Days ago, I was reminded that sometimes when you most need it, you can get a break – if you just reach out and seize the moment.
A Facebook friend posted that she needed help packing up the contents of the house she’d lived and worked in for 40 years, because it was sold – vacant possession was in two weeks and she was snowed under and panicking.
The house, tucked into a rainforest valley in the Gordon area of the North Shore, is a tear-down: a rambling, century-old wooden cottage that’s been extended back and down at least twice, and now includes two ample bedrooms, two lounge areas and four balconies, an office corner and other workspaces, a grand piano, dining for eight, a spa room, a full recording studio housing an historic desk – and 30 or 40 display cabinets, dressers, sideboards and occasional tables of varying sizes and vintages, crowded with countless fascinating objects, from early transformers and scientific glassware to clocks, bowls, figurines, vases, vintage film equipment, exquisite weighing scales, trumpet-speakered turntables, old records, books and magazines, maps and paintings and posters and photographs, and lamps made of giant shells or translucent, hand-painted hide.
Everywhere you turn, there’s more amazing stuff; the heritage of several varied lives and generations – it’s a beautiful, valuable and possibly significant collection. Mostly it will go into storage – plans for an exciting new venture are afoot.
Because it’s time: one corner of the house sags noticeably; there are ducks nesting in the parlour fireplace; birds of all sorts hang about the verandas and flit (or in the cockies’ case, strut and flap) through the open glass doors of the lounge area and across the room to the kitchen veranda, sometimes via a quick food-snatch from the table.
Where the ducks track from fireplace to door, the polished wood floors are speckled with bird shit. Termites are eating the place from the ground up, and on the walls at the back, 20 metres above the garden that falls to a rippling creek, cockatoos have gnawed away much of the woodwork. All day one shouts at them and bangs on the windows, but they just come back, clawing bandy-legged along the joists, grinding away with their itchy beaks.
The house, sadly, is doomed.
Still, being where it is, it fetched a pretty price, which meant my friend had what I most urgently needed – cash – and I, having packed my grandparents’ and parents’ estates, know exactly how to deal with this kind of crisis. So, I reached out and boldly offered, and it’s going to be a very busy, fulfilling, exhausting, exhilarating and profitable two weeks.
Carpe diem, I say. Reach out.
