Our ex-factory home studio has four glass-brick windows which have remained in ‘original’ condition since we purchased the derelict A. E. Harding & Sons premises in 1991.

The largest one (in our kitchen – once the dispatch office) exhudes a particularly beguiling, higgledy-piggledy, make-do, depression vibe. A few of its 64 greenish-glass bricks are damaged/cracked and one has housed a small wasp colony for years. The window also features some of the poorest grouting I’ve ever seen.

But you only notice these things when you have time, when you’re in slow-reno mode. And when you do, it’s chastening to realise that one has been living, quite happily (for 32 years!) like Steptoe and Son, ’midst a veritable sea of resonant defects.

Due to the age of the building, excessive recent rainfall and micro-subsidence (WestConnex tunneling? Sydney Metro’s high-voltage-cable excavations?) this year we’d begun to observe that significantly wider gaps had emerged between some of the glass bricks, and that it was a little breezier than usual in the kitchen!

So as part of a somewhat-glacial factory upgrade I determined last month to get grouting. As ever, the trick has been to be fussy, but not too fussy, aware that, between imperfection, error and finesse lies the true beauty of the barely-renovated.