Spring fever

The first coat of green goes on...

Well, it seems like every man and his dog is having their house painted this spring – which of course in the southern hemisphere is also the run-up to the Christmas holidays – so we got a bit caught out and hadn’t sorted a painter by the time the tenant moved out on 10/11/10.

Lovely to have our house available on 11/11 but here’s me freaking out thinking that we won’t have it fixed up in time to move in a month later… Anyway, hubby got onto it with his usual flair for internet research and we now have a charismatic American guy on the job. Jim’s a bit of a surf dude with a shock of paint splattered hair and a house painting story to match every tint in the Dulux swatch book…!

Having decided that green would be good for the exterior walls (to blend in with the lush surrounds) we then went through a week of torture trying to decide which green, got a hundred colour cards from Bunnings and a few sample pots – then tried them down at the house and they looked crap. So Jim flung a bit of blue on the wall, added a bit of yellow, then a bit of an old green he had hanging around… and we seemed to be getting somewhere at last.

Of course it’s not just about painting – there’s weatherboards to be fixed, gutters to be cleaned out, doors to be mended or replaced, not to mention several missing door handles and a crappy electric stove. But it’s ours to fix up now, and hubby is already having a ball. He bought a ladder on eBay, a trailer from work and spent a blissful afternoon without me or the kids doing a bit of DIY. He came back grubby and tired but announced, “I’m in love again!”