...but I'm not laughing!

We’ve been hard at work (seemingly never ending) trying to clear this house of our predecessor’s rubbish yet again today. Two more trips to the dump, carting noxious chemicals to kill all sorts of different things. Rats, ants, slugs, weeds, fungus, flies and aphids have all met nasty, toxic deaths at the hands of the person who we bought this house from.

I’m not confident we’ll ever emerge from under this heap of unwanted stuff – these two car-loads are numbers seven and eight……and we are nowhere near through. What makes us most angry is that there was a clause in the contract stating that all rubbish had to be moved by her before we moved in and she had agreed to do so. It’s not just the fact that we’re carting it all away, it’s the time it’s taking. Today has been totally consumed by the effort.

DM has decided to go on a mission to get her to pay us for clearing her stuff. I’ve lost the will to fight any more, having failed spectacularly to win any of my recent tussles.

The trouble is, we can’t start to use the house and garden comfortably until we’ve got rid of it all because much of it is in the places that we were most looking forward to using – today’s epic has been to clear the greenhouse so I can start planting my tomato and chilli seeds for the summer. Last week, we spent a day and another two journeys to the dump clearing the rooms we are to use for our workspace.

This pot is one of several dozen that were just abandoned in the dirt…..I kept the clay ones and ditched the plastic and I reckon that for a day’s hard slog, my ‘pay’ has been a couple of dozen chipped and tatty clay pots.

My hands are numb from the effort and I am coated in nasty muck so I am off for a bath in a few moments but I thought I’d write my account of the day before doing so.

Still, David’s patience has revealed one good thing – a working shower. I had abandoned it as broken because I’d put on the isolator switch and turned the dial but failed to get it going. He was more resilient and instead of giving up on a full 360º rotation of the dial, he rotated it three full circles and found that it worked!!! I would never have thought to go that far so after climbing out of a nice, hot shower this morning for the first time since moving, I was deeply grateful for his persistence!

It was COLD last year in Madrid!