Tough, Amped, Mentally Prepared

On Friday night, Dan and I went over to Karra to commence two days of hard labour.

We were feeling tough, amped, mentally prepared:

On Saturday, I pulled out the old straw mat flooring while Dan rigged up his new trestles and cleaned out the gutters.

It was pretty messy work.

Next job was to use the hose to clean off the outside of the house. When I hosed off these timber slats, most of the paint just fell straight away. Some of the timber did too. Turns out a Karcher pressure hose held five centimetres from old, rotted timber is not really an even fight.

The timber that was strong enough to survive came up pretty nicely. All these slats will be painted a dark grey-blue.

We had the idea of getting rid of the karravan. It's starting to look pretty shabby, and doesn't really fit in with the fresh, clean look we'll be going for here.

We've spoken with a few of the other locals over the last couple of months and found an islander who was very keen to take it on.

He came round yesterday to investigate, and after a long session with a measuring tape, we realised that there was no way the van is going anywhere in one piece.

Seems like the house was actually built around the karravan. It must have been where the original owners stayed when the house was being built and they just decided to leave it there.

So, we'll have to spruce it up a little and leave it where it is. Or hack into it with a grinder. We haven't really decided yet.

In between jobs, Maisie and I made several trips to the tip, filling the back of the ute each time. We threw out a lot of old timber, flooring, furniture and green waste.

I like driving the ute almost as much as I like riding in the back of it. I think Maisie feels the same way.

Sunday, we started sanding back the exterior. We were both stuffed after Saturday and didn't get as much done as we would have liked...

In fact, this wall is about all we managed before collapsing into deck chairs and breaking open a couple of beers.

So, now we're going to hire someone to go over in the next fortnight and finish the sanding for us, so we can start on the painting when we next have a weekend there.