Rather like buying an old house

Alternative title #1: How I spent my Saturday

Alternative title #2: NZ truly is all fun and games

Before


After


I know, not much of an improvement, but this was all I had to work with:


Three boxes of trash/clippings from the house we moved into 4 days ago. Attention landlord: if an unkempt house is returned to you when we move out, rest assured that it was in better shape than when we moved in.



In other news: One of my coworkers was kind enough to give us us a little wood. We have two wood burning stoves, and really have no idea how we go about buying wood...or how much wood we should buy...or how much we should pay for it. Nicole says this will not last the winter, but hopefully it will tide us over until we figure out where to buy more from. Also, we were invited in for coffee and Tim Tams...which are probably the NZ equivalent of Oreos.



In still other news: Those of you who are longtime readers of this blog may know that I do not care for assembling barbecues. Each barbecue I have purchased (or been suckered into assembling for someone else) over the last 10 years has been more difficult than the last, and this one was not an exception. There are all kinds of Kiwi-isms in the instructions that I do not understand, like: "Lay on the flat". Anyway, the 15 minute job only took 3 hours. [I could now do another one in 15 minutes if I had an exact duplicate...]