The Porch Project

 

Porch is a rather pretentious word for the smallish, tiled concrete slab outside my front door. The grey tiles that covered it have been cracking for years.  It looked rather tired, dreary and run-down (perhaps in keeping with the rest of this little house, to be honest. Or its owner...). When I first had the thought to try my hand at mosaics, it was the “porch” I actually had in mind, but it sat in the too-hard basket for two or so years while I dithered and dallied and did Other Things.

After the success of the Snake Mozake earlier this year, I felt ready to give it a go. Also, I had a huge bag of cement that needed using before it turned into a Scummo*  

My front yard is very much a green space, filled with fairly overgrown shrubs – many of them native – doing their own thing. These days there’s nothing very ordered or manicured about it, although it was very neat when I bought it 9 years ago. There’s also a gorgeous flowering gum, beloved of fruit bats, birds and bees – that has been known to house the odd feather-tailed glider. It showers the “lawn” with enormous gumnuts that regularly try to kill the lawnmower. I wanted the porch mosaic to have a bit of that untamed bush greenery feel – to be an extension of my unruly garden.

So I pulled up the old tiles and chalked a design on the underlying  surface.

In many ways this project was harder than the snake – the overall area was a little larger; I had to use proper tiles rather than smashed crockery, which often has a bit of a curve on the surface; the old tiles, some of which I left on the slab, and some which I broke up and reused, were much thicker than the new tiles. Aaaaand - I had to trust, despite serious misgivings during the construction process, that the grouting would pull it all together and give the design some form. The mosquitoes and wasps were bloody annoying, and once again, my back and knees were crying for mercy after about 3 hours.

On the plus side, the site was less exposed to the midday sun than the cat palace.

I wanted to try and capture the feel of looking up through the trees to a light, bright morning sky. Something like this: 

Here’s what I ended up with after about 2 or 3 weeks… An Australian Bush Morning.  What d’you reckon? I like it!

There’s still a LOT of cement powder in that 20kg bag… whatever shall I do next?

 *big, heavy lump of uselessness. Pure coincidence that it's the same as the nickname I use for a certain Australian politician...

The "Snake Mozake"

Because cleaning all the gravel and digging up all the pavers during lockdown wasn't back-breaking enough... 

When I finished all the gravel work and looked at the cat palace I thought it was a bit bland...that big expanse of boring (but clean!) gravel and those plain, boring old pavers. The layout of those boring pavers, however, suggested one thing to me (especially living in Mallacoota, where such things abound!) - the wriggle of a snake across the ground - so the plot was hatched. 

I know! I'll make a mosaic of a snake! 

Look at the way those pavers wiggle -
it couldn't be anything else, could it?

I rather liked the idea of a giant Red-bellied Black snake. While the living version is highly venomous, folk wisdom suggests they are the "good guys" of the Mallacoota snake population. They're certainly preferable to brown snakes or tiger snakes, at least.

But back to the mosaic...

Apart from the heat and the flies and the ouchiness of the granite gravel, I didn't realise how hard on the body it would be. I've never made a mosaic before. I completely underestimated the amount of work it would entail. 

"Oh, it's just a few pavers", said I. Eight, to be exact. I discovered, during the clearing of the cat palace, that each paver weighed around 16kgs, so I decided to leave them in situ, and found myself  a piece of board and a foam kneeler to kneel on as I grovelled in the gravel at all sorts of weird angles.

 

Sooooo..... Eight 40 x 40cm pavers. Laid end to end that's 3.2m long, and 1.28 square metres. or, in the old currency, 13.7 square feet of back-breaking, knee-bruising, plate-smashing, tile-nipping hard labour.

I've smashed more plates than a guest at a Greek wedding. I've endured insect bites and arthritic aches, sunburn and broken fingernails. Oh, and twice I got so engrossed that I was almost late for work, and had to dash to the library, unshowered and with cement under my fingernails - but it's done and it was soooooo worth it! The Snake Mozake is now a beautiful colourful reality, and I love it!

Here's a closer look at each individual section

And - in case you're wondering about the cost of making this - 

Pavers: nothing - they were already there.

Cement: $30 - silly me, I bought a 20kg bag when 5kgs would've been plenty. Live and learn, (Not to worry though - now I have lots left over for any future projects - I have my eye on the front porch...

Grout: $22. I used just under 2 x 1kg boxes

Tiles: $12  The tile shop in Pambula sells small (95x95mm) tiles for mosaic artists @ $1 each. I used about a dozen

Plates: $20 old crockery from Vinnies, the Salvos and the Mallacoota op shop was $1-2 per plate, and I reckon I used about a dozen (and also scavenged a couple of old chipped ones from my kitchen cupboard.

Little round glass marbles - about $2 from the "bling" shop in Eden.

Total cost - somewhere around $85, and that includes plenty of leftover material, so you could probably knock at least $20 off the total.  Say, $65...

Doctor's bills and Painkillers: (just kidding!)

Time: About 35 hours, spread over a couple of weeks and with time off during a heatwave and wet weather.

Verdict: Challenging, fun, worth doing, will do again once I've recovered, ha ha ha! Oh, and I'm hoping it's the only Red-bellied black snake (Pseudechis porphyriacus) that I ever see in my cat palace!