Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Then finally

Finally, we were in. We opened the back door and walked into our new house. It smelt dreadful, of napthalene flakes and general dankness.

The house was quite dark inside, and it still is. We flicked on some lights and went into a tailspin. Where to start?

It was getting late in the day so we poked around through our new things. The first thing we found, literally the very first, was a pair of Mikimoto pearls in the draw of a dresser.

This was a tremendous coincidence because it had been my birthday a week before, and I had considered asking my husband for some Mikimoto pearls, but I decided it was too extravagant.

We returned to the house the next day and started the process of cleaning out. We had invited quite a few people to drop by and have a look. I felt protective of all of our still undiscovered treasures. I wanted to unearth them all ourselves, and relish every moment.

It soon became apparent that it would take up weeks to clean the house out ourselves. Every room was so jam packed, it took hours just to clean out a single chest of drawers. The 'stuff' was dense.

One by one our visitors dropped by. One by one they settled into a corner of the house, and got lost piecing together the lives of the family who had once lived here.

It was a great day, we all stopped occasionally for some chicken sandwiches and champagne, then later in the day, takeaway pizza, paid for with some money found under a pile of papers on the lounge room floor.

My mother and sisters cleaned the kitchen. Our friend from across the road cleaned our bathroom, although he had to fight one of my sisters off for that job - weird!

And so we begin, sifting and sorting. I'll show you some of the things we found in future blogs.
This is an example of what we found. Beautiful old cupboards, but absolutely jammed with decades of household debris.

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