Give me shelter

This is Beverley. We got her cheap in the local paper, due to a severe bout of leaky windows and teenage angst graffiti that had left her insides looking a little more than undesirable (see below left). "There's nothing a lick of paint and a dash of windex can't do," thought we, naively as we approached Beverley's insides with scrubbing brushes in rubber gloved hands. Six days, three tins of paint and four metres of vinyl flooring later we were licking our wounds and vowing NEVER again to entertain the fantasy of renovating anything - not even a goat shed - for it seems renovation often means just as much work as starting from scratch.

But with a few days distance and a candle-lit evening spent inside Beverley's freshly painted, water-proofed and cosy interior we're feeling the rewards of our pains. We've even given in and strung up a line of twee-as bunting in celebration (see below). 

Beverley 2.0

And it did feel a little bit celebratory as we worked, despite the effort, as each brushstroke obliterated the hate-speech and scrawlings of male genitalia that had been grafittied across poor Bev's fake-wood laminex interior. As each scraping of revolting 70s lino was peeled away, centimetre by centimetre. As each leaky bump and dent was patched and plastered. As we grew to love this hulking old dame we now call shelter.

We've still got quite a ways to go before Bev will be finished (she's still on candle-power, there's nowhere to sit, and her exterior still needs seeing to), but she's habitable for the moment, and somewhere on the way to being a place we *might* just call home.

That is, if we were really, really desperate.