Yesterday Keith and I and our friend Tom (who does our garden maintenance) set out for Norwich to do a bit of maintenance at Keith's mother's bungalow. It's on the market, so hopefully our work may encourage buyers.
The main effort was with the garden (nine sacks of hedge prunings, dead leaves, dying-off grasses etc) and for good measure I also hoovered the floors inside and wiped down a few surfaces. Mercifully Tom tackled the lawns and hedge - which last is the developer's original planting, and is a densely set mix of privet and cotoneaster, now enthusiastically interwoven. To say that it's resistant would be an understatement - frankly nothing short of a rhinocerous could get through it, and one of the neighbours told us that he'd only been able to remove his with the aid of a mechanical digger!
NB We were clearly not meant to notice how many of the neighbours suddenly found pressing maintenance work of their own at the front of their properties, thus getting themselves a good view of what was going on. Meanwhile Keith went off to visit Dora at her new home, taking the things on her shopping list (all fun stuff to buy, majoring in jam, jelly babies, mango chutney etc).
We picknicked on sandwiches from M&S - it's actually little more expensive than buying the ingredients and saves a whole heap of time - and rewarded ourselves for the day's efforts with an excellent pub dinner at the White Lodge on the road into Attleborough. I felt I'd earned my chips, so to speak, but it's amazing how easy it is to clean a house with no furniture in it, and this surge of housework and gardening maintenance will probably not be translated into a similar effort with our own dez rez...
1 comment:
It is so much easier to clean a house with nothing in it I agree. When we moved we paid a cleaning firm to come in and clean both houses when they were empty - not cheap - but worth it. I was there while they started on my house because the removers hadn't quite finished and they seemed to just whizz through the place. I could have done it myself I suppose but at the time I was working away from home and it was one less thing on my to do list.
Neighbours - yes it's odd how everyone comes out to do things that don't need doing just to have an excuse to be nosy!
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