Danny Katz: My street is a renovator's paradise and it's pushed me to the brink

There’s a Johnny Cash song, a really famous one, called Folsom Prison Blues, where Johnny sings, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”. And I know how Johnny feels. I had the exact same urge last Sunday when a neighbour switched on a circular saw at 7:58am to work on his back extension.

Yeah, I would have shot a man in reno just to watch him die. Slow, real slow.

Actually, if I’m going to be honest, there have been plenty of times I’ve wanted to shoot people in reno just to watch them die – I could be serving multiple life sentences in Folsom Prison, locked away in the Maximum-Security Reno-Killer’s Psychiatric-Meltdown Unit.

Because my street has turned into a “renovator’s paradise”. Everyone is fixing their homes and it’s pushing me to the brink – all day long there’s the buzzing of saws, the thwacking of hammers, the beep-beep-beeping of reversing trucks (backwards is the only way trucks seem to drive up and down my street).

The situation is getting so bad that after a five-minute trip to the shops, I returned to find a skip in my parking spot and the house across the road gone.

Murder was on my mind again, when I walked past the half-constructed house down the street and stepped on a roofing nail that went through the bottom of my shoe and peeked out the top of my shoe, which suggested that at some point it passed though a between-part of my shoe called “the foot”.

Thankfully I stumbled backwards and stepped into a puddle of concrete slurry, which stemmed the bleeding.

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Killing was oh-so close when the people living directly behind me put a second-storey on their house – a massive Eureka Tower Skydeck-storey.

They specifically said they were going to use frosted glass on their windows, but those windows don’t look frosted to me, they look quite clear, possibly made out of Carl Zeiss telescopic lens-glass with a 200x magnification.

Since then I’ve had to use my back bathroom with the blinds down, the lights off, wrapped up in an oversized Australian Open beach towel.

Bloodshed was brewing when a neighbour insisted I pop round to see her new kitchen reno. I had to stare at a subway-tile splashback for half an hour while she told a fascinating story about how she wanted gloss tiles but the tiler laid down matt tiles so all the tiles had to ripped up and gloss ones put down.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t a killing offence, but she certainly deserved a head-clobbering against her exposed-aggregate polished-concrete kitchen benchtops.

Yep I could be in jail right now, huddled in a cramped unrenovated cell, singing my own version of Folsom Prison Blues: “Well I heard the saw a buzzin’/ On Sunday before nine/ I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve seen the sunshine/ I’m stuck in Folsom Prison, where I just sit n’ weep/ But at least there ain’t no sound of trucks reversin’, going beep beep beep …