Today we moved into our new house in 177 Grattan Street, Carlton. I can't remember very much of it, just that we already knew we were going to have to completely remodel the front part of the house. I took the opportunity to be naughty and draw on the wallpaper in the hallway—a circuit diagram of a crystal set.

My father was an architect, and he also had considerable experience building houses (he built the first house we lived in from scratch and almost single-handedly). The house was tiny, at the end of a terrace of four houses. It would have been built round 1900. It had a single story with two rooms in the front, with a hallway on the left. At the end of the hallway there was some steps down into the kitchen, with a laundry room behind it. A staircase led upstairs to two of the smallest bedrooms I have ever seen.

The ceilings in the front two rooms were over 3 metres high (I think), and my father's plan was to lower them to about 2.4 metres (modern ceiling height), lift the (slate) roof and put in a bed-sitting room with a kitchen corner in between, with a bathroom just behind it.

This wasn't that simple: clearly he needed planning permission, and one of the issues was that terrace houses of that era normally didn't have any dividing wall in the space above the ceilings. In principle, that wouldn't have been an issue, but they also usually had only a single row of bricks (4½") dividing the individual houses. Modern (1957) building regulations required at least a double row (9"), so a missing existing wall could have been a show-stopper.

My father checked: yes, both conditions were correct. But somewhere he had some used bricks, and he built an existing brick wall and got it dirty enough that the building inspector was satisfied. We never knew whether he noticed and said nothing, or whether he didn't notice.