From luxury to rat poo

Thursday night I checked out of my fancy hotel and did the red-eye back to Australia, and back to grim reality. Although it was very nice to see everyone again - I picked the boys up from the local shops after school as usual and had the compulsory Friday ice-cream. It was the last day of term so everyone was a bit tired, but both the boys really enjoyed their school camps earlier in the week. Lots of mud.

So grim reality didn't really kick in until Saturday, when we turned out the shed. It's not really a shed - it's a walled-in area underneath the garage, which is higher than the house. Fantastic storage, but it had become absolutely infested with rats. And it wasn't until we had got everything out of the shed that we realised quite how disgusting it was ... drifts of rat poo and nests. They had eaten through almost everything paper or cardboard that we had in there, so all those boxes had to be cleaned out.



Luckily my Dad is staying and he is a machine with this kind of thing (and a wonderful motivator when my husband and I would just have given up) so we got it all cleaned up and even threw masses of things away. If any relatives are reading this they will be chortling; apparently my Dad's garage is a complete disaster zone because he NEVER throws anything out ... he says it is much easier to toss other people's stuff than your own. He could be right.



This is really an "after" shot. Before was too horrible to contemplate. I have bought lots of rat-proof plastic tubs and we will transfer all the papers to them (hopefully with at least half being chucked, but no promises) then re-store in a more organised fashion. And we've put down a lot of poison. No wonder the neighbourhood has had a brown snake explosion, we've been feeding them from our shed.