Ross Vlahos

Some of the things he does other than standard carpentry  

Now the other thing that we do is replace pool fencing, which is a regulation in Australia where they have to be of a certain height. The gaps need to be of certain distances. When a lot of these pools, when they were originally put in, there [was] no pool fencing at all. And then people started… under law [they] had to put in fencing. And when they were put in, they were not put under regulations with the correct gap distances for children, so the children not could get through the gaps. And, of course, the worst thing could possibly happen. And regularly I replace… where I’ve had to remove fence panels from pools and actually shift them into a different position, so they are under regulations.

Yeah, there [are] quite strict compliance laws in Australia for pool fencing. And even to the point where we have to double-pale fences from both sides so children cannot climb on either side to get into the pool. Because everyone’s worried about young children — as they do. They are very inquisitive, and they’ll jump the fence if there’s a pool to go for a swim in the middle of the night. And we have to try to stop that. So, there [are] compliance issues and laws in the country to help with all of those things. Locks and things like that — I replace door locks almost every day where door locks have failed or they’re very old, and we just have to put new locks, new deadlocks, hinges on doors. We also have an issue with quite a lot of movement where we have a country that’s quite dry and quite wet and there’s always movement in house constructions and walls and fencing where gates don’t shut properly anymore, and we have to shift and move gate latches, those sorts of things.