Day 4 - in which the day starts with awesome jelly lamingtons and coffee

So we potter along slowly - perhaps a bit more slowly than we anticipated due to the fact that it takes two strong coffees to get our sore muscles moving from the exertion of the day before.

And when I say exertion, I mean dirt covered, sweaty disgusting exertion of the kind seldom found in my sheltered life. Yesterday we decided to dig out the plants in the front garden to pave the way for our future garden of brilliance. But of course, in what has to be my mantra of the past few days 'wow, who knew that was under there?'
Because in renovating, I'm learning one thing really fast -- there's always something icky underneath.
Take for example the lovely, low maintenance wood chip in the front garden. We innocently thought a little patch of grass might be nice there -- so duly ripped up the wood chip (and that awful weed mat underneath) only to find this:



wow. It's like none of the bountiful Tasmanian rain ever found it's way through the matting. Which of course, it didn't. So now we need to hire a cultivator to plough the dirt up.

But at the end of the day, Big Al looked was all ready to go to the tip -



and we were ready to collapse onto the air bed and watch an episode of Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares which always makes us feel better about ourselves -- 'heh heh, we might be sore, but at least we aren't 100,000 pounds in debt! -- a reaction I believe to be at the root of the world's fascination with reality tv.

Today it's more painting preparation. We bought a ladder yesterday, one of those fold-a-million-ways numbers that creaks every time I climb it and makes me feel like I need a safety harness. Which, let's face it, I probably do.

As we prep the rooms, rubbing off dirt and filling holes, we try to imagine what the HECK our lovely tenants were doing to create the particular package of dents and smells. One bedroom has charcoal splatter in the corner and up the walls like someone lit a fire, and the carpet smells like old casserole. The mind boggles. I'm trying (unsuccessfully) to get Tony to blog. Please help me in my petition for the male POV. He reckons he'll just put a heap of dot points. I say that's just fine and sounds like a hoot.