The house had been constructed in several goes over a decade or two (three?), and lived in for some time. It needed not just cleaning, sprucing up and repainting, but had some serious leaks. The damage needed repair, the leaks fixing, and the garden kept maintained.  We would both take a day off work to make a long weekend. After a day working I would usually prepare dinner - salad or cooked - from our supplies and we could eat at the table behind open (fly-screened) balcony doors or down in the kitchen which also looked out on the trees and lake. If mosquitoes weren’t bad, we could sit outside on the balcony with a cordial or juide, sometimes with music on the radio or just talking and being together. Undetected as yet, by the Christmas/New Year break my cancer was making me tired and weak.

The screened doors & windows were kept open as much as possible, not just to keep the house as fresh as possible, as it was shut up between visits, but to help dry & flush out the new paint & lacquer & waterproofing stuff. I spent some little time painting fair-sized samples of all the cans of marked-down paint that Chris had bought over some months and we put them around different rooms to decide what to paint where. Chris had worked out a colour scheme but in this photo we are still at undercoat stage.