Feeling like the Mad Hatter

It was a very busy time and throughout my stay in Melbourne I could see that time was running out. Time just seemed to evaporate. So much to do, so little time.

We bought some ferns to cover a hole in the driveway. There is a wood burning stove in the house. These things can set a nice mood on a cold evening, but wood fires are messy, and the firewood needs to be carried by hand. Woodstoves are hard work, and I won’t miss it. Anyway, the driveway is bitumen, and a firewood delivery truck had one of its wheels put a depression in a corner of the drive that gradually turned into a pothole. Filling it with concrete would have been a solution, or calling in some bitumen repair company would be another solution. An easy alternative solution, since this was in a corner of the driveway that doesn’t get driven over, was to fill the hole with soil and a few plants. Half a dozen ferns of different sizes and shapes from the local nursery transformed an eyesore into a pretty highlight of the garden. Another way of considering what we did was that we didn’t repair the drive, but we did a cover up job, which irks me. But it did look good. So, I’m not feeling so bad.

I must reinforce some advice I’ve mentioned earlier: before moving house, get yourself fit. Make yourself nice and strong. You are going to need those muscles. Spend some time in the gym or do some home exercises to build up your strength in the months beforehand. The following exemplifies how unfit we were.

We shifted a desk from the house into the garage. This was a large desk that I grabbed when one of the places I worked about eight years earlier was doing a clean out. It was going to be dumped. It wasn’t a brilliant looking desk but was very large and functional. It dominated the room and made it look small, but it was a great surface to work. Getting rid of it and putting a smaller desk in its place helped make the room look spacious. Spaciousness is good for the punters.

Anyway, I can remember carrying this desk into the house. It was heavy, but we did it. The two of us, one on each end carried it through the garage, popped it on its side, and up the narrow garage stairs and into the house. The desk was so big it wouldn’t fit through the hallway and into the study. We had to remove the study window glass and lift it through the window.

So, here we are, eight years later, wanting to take this desk out the window and down the stairs and into the garage. That was the plan. You’d think it would be easy, and it might have been for other people; we were going down hill, after all. But we could barley lift it over the window sill. Getting it out the window seemed positively dangerous with it threatening to crush us.

It would have been best to lift it clear of the ground and carry it down the garage steps to prevent it from becoming damaged (just like we did in bringing it up the stairs all those years ago). Concrete steps can be very rough on polished wood. We had no energy, and it got dragged and bumped down those concrete steps. Why was it so heavy, this time? Where had all our muscles gone? It was a surprisingly shocking experience.

We cleaned and painted the decking out the front of the house. The job took a whole day from start to finish, but it looked so good in the end that we didn’t re-clutter it by putting our pot plants back. It was a huge area, all under a covered veranda. With the decking left clear like this, it seemed such a huge expanse. Doing jobs like this and seeing the end result so quickly made me feel like reconsidering selling. The interesting thing here is that I thought the task would have taken a few hours, but no, the whole day was gone.

The bedroom and ensuite and toilet got painted. I was standing on the bed painting the bedroom ceiling. S got tipsy that day, and I became distracted with her lying on the bed and tickling me. So many distractions.

If you are planning to do some work prior to selling, make a reasonable estimate of the time things might take, then double it. You need to rest at times, problems occur, and you get side tracked. No, quadruple the time estimate.