Hooray! It’s the weekend! The working week is over, so now I can finally… have my weekend sucked up by some boring house-related stuff. Sigh. The way I should be viewing this is that if it’s done now, then it doesn’t have to be done later, but I remember all the weekends we lost when we were painting and sanding and cleaning, and it’s more than a little depressing. Most of it is unavoidable, though, due either to damage caused by the previous tenants, or improvements that really need to be made before someone else moves in. Tenants suck. If you’re a tenant and you don’t suck, then good on you. And would you like to rent our house?

After going to bed at 2:30 this morning, and getting up at 11, productivity levels for today weren’t going to be at a maximum. Nevertheless, we bought the necessary items, had lunch in a nearby cafe and finally started work at 2:00. This didn’t give us much time, given that the sun sets at around 5:30, but it was still enough to get some things out of the way.

The first job was to replace a broken tap in the bathroom. Since we couldn’t get hold of exactly the same type (and it was too expensive to replace for a tenant anyway), we bought a new tap set (click the images for larger version).

Replacing taps

New taps

The most daunting job, but the one that will yield the most benefit, is one of the bedrooms. It’s the one room in the house you really don’t want people to look in because unfortunately it lets the house down, and could possibly be a deal breaker. But no more! We’re going to patch it and paint it and put in some carpet and I think that at the end it’s going to look great. It would be nice to have the floors polished like most of the rest of the house, but I don’t think the condition of them is good enough for that, hence the carpet. M patched the wall today, and we’ll do the painting tomorrow. You can see from the photos what condition the room is in, but that is all about to change.

Bedroom before

Bedroom patched

We’re painting it the same colour we did the lounge room:

Lounge room

When I was there on Tuesday, a ginger cat came to say hello, and he visited us again today. The poor thing seemed starved for attention (and food - he wolfed down the little biscuits I gave him), and I felt bad for leaving him there. I’m assuming he lives nearby and wasn’t actually abandoned by the tenants; I like to think he has a home to go to. He wouldn’t stay still long enough for me to get a decent photo, but here are a couple.

Ginger cat

Ginger cat