Perfectly Imperfect
First published in the TasWeekend magazine (The Hobart Mercury)
To her four young grandchildren - Toby, Max, Tess and Austin - it is Ma’s house - their cosy, safe sanctuary that’s brimming with fun and adventure: getting messy in the potting shed, searching for bugs and snails, digging up worms and licking the cookie batter off the wooden spoons in the galley kitchen.
For three of her four adult children - Mykhayla and Casey and Poppy - it’s their childhood home they have fond memories of and return to most Sundays with their families for a shared breakfast of bacon and eggs - split into two shifts now because they don’t all fit around the dining room table anymore.
The third child - Louis - still calls it home. As do the two dogs: Roger and Ralph and the chooks and cats and birds. But for Lee Farrell and her husband Craig, the old house in New Norfolk is their forever home. It’s the focus point for their growing family and a labour of love, they love more as they labour.
Lee divides her time between many loves: she is the Agrarian Kitchen gardener growing all its organic vegetables two days a week, she is a potter in her rough shed potting studio two days a week - where she makes dinnerware for restaurants like Glasshouse and the Agrarian Kitchen and on Tuesdays she baby sits her two 2-year-old grandchildren. In her spare time she likes to play golf. Craig is the member for Derwent in the upper house.
The pair have spent the past 25 years slowly un-renovating changes that the hundreds of people who have lived there before them have made to the convict created house built almost 200 years ago. “After we’d bought it, and we stared fixing it up, we both thought ‘Oh My God what have we got ourselves in for?’,” Lee says.
They’ve pulled up vinyl floors, taken down wallpaper hiding cracks and crevices, removed old, Victorian-style decorative boards that were attempting to mask rotting bricks and also taken away several layers of rendering to help with the air flow as well as cutting channels into the bricks. False plasterboard ceilings that were hiding the beautiful original Blackwood beams have been taken away. They’ve resurrected the magnificent fireplace that had been significantly built in and its grand size now effectively heats the triple-bricked home with the help of 8 tonnes of firewood in winter. “We are trying to take it back to what it was,” Lee says. “It’s got a lovely and basic rustic beauty.”
Our governor’s husband Dick Warner tipped the Farrell’s off in the 90s when the now four-bedroom house came on the market but Lee says it took them over six months of um-ing and ar-ing before they decided to buy it. “It was the kind of house any reasonable person probably wouldn’t have touched with a ten foot pole,” Lee says. “We’d spent a magical summer day with the Warner’s swimming in the river and I was really taken with the beauty of the area. It was heavenly. But I had a new baby and Craig had a new job and all I could see was a broken down house with big cracks in the walls and ceiling and a rising damp problem.”
It was her builder brother - Simon - who convinced the Farrell’s to buy the house and that was before he’d even stepped inside and seen the un-square rooms. “We were coming down the driveway and he announced ‘you have to buy it, it is beautiful,’,” Lee says. He was describing it’s uneven, natural beauty: something the whole family has grown to love.
Lee’s lost many hours scrubbing down old weather board and cleaning up the original bricks that were hand-made and still have convict thumb prints in them, for example, rather than buying new. “I guess because I am a potter, I can kind of patch things up and make them look like they’ve always looked,” she says. “Because in this house if you try to make things look square then it ends up looking all wrong.”
The house - originally two joined cottages for the working staff at the nearby Valleyfield Farm - sits on a soil foundation - and an acre block of land with a park-like garden of big trees that provide good shelter and shade and hedges.
The electrician who rewired the house for them said he’d never seen anything like the mess of tangled wires: a mix of bare copper and cloth wire with extended and tangled extension cords.
The first thing Lee says she removed from the house was a gaudy chandelier hanging in the main entrance because she says it didn’t seem right to try and dress up a cottage and make it into something that it wasn’t. “It’s not the grand manor,” Lee says. “The people who lived here, weren’t wealthy people and we’ve never really had any money so we’ve just made do with what we’ve had and that suits the house. The home is decorated with an eclectic mix of recycled, renovated hand-me-downs from the tip shop and friends and strangers topped up with special pieces from the Drill Hall Emporium. “In a house like ours, things look just right if they are old or a bit broken or crooked,” Lee says. “It is really rustic, and honest and it has a beautiful warmth, and the stories seem to seep out of the walls.”
People are always knocking on their door and asking to come in and have a look around because a distant relative once lived there. “The wonderful thing about this house is all the stories of the people who have lived here,” Lee says. Years ago an old lady knocked on the door and asked to come in and when she was shown into the front room burst into tears because she remembered her uncles fighting over a card game and her Grandmother throwing their cards into the open fire. Another man recounted how there used to be a squeaky ladder up to the second floor which made sneakily courting his girlfriend a real challenge.
Lee spends most of her time at home in the kitchen and she was determined to have one that looked like it had been apart of the house for a very long time. Of course in 1825, kitchens were just a room with a fireplace in it so the original room was a bit too small so one day when Craig was at work she ignored his advice and knocked down a wall to make space for a long galley kitchen. The bench tops are hard and practical third-grade Blackwood - all biscuit joined together - that she rescued from an old boiler at her other brother’s farm. The cupboard doors were from old pine, full-sized doors she found at the tip shop. She did a black smithing course to learn how to make the cupboard handles.
It’s now a sunny and bright room without the vinyl floors. The fake ceiling is also gone revealing the original Blackwood ceiling. French doors open onto the garden and there’s a separate entrance that’s handy for unpacking the groceries.
One of her favourite rooms - she calls a snug - is a cosy, small lounge room with an open fire place with exposed old brick that shows off the age of the room. She has dreams of sitting in their one day snuggling with a book but she says life’s too busy. For now, the snug is a good place to store locally-produced wine.
“This house has got a wonderful feel to it that a spick and span new house just couldn’t pull off,” Lee says. “It just feels right. You need all the nooks and crannies and spiders and cobwebs. It’s imperfectly perfect. We are here for good. They will have to take us out in a box or a beautifully hand-made ceramic urn.”
LEE’S TIPS TO UN-RENOVATE
- Find the basic, real materials like old timbers. The more rustic the better. Whether it is an old cupboard or an old bit of a bridge or a door - you can always find that stuff.
- If you can’t do it yourself, find a builder who is used to working with old stuff.
- If you can’t get old, then get new but handmade. Anything handmade will age well, it will start to look like it’s always been there.
