Mark Cohen is a CIO at Australia's largest online retailer and is a hands-on, sleeves-rolled-up, code-cutting geek. He lives in Sydney, Australia with his wife and boys and can sometimes be spotted puffing and panting as he runs at Maroubra Beach

Archive for the 'House' Category

How to screw up a renovation

I just had a toilet block up and start leaking across the bathroom floor. That’s enough to piss me off on a good day, but today was a bad day. Not only was this a bad day but that toilet must be less than six months old. I had a bung-hole builder who made an absolute mess-up of my bathroom, named Rafi Assoulin. His business should be called 80% Renovations, because he does 80% of the job and then pisses off. Let me just warn you all: All Needs Property Maintenance is a company to be avoided on pain of sewer water running across your floor.

The toilet is blocked (I’ll wager there’s building rubble in the plumbing), he couldn’t hang a cabinet properly, he never sanded the walls before painting, he left gaps in the grouting, he broke two bathtubs before fitting the third one with crooked plumbing so it drains really slowly. He never removed the plastic from the third one before grouting round the edges so I can’t get rid of the bits of plastic sticking through the grouting. He left the window without the wooden frame that it had before he got here. He reduced the size of the trapdoor in my roof to a size so small I cannot fit my shoulder width through it.

This Rafi Assoulin is going to be the end of me. If you get three quotes to renovate in your house, strike the one from Rafi Assoulin or All Needs Property Maintenance. Either that or add 20% extra onto your budget to clean up after the idiot. He even put the door handles on upside down.

Garden Nightmare!!!

Help help!  I’m trying to turn my garden into somewhere nice and safe for my kids to play.  I enjoy gardening a lot and have already made a start.  While I like Cocos Palms I think the last owners of my house got a bit carried away when they went off and planted five of them in a semi!  I have removed four of them (The three in the picture are gone) and I have removed
the Hills Hoist washing line…

The tree against the back wall is a mandarin and is fruiting now, so I want to keep it. 

I haven’t been able to come up with any good ideas, and it’s not an easy garden.  The sand is like beach-sand, it’s shaded by a beautiful big bottlebrush tree on the right, and an overhanging jacaranda on the left.  The lawn that is doing okay is buffalo, and seems to be doing okay.  Oh, and I live in New South Wales which has level 2 water restrictions because of the ongoing drought.

Any ideas to turn my backyard into a kid-friendly nice looking garden would be really welcome!