Cleaning is a dirty job

Yay settlement occurred last Thursday and we are now the proud new owners of our house :-) Hmmm but we have been cleaning the place ever since. Family have been helping us to scrub this house for the last 4 days and it's not finished just yet. We can honestly say that this house has not been cleaned for many many years. It's currently taking between 4-6 buckets of a borax / water solution to clean the walls alone (and they all look as black or blacker than the water above).

You know a house is dirty when you clean a room and it looks like it has been repainted!!

We thought this room's walls were coffee coloured - guess what they're white!!

I've hand scrubbed the beautiful wooden floors 3 times so far and we have done a great job of lifting off the surface muck. Granny B spent a day cleaning the inside of the windows and vacuuming out the window frames and found the original paint colour for outside.

As much as I detest yet another renovation, the underlying beauty of this house keeps me motivated and with the sun shining in this afternoon, I was even heard to sigh in my appreciation.

I spent part of Saturday pruning back bits of the garden (which is a monstrous mess) and found some lovely surprises (which I'll save for a later post).

My endless lists and getting quotes prior to settlement means we have hit the ground running on settlement. Restumping started Friday, plumbers have been through and start replumbing a lot of the house on Wednesday, locksmiths have changed all the locks and next week the roof is being fixed and the possum problem sorted. We mean to have the basic structure ready for Mr B to rip out the bathroom immediately after Christmas.

Then the rest of the renovation will be a long project that we fix over time. With the bathroom done and some plastering we can live here and do bits as and when we can afford them. But we are so happy to have our own place again. We wont move in until Feb approx, but it's ours and we love it and it feels like closing a very solid door on our moldy house experience. This house gives us hope and lays a path of potential for this new part of our future.