Weirdness can turn a house into a home Home renovation can produce a range of challenges. MY father is the kindest, smartest, weirdest man I know. When his house burnt down in the Ash Wednesday bushfires, despite having no designing or building experience, he designed and built himself a crazy, paranoid bunker of awesomeness. In it is a bomb shelter, the biggest domestic boiler in the southern hemisphere and escape tunnels, along with an abundance of canned goods and cattle feed, in case of disaster. It also has battlements. It is the house I grew up in and perhaps it's why I chose a crazy, paranoid, ex-bikie fortress when it came time for me to buy my own home. And, because everything that goes wrong in our family is jokingly deemed to be Dad's fault, I blame him for my belief that I could do everything in this renovation myself. When I was a child, Dad and I would build furniture from scratch for father-daughter bonding time. When I first naively went into my current renovation, I assumed it wouldn't differ much from making a bookcase. In the past nine weeks, I have been disabused of that notion, though I am enjoying adding new strings to my bow. I now know how to do my own paving, mix concrete, carry out roof plumbing and do roof maintenance, plastering and minor electrical work. Of course, I have my partner and my dad working too, with an army of friends and minions. To be fair, Dad is doing most of the heavy, pointy and dirty work. Having a tiny budget has forced us to be creative, which is fun, because Dad is the king of creative. Sadly, he is also the arch-nemesis of health and safety. Already he's shot himself in the knee with a nail gun and nearly cut his finger off, along with many other injuries he considers too minor to mention. And those small injuries are nothing compared with what he sustained when building his own house. Mum tells the story of the day he decided the best way to construct the escape tunnel (that was actually planned for a boiler-feeding conveyor belt, once he'd invented the system for automated wood chopping and delivery) wasn't to use a large concrete pipe, but to have the concreters pour the concrete around him on a light frame while he more or less flailed his arms. He survived with only minor scarring. When installing the windows upstairs, with panes too big to fit through the doors, Dad got a couple of men to lower the pane from the roof, roughly in line with the frame, and then hurl himself at the glass from the top of a ladder and hope that my elderly grandparents would be able to stop him from going straight through the other side. That time, the scars were emotional ones inflicted on the witnesses. One of the great things about Dad is that he does all these things with such good humour. I remember him once coming down from the roof after fixing a skylight and offering to make us tea, even though he was bleeding after cutting his arm nearly down to the bone with the angle grinder. Perhaps I should keep these stories in mind when Dad suggests we do something potentially dangerous on my house. Whenever I ask him if we should use safety equipment, his answer is almost always no. This is how I ended up blowing concrete dust out of my nose for three days. He doesn't like concrete mixers, goggles or face masks (despite having a large supply of masks, in case of an H1N1 virus epidemic), so I would stand over the bucket with the bag of Ardit and he would stir it with a bit of wood he found when we demolished the kitchen with a sledgehammer and a hand saw. What impresses me so much about him is that he's right 90 per cent of the time when it comes to construction. Sure, I have a lot of unusual holes in my walls now (turns out that bookcase was glued), tiling isn't his strong suit, he calls the Stanley knife "the pinky thing" and plaster "pink goo" and he has the style sense of Bob Katter, but things are never boring around him. And we always survive. OK, last week he asked me to put my face in the line of sparks from the angle grinder to catch the hot bits of metal he was cutting from the bannister. But some burnt hair (and flesh) is a small price to pay for help and the entertainment of never knowing if you're going to die.