Shortly after we moved in here a fellow, lets call him Alfonse, introduced himself to us pausing briefly on one of his, what we were to discover regular, evening power-walks past our house. He lives three doors up the road and used to own our house as a rental property for many, many, many years.
As our renovating involves piling lots of stuff for removal on our front verge, he gets a daily snapshot of what we are doing inside and out.
As our renovating involves piling lots of stuff for removal on our front verge, he gets a daily snapshot of what we are doing inside and out.
He stopped to comment with thinly veiled horror when we removed the horrible dirty cream carpet to have the beautiful wide jarrah floorboards polished;
"That carpet is only a couple of years old!" he exclaimed.
When we removed the falling down wonky picket fence out the front to replace it with a low limestone wall and lavender hedge;
"I built that fence myself" he sobbed.
When we pulled out the hideous kitchen to replace it with one that wasn't inhabited by crawling things.
He walked straight by just slightly shaking his head.
So, safe to say, that Alfonse is responsible for most of the things we are now undoing in our renovations.
He buried the 50 or so enormous concrete slabs all over the back yard that the Historian had to remove in back-breaking toil.
He put in the "death trap" (quote by our plumber) gas heater in the lounge room and various dodgy electrical s**t-f**kery all over the place.
And he slapped cheap yellowy cream (we call it "Tenant Yellow") paint over everything without any form of preparation (including over dust and dirt!) so that it now has to be completely scraped off by hand and the walls primed before repainting! The lounge room took us an incredibly long time to prepare and now we are struggling with the dining room.
It's not many people that have the daily opportunity to kick their nemesis in the shins as he walks past.
Fortunately for Alfonse the Historian is restraining me.
You already know I actually like your dining room in it's scrapy paint glory. And I had to laugh at the vision in my head of the historian holding you back! I also had the old fellow that did the dodgy renovation work at my place off side he owns the place at the back of mine and was around daily to lament the removal of the old jarrah framed kitchen benches with green marble laminate fronts- he too was indignant as he had built it all himself 25 years before, the fact that he had built on cupboard in front of another so that you couldn't open the door properly was obviously not a problem for him. Funny thing is that he has recently sold the house he was living in down the road and I'm now watching them throw out much the same kind of stuff I did. I almost went up to commiserate and empathize with them!
ReplyDeleteHah! In our last house the old owner still owned the rental house next to ours. He made similar comments to those of Alfonse when we ripped out the nasty a*@ bushes in front of and on the side of the house. "When I buy a house, those are the first things I put in!" I wanted flowers and grass, so :P to him. Thankfully he sold that house before too long, too.
ReplyDeleteHe he he! I love this post! And the idea of "tenant yellow"! We once lived in a rental house that had a "tenant pink" feature wall, in the middle of a "tenant lilac" room. Hideous! Oh, I feel for you!
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