of the house behind me, and then you might appreciate why the "after" photo hurts so much:

Things given

I've recently bought a house (Yay! Finally!) and I'm in the process of moving all of my many, many, many belongings into the darn thing. It turns out I have a lot of stuff. Some of it isn't even mine.

Actually, quite a lot of it isn't mine. It turns out that my family has been waiting for this opportunity for years, and have been holding on to various things with the ultimate goal of "one day giving it to Sharon".

This is nice... I guess. Only it means that I'm stuck with a slight dilemma: What do you do when you have something that is perfectly good, does exactly what you need it to do, and was given to you by someone you love and respect... but isn't what you want?

Many years ago, when I was a child, my mother and grandmother collected a dinner set for me. It was a promotional thing by some grocery store, and shopping trip by shopping trip they collected an entire 8 piece set of plates, saucers, cups and the like. It's an okay set. The bowls are too small for cereal, but okay for dessert. That's really my only legitimate complaint.

Only it's really boring. If you had put me in a room of place settings and said "pick one you like", I probably wouldn't even notice this set was in the room.

What I would do, given the choice, would be to run around the room and pick six or eight different patterns (with actual patterns) and get a complete single setting in each (dinner plate, bread-and-butter, saucer, bowl, teacup...). Then I'd keep myself amused for months by flitting between the different patterns every time I ate something.

I'd like a whole bunch of different interesting patters. Like this one I saw in a shop a few weeks ago:

You may notice it's not white.

Personally, white plates aren't my cup of tea - they're not what I'd choose for myself. But now I have a perfectly good white dinner set (a whole 8 settings' worth) that was lovingly collected for me (by two people whom I love and admire), and diligently kept aside for me for decades. Literally, decades. There's a lot of love in those boring plates.

My mother also decided to celebrate the purchase of my new house by buying me a new cutlery set, meaning the set I've had in storage for years (and was kind of hoping to use one day) is now redundant.

I feel ungrateful and churlish for complaining about these things. I have something that I need, that I didn't even have to pay for. There's nothing wrong with any of it. Heck, the cutlery set is better than the one I brought back with me from Tasmania.

It's just not really "mine", you know?

Buddhist philosophy would say my problem is wanting stuff. If I didn't want something with a pattern (or a bunch of patterns, as the case may be), then I would realise that I have everything I need and much more besides. And then I would look at my plates and utensils and realise that it's foolish to think anything could ever really be "mine" anyway. Solomon would probably agree with that.

But still... I want the pretty plates. But I don't need any plates. Aren't I lucky to have such pointless problems?

As for the stuff my uncle has been keeping for me, well that's a whole 'nother post.

The great window shortage of the late C20th

I’ve been house-hunting for quite a while now.  I know I should just hurry up and buy a house already, but I’m slightly hampered by the fact that, at the moment, the longer I wait the more the house prices seem to drop, and the bigger my savings get, so it’s a weird little gamble.

Plus, I have a roof over my head, and no one is in a hurry to kick me out, so I have no pressing *need* to buy a house, I just want to spend at least part of my adult life being the person who gets to say “I think a deck would look lovely, so I’m going to go ahead and make that happen.”

Also, my mother isn’t getting any younger, her hips are getting dodgier by the day, and she lives in a house with stairs - but she’s not going to buy a low-set house any time soon.  It will be much easier to turn around in five years and say “hey, Mum, why not move in with me in my comfortable low-set house where you don’t have to climb stairs everyday?” than it will be to say “just sell your house and buy a new one, already!”  This is the way it works with my mother.  She rarely takes suggestions and almost never accepts instructions, but occasionally falls for invitations.

One of my problems with the housing market is that I want to keep things cheap (if you take out a loan, you’re basically asking a bank to buy your house for you and then sell it back to you bit-by-bit for twice the price), but the houses in my price range at the moment seem to have be built by weirdos.

I know I’m not going to get a mansion for the amount I’m willing to pay, but is it too much to ask for windows?

It seems like most of the houses I’ve seen that were built in the 1980s and 1990s around these parts were constructed during some sort of window shortage.  I’ve lost count of the number of houses I’ve walked into that only have one window in each of the bedrooms, even if the rooms have two external walls.  They’ll cut a hole to fit in an air conditioner (which is necessary, because without two windows you don’t have any cross ventilation), but they couldn’t see their way to putting in another window.  Not even a small one.

I’ve even been in houses where, of the four external walls available, only two had windows in them.  Two whole walls of a house, completely windowless!

Why?  Were windows so expensive?  Was there some sort of window tax that I’m unaware of?  Do you save money on your rates if you aren’t using up so much of the council’s precious air supply?

What really weirds me out is the location of the windowless walls.  Okay, so maybe you don’t need a window looking out the side of your house and directly at your fence.  Fair enough.  But the majority of windowless walls I’ve noticed have been the wall at the rear of the house – facing out to the garden.

If you were going to pick any wall in your house and say “nah, I don’t want to see what’s outside there” – why, for the love of all things holy, would you make it the wall that overlooks your back yard?  Why would you position the window placement so that you could see the side fence that’s three feet away, but not your garden?  That’s just weird.

Call me crazy (go on, we both know it’s true), but I don’t want to buy a house where I can’t look out over my own grounds.

I might - *might* - end up buying a house that was a victim of the great window shortage (although I’m a big fan of air, so I’d like to avoid that , if possible) but I’ll be darned if I cough up good money for a windowless box that keeps me from seeing my own lawn.

The Worst House in the Street

I was looking at a house the other day that was in a location I’d never really paid much attention to before. 

Driving up the main street of the area has never filled me with much confidence, but once you get into the back streets the neighbourhood actually looks kind of nice.  And it’s about 1km from the River (nice) and about 1km from a botanical garden (nice) and close to shops (nice) and close to take-away food outlets (nice) and walking distance from the club I sometimes go to for dinner (nice) which has a lawn bowls club attached to it (noice)…

So, in other words, I really like the place.  I particularly liked the fact that it honestly looks like it would be easier for me to run to work from there than drive.  There’s a rather conveniently located footbridge which makes getting to work on foot about a 4km trip, while driving would be closer to 10km.

The house looks kind of nice, from the agency photos, and the outside doesn’t look bad, in passing.

And it’s in my price range, and it’s had new paintwork and carpets done “recently” (whatever that means, in real estate parlance), so I probably wouldn’t have to fix it up at all.

There’s only one problem:  The house right next door.

I think it’s a good sign when the house you are looking at is the worst house on the street.  Once it’s yours, you can do something about it.  You can make it the best house on the street.

However, if the house next-door or across the road is the worst house on the street, there’s nothing you can do about that – it’s practically part of your house, and you’re stuck with it.

I don’t know who lives there.  I’ve not seen them, and the yard doesn’t show any signs of couches or car parts on the lawn (it also doesn’t show any signs of watering, but that’s beside the point), and maybe they’re perfectly nice neighbours…

But they are the kind of people who don’t believe in nice curtains.  Standing in front of the house I noticed a tatty rag in one window, broken blinds at two others and part of a cardboard box acting as a sun-block for a fourth.

So the house needs a paint job and the yard needs a good water.  These things in themselves and on their own are not indicative of poor quality people.  A lack of decent window dressings, on the other hand, makes me instinctively distrust them.

Nice people have nice curtains.  They may not be expensive ones, they may not be backed or anything fancy – but they are intact and they look like they are meant to be in the window.

Do you know who has cardboard boxes and rags in their windows?  Unpleasant people.  That’s who.  The kind of people who don’t care if their kids our out doing unpleasant things like graffitiing the neighbourhood and doing burn-outs in cars of dubious road-worthiness.  The kinds of people who play unpleasant music at unpleasant volumes.  The kinds of people who have unpleasant conversations in unpleasant tones of voice that cannot be tuned out.

It’s the worst house on the street, and my inner snob is sure it must play home to the worst neighbours in the area.

The house on the other side looks nice at first glance, but it has besser blocks scattered around its garden at random intervals.  They aren’t even set upright so they look like they’re meant to be decorative.  What’s with that?

I don’t know if I’m going to go to the open house on the weekend.