The Farm - The Truth Revealed

You do know that The Farm really isn't a farm, don't you?

It's two big, old-fashioned house blocks side by side in the middle of retired farmers and wheatfields.
On one block is a ramshackle old cottage.
On the other is our ramshackle but not-so-old pug-wall-and-cinder house with it's little 1950s and 1970s additions.

When we bought it we knew the floors were going and the plumbing was dodgy and the electrics were 'modified' - but we were buoyed by the knowledge that the yards were huge, the trees were big and it was a real little stone farmhouse.

All our parents - mine and The Man's - were just horrified by the amount of work we had to do just to make it, well, if not liveable (because, let's face it - that's not a hard requirement to fulfill - all you really need is running water and a solid roof and you're one-up on most of Rwanda's residents) at least visitable without huge embarassment.
We laughed, told them we were young, had years ahead of us to get the work done.

I feel so old right now.
And frankly, when you're as old as I feel, you really need to not be shovelling the plaster from your newly-revealed stone walls off your ugly orange carpet.

That carpet - it's a nightmare!
And, let's face it, it'll be here until the walls, the windows and the bathroom are all done.
The orange and brown carpet came as part of a matching set of 'nostalgia' colours - avocado-green flocked wallpaper in the lounge, orange melamine in the kitchen and brown wood panelling over the top of anything that might, just possibly, have needed painting one day by the former owner.

He ran greyhounds - have I mentioned that?
So our beautiful view of the Southern Flinders Ranges is currently obscured by 30 greyhound kennels made from old redwood sleepers (...won't they be great if we recycle them and plane them up for the kitchen benches? Oh yeah, sure...in the year 2009!) and corrugated iron.
On the bright side - we've got our own rendering house to boil down whole cows and a little yard that, for some reason, is full of old sheep bones.
That - I'd suggest - is taking hoarding just a little too far.

We're currently living in a little corner of our house, chipping away at the rooms we can spare.
We're living in a little corner of our property, because, let's face it, the rest of it is a deathtrap of rusty iron and dog-bones.
Good thing I'm living away one week out of two or we'd just bust out of the place in stir-craziness.

This is what real estate agents refer to as a 'real doer-upperer' with 'lots of potential'.
Next time you're reading the Real Estate adverts, remember...you have been warned.