Janine and I have been painting all the multicoloured different hued sheets of re-cycled corrugated iron sheeting that we used internally as lining for our shed. I spent 3 or 4 months collecting old roofing iron off a lot of buildings from Sydney to the Highlands. I spread the word among my friends and students. I would come and collect what ever was on offer.

Sometimes, I’d get a call in the morning saying you need to be here between 3 and 4 this afternoon, you can have the roof and we’ll help you load it, but if you aren’t here, it will all go to the tip. We can’t store it here on the building site. And I did, some of it wasn’t much good, but I could select was was useful to me and take the rest to the recyclers.

We ended up with a dozen or so different styles of old corrugated roofing in every imaginable colour, from straight silver-metal zincalume, through red, green, blue, brown, yellow and grey.

I chose to use the sheets in the necessary lengths required in each position. This resulted in a mix of rather unattractive colours that didn’t sit well together. We decided that we would have to paint it all one colour to get some aesthetic cohesion. Even if the profile of the different sheets, manufactured in different decades, by different companies, didn’t fully match, resulting in some rather big gaps in the overlaps. Well, beggars can’t be choosers!

We gave the room a first coat of very cheap ‘Aldi’ flat white acrylic to bring all the sheets to the same base colour. Then to save money, we bought one 4 litre tin of cheap commercial ‘pink’ tinted flat plastic and made our own blend of 3 parts, Aldi cheap white acrylic that just happened to be on special in the week that we needed it, and one part of the tinted pink paint. We ended up with a very pale pink that looked like a warm white. You can only tell that it is a pale pink, by comparing it to a otherwise supposedly ‘White’ test sheet.

Two coats of our cheapskate, ‘poverty pink’ and the room looks good and completely consistent in colour. We have gone through 16 litres of paint to get all 4 of the quite tall 4 to 5 metre high walls coated. Good value at $120.

Looking out of the big arched window that I made for the ‘gallery’ room. I can see the Balmoral Railway Station out in the garden. We bought the old Railway Station by tender, back in the 1970’s when the Railways Dept. had closed the line to passenger traffic, and kept it open as a solely goods line. They decided that they wanted the un-used timber stations removed from the line and the site cleared.

We thought that this was a shame, as the timber railway stations form part of the fabric of village history. The Station at Hill Top, the next village along the line, was the first to be sold off. It went for $2! the people who bought it only wanted the tin off the roof to build a chook shed. So they took the iron off the roof and burnt it down. That cleared the site, and fulfilled the contract! The what a shameful event.

We decided that this wouldn’t happen to our village station. When ours came up for demolition, we tendered to demolish it, but instead we picked it up in a couple of huge wire slings, lifted it onto a low loader and re-located it to our own back yard. That fulfilled the contract to clear the site. But most importantly, it preserved this valuable part of our village history for some time to come. The station building dates to about 1880 and although it is only small, we decided that it was too important to be destroyed.

Incredibly, it almost burnt down a few times during the catastrophic bush fire that raged through Balmoral Village on the 21st Dec. 2019. Embers lodged in the roof facia board and it caught fire. I was lucky to manage to see this early on and managed to hose it out before it spread to the whole of the roof. I was simultaneously fighting the fire that had caught hold of my barn at the same time and had t keep returning to the water tank on the station building to refill my buckets, because the pump on the barn had failed after half an hour. I saw the station roof burst into flames again, and again hosed it out. With the wind howling and the air temperature very high, and the constant shower of ember shrapnel flying through the air, my hair even caught an ember and caught fire at one stage. It’s impossible to forget the small of burning hair!

Even though I hosed the fire out very well and soaked the area around the fascia of the station roof. It soon dried out in the hot gale and burst back into flames. I had to return and put it out several times.

So I saved the Station – for a 2nd time.

Looking out at the station through the tall arched window from this newly painted white room. I am suddenly reminded of the lines of a song from my teen years, “In the white room, with no curtains, by the station” There was something else about tired starlings. but the important part is that we have a white room with no curtains, by the station.

That’s The Cream (on the cake for me)