Photos.

Wales - Part 2

As I mentioned before, what we spent most of our time in Wales on was helping my Dad to fix up his rental house. Most of the work inside was already done when we got there, and I had never been there before, so I can't tell you what it looked like before, but assume it wasn't pretty. This is what it looks like now with new floors, freshly painted walls, new tiles in the kitchen and bathroom, new kitchen cupboards, new windows, and a lot of cleaning.

Living room:


Kitchen:




Bathroom:


Main bedroom:


Back bedroom:


What Dave and I spent our time on was outside. Everything was pretty overgrown.
If you go out the back door from the kitchen, you find yourself in a really nice sunken patio area. When we got there, it looked like this:






Now it looks like this:






The last of the three before and after pictures are facing in opposite directions. Sorry.

If you go up the little steps at the back corner of the patio, you find a bit of lawn with several fruit trees and some bushes and things. I forgot to take a picture before I started hacking things down, so just imagine that all the trees were really overgrown, and you couldn't get right to the back. Here's what it looked like after I cleaned it up:


The lawn area is connected to the front of the house by a pathway that runs up along the side of the patio. On the other side of the pathway are the neighbours:

Also on the other side of the pathway is a stream and a lot of brambles. The brambles were invading a fair bit. The path before we tackled it:




And coming down towards the front:




All cleaned up:








The front of the house wasn't too bad, but the grass had overgrown the path, the driveway, and the little garden in front of the living room window. It went from this:






To this:






I didn't quite get any of those angles the same on the before and after shots.

Finally, out front was the garage, which was full of all sorts of things, like the old kitchen cabinets, spiders, mirrors with snails on them, shelves with snails under them, tools, furniture with snails in it, the remains of various things that had been decomposed with the aid of snails, dirt, and snails.
My before picture is actually after the old kitchen cabinets had been removed and broken up, so work was already started.


After:


All this took Dave and I the better part of three and a half days, which is not bad, considering the state it started in. I found it pretty satisfying to look it over afterwards and see the difference. And we got paid in a place to sleep, pub dinners, and a trip to Chester zoo. Next time, animals!

posted by Sian at 4:45 PM