Lazy and Cool

It was a lazy and cool weekend here in Brisbane. For the second weekend in a row, we had guests in at Karra, which ruled out a trip to the island. Instead, Dan and I spent it at home in Brisbane.

There was plenty to do here. Plenty of really fun stuff like cleaning and painting and cooking and shopping.

Yeah, fun stuff indeed.

Dan and his mate Dave concentrated on painting the deck.

I concentrated on the more mundane tasks.

You know, a few years ago, I never would have thought that whole weekends could disappear in a haze of scrubbing and dusting and polishing and cleansing.

No one ever tells you that you can spend years and years studying to get qualifications and a good full-time job with a decent salary, only to spend most of your free-time frantically trying to catch-up on the chores you don't have time to do all week.

'First world problem', I know. I also know that people out there do working full-time thing WITH KIDS - I have no idea how.

Frankly, I take my hat off to them all.

Don't you think it seems strange how little we factor in the time and money it takes to care for our homes and possessions when we think of buying them?

I just never knew that buying nice things just meant you had to work that much harder to look after them.

It never occurred to me that the more I acquired and accumulated and coveted, the more time and money I had to spend on maintenance.

I never knew that just deciding that you want a long-haired dog who comes inside in the evening would mean whole hours could disappear every week just in cleaning up dust and hair and scrubbing muddy foot prints from the floorboards.

Not that it would have prevented me from getting said dog, of course.

The more I have, the more frustrated I get when it breaks or the software needs upgrading or the bulb breaks or I need more batteries and it's 10:30 at night and I have an 8am meeting and I REALLY JUST NEED SOME TRIPLE A BATTERIES RIGHT NOW, DAN.

Basically, I never thought that buying two houses to renovate simultaneously (although slowly) would mean so much work, expense and frustration.

I probably should have guessed.