Spring cleaning and spring renovating

Some photos for you of the hallway and toilet (before and after pics of the bathroom, coming soon):

This is the door to the bathroom, painted silver (it's really shiny IRL, even though it just sort of looks grey in the pics) and with the notice I got years ago in Bath about how much it costs to have a bath (3d including use of two towels and a cake of soap, or 1d if you just want to use the lavatory).

This is the toilet shrine - two Marian icons, a pleniary indulgence covering my Great-Grandmother, Marie Therèse Power and all her family, so we don't have to confess before we die, we're fine as long as we say Jesus, or even just think Jesus. And they say there are things money can't buy. There's also a curly plaster shelf thing, which is for incense, and the mirror was from the local op shop (I think it was $15) - it used to be the door of something. The small things you can see attached to the mirror are tweezers and nail file shaped like a superhero. She has a mask and looks like she eats villians for breakfast.

And the back wall of the toilet is painted red and has a small yelllow antique cupboard on it, used to hold the standard bits and pieces you find in toilets.

This is the top of the corridor, showing my signed Timothy Leary "Timothy Leary in Wonderland - An Exhibition of Blotter Acid Art" poster, with an example of blotter art (presumably sans the acid) underneath it.

This is the new hall light, which PU#2 just changed the globe in, because it wasn't coming out for me, along with my printer's trays, which hold an assortment of small things from political badges to china figurines I had in my room as a child.

Painting by an elephant that my PU#1 bought at an elephant sanctuary in Cambodia (she watched the 'panti painting it, and swears it was enjoying the process) - it's hanging opposite the Tim Leary poster.

Masks from PNG - also bought by PU#1, in the 1970s when she visited - she was going to get rid of them (and the two spears you see in the next shot, and the big bark painting and the bamboo painting in the shot after that) when the PUs moved house recently, so I nabbed them.

The PNG spears - one has a special dead bug in one end that makes it work GOOD. The other doesn't, so is less speccy. There is an empty space that's for the arrow PU#2 got me in the Solomon Islands, if I can find it. I know it's somewhere in the apartment...


The one on the left is African (I think) and the one on the right is on bark and is also from PNG.



This shot is looking up the stairs - the purple is actually more purpley in real life - it looks quite blue in the pics but it's not. It's Porters Paints "Purple Rain".


Shot of the vintage plastic light above the stairs, before the pics etc went up.



And a closer up shot...

And this was the old light fitting in the corridor that has now been replaced by the big silver one. I think the big silver one looks heaps better - I despise oyster lamps as insipid. I am not into inspid decorating. No "think of the resale value - everything neutral" here, thank you very much. If the next owners of the apartment don't like it, they can bloody well paint over it. Not that we're going to be able to afford to move in a zillion years anyway.

This is the magic calendar on the back of the front door - each day, date, and month has a little pocket that you can put things in - tickets for specific dates, cards with vet appointments, that sort of thing. Is v useful for being organised.

So, on to the spring cleaning. With all the painting and decorating going on around here, I have a bit of a new regime happening. Every day I am trying to:
1. get rid of something out of the house
2. clean something
3. plant something
4. put something away
5. fix something.

Today I have got rid of three bags of stuff (including some clothes, some housey stuff, a couple of books and some magazines) to the op shop (stupidly, I forgot to give the PU#2 the really big bag of op shop stuff to take away), plus one bag of plastic bags with holes in them that Hugo has just taken down to the recycle bin at the supermarket.

I handwashed what Sean very kindly calls my "hobo cardigan" (I'm sure you can picture it from that description - it's large, black and kinda daggy), I planted a whole pack of California poppies (I love poppies best of all flowers) and I put away a bunch of Simpsons figurines in my newly-re-hung printer's trays in the hall. I also got the PU#2 to put an energy saving globe in the hall light, because for some reason I couldn't get the old globe out (this counts as fixing something, in my book). So I'm done for today. Yesterday I think I forgot to plant anything, but I did a bunch of throwing stuff out and also the handyman, Peter, was here and so much stuff got hung up/fixed to walls/etc that by the time he left I was exhausted - and I was only showing him where to put things!

If you're very lucky, I might post pics of the bathroom tomorrow...