Spring cleaning

There's a major cultural event happening this weekend in Australia, known as 'The Festival of the Boot', and so this is the perfect chance for me to spring-clean my garden shed with a radio playing in the background. 

(So, "What's the Festival of the Boot?" overseas readers will no doubt enquire. It's football Grand Final weekend here in Oz. In Melbourne on Saturday, it's one code of Football (called AFL) in which Sydney plays a Melbourne club (Hawthorn) to find out the winner of 2012 Supremacy. And for a completely refreshing change of pace, on Sunday, in the other, totally different, culturally 'other' code of Football (called NRL) it's Melbourne against a Sydney club, Canterbury, to decide the 2012 champion.)

While I cannot bring myself to spend much time watching football on TV, I do enjoy listening to it on the radio while I work. And as my shed is a disgrace in need of redemption I have the perfect Saturday afternoon ahead of me.

Here's my tiny little shed (on the right). On the left
is our bigger, original garden shed, which is now part
of Pammy's art studio empire. Such is love...

There was hardly any room to move in my shed, no
tabletop space to do anything... clutter, clutter
and lots more clutter. A complete disgrace!

So, in such a tiny shed, the only way to clean it and
tidy it up is to take almost everything out then get
stuck into cleaning, sorting, throwing out, tut-tutting
and wondering "why in the hell did I keep that?".
Then put 80% of it all back, and throw out the rest.

Though it's hard to tell at first glance, this is how things
look after two solid hours of spring cleaning. There's
shiny brown polished timber tabletop space, and take
my word, there's space to stash more crap here now!
(And yes, one of these days, I will finish painting our
latest batch of gnomes, probably when I retire!)

I've even added major environmental
upgrades to shed comfort levels. I like to
think of this as air-conditioning. Admittedly,
it is just a fan and it does work best with the
door open and a southerly breeze blowing,
but that cheap little fan makes quite a
difference to comfort levels now. As far as
I am concerned, it's an upgrade!

Looking through the window out to the garden, my
aspirational (tin) chooks love the view. Oh how I would
love to have some real chooks here, but at this stage
these are as clucky as I can get here in Amateur Land.

The other major improvement here is
the new artwork. My friend Jolanda
found online this great image of
Superheroes 'Victory' gardening, and I
then found a big enough jpeg of that
image that printed out OK on our printer.
Pammy had a spare frame that was
almost the perfect A3 size. I love it!

This corner of the shed is now my
'pretty' area, with my modest collection
of decorative tins underneath.

I love old-style tins. On the left is a tin of cookies I
bought in Savannah, Georgia, and on the right is a
brand new commemorative 125th Anniversary seed
tin put out by Aussie seed company Yates.

Whenever I see a special biscuit tin at
our local supermarket, I snap it up.
Arnott's is our major biscuit maker.
Neither Pam nor I eat biscuits, but I buy the 
nice tins no matter what's in them!

In this Arnott's tin I keep all the plant 
labels of the major plants growing here, 
plus all the latest annuals/vegies as well.

Finally, after spring-cleaning the shed
I gave the barbecue its major spring
renovation, fired it up to make sure
it all works perfectly, and tonight I'm
kicking off the 2012-13 barbecue
season with a deboned, butterflied
shoulder of lamb.

And stop press: Festival of the Boot, part one, is over, and the Sydney Swans have defeated the Hawthorn Hawks in a thrilling nail-biter which went down to the wire and used every cliche not once, not twice, but a hundred times!

While I didn't get to see the game, thanks to the immortal radio call of HG Nelson and Rampaging Roy Slaven (Aussies will know who I am talking about, a comedy duo who broadcast sport in their own immortal way) I was there living every exciting, groin-straining moment... while I cleaned out my garden shed.