Spring clean!

Well it's the first day of spring (not according to the weather) and I've been inspired to get rid of a lot of my 'rainy day' things (those things you keep in case one day you might just need it) also we've just been down to visit a friend and help her clean out her spare room and seeing the space she freed up made me want to come home and attack all of my piles. Don't get me wrong I still love my junk but there is only so much one bus can hold!
I started with the easy stuff like sorting through all my shopping bags and throwing out the ones with holes and rips, then moved on to the toiletries/first aid/anything that doesn't have another home box. This was a bit more painful as some of my rainy day things were quite expensive to buy such as cosmetics (which incidentally I last wore for my sisters wedding 3yrs ago) and natural health products and throwing them out even though they were out of date felt terribly wasteful. I needed a bit of a push to make that decision and luckily Black Velvet came to the rescue with all the reasons I shouldn't keep them haha.
Next I tackled the kitchen bench which had become unusable as a bench because of all the stuff stored on there. I'd bought a new food processor just before we went away and I really wanted it and my juicer to have a place they could be used but not be in the way. After deciding to get rid of the coffee machine I had space above the bench to store the dehydrator and yoghurt maker (btw I'm not really an appliance freak most of these lovely machines have been given to me and once I have them I do use them unlike in a lot of kitchens where they sit in a cupboard collecting dust) (note that little bit of a defensive edge creeping in to that justification there, it is a bit of a sore point :s) anyway back to my story, the end result was a tidier kitchen with a lovely bit of bench space that my gigantic chopping board can now fit on.
All in all it was a productive day. Tomorrow I'm going to tackle under the bed!

Ok I have a lot of old photos that I'm not sure what to do with so I'm going to just post them with little blurbs and hopefully the story will piece itself together somehow.

This is the bus (black velvet and his little brother sitting on the stairs) after we got the mechanic from up the road to drive it to the caravan park because neither of us had a bus license yet and frankly we were both a bit wary of driving such a huge old beast.  The caravan park was at Avoca Beach NSW and was the only one that would allow us to stay for more than a week. It was a pretty sketchy place full of single men living in dirty caravans with lake on one side and swamp on the other ( I dont think the ground dried up once in the whole six months we were there) but we were happy! We finally had our own little space that we could do whatever we pleased with. 
The tape above the passenger window was holding a piece of metal on where a window used to be which weve since reinstalled and the plastic bag and tape on the left-hand side is where we removed a window and the rubber to see if we could get replacement rubbers the same or some made up. The answer to both of those was no, so we reinstalled the 50yr old rubber until we came up with an alternate solution ( they are still there)

Rabbit hutch in the foreground. When we moved into the bus our family consisted of two humans, one dog, one cat, one rabbit and a rainbow lorikeet.

The bus after her first paint job. We scraped, sanded and painted her all by hand as the only two power tools we owned were a jig saw and a drill. We spent ages trying to decide what colours to paint her, originally I had wanted a nice shiny red or brown and cream but then  freaked out for some reason and thought green would blend in better when we were parked places we probably shouldnt be. Dont know what I was thinking as if something that big was going to go unnoticed. The colour on the roof was called 'lettuce' which still to this day cracks me up because it reminds me of a joke Jimoen told about a snail eating his letters (corny I know)  can't remember what the bottom colour was called but we used exterior weathershield paint.