All cleaned out

We've had a skip bin sitting on our driveway all weekend, and we've been filling it with all sorts of junk. I'm astonished that we actually managed to fill 7.5 cubic meters - almost the size of our garage!

It contains:

• heaps of crap that we found under our house (when cleaning it out in preparation for under-floor insulation a coupla years ago) - construction materials mostly
• Old ceramic dinner plates (which I tried to get rid of on Freeview, but shortly after signing up my inbox was so inundated with irrelevant emails that I've never been back to check whether there were any takers)
• A bag of rags ( we produce enough old clothes to use as rags that there's no sense in saving them up)
• the old filing cabinet I put together myself, by hand
• an old glass cabinet passed to me by my mum (and it was secondhand when she got it)
• old pillows, synthetic duvets, wool mattress liner and curtains
• old back packs (including the packs which served me faithfully through two years of OE)
• an old oil column heater (which nearly caused me to fall out of the attic because it was so damned heavy
• lots and lots of weeds
• and my friend's surround sound systems, which I didn't even know we still had (Dave L, I'm really sorry - you were right and I was wrong) and which is still up the attic because the box is massive and massively heavy.

It was rather too exciting having to be the one to go up the ladder to get into the attic (the boy couldn't get through the hole because his shoulders are too wide. No, really!) But I did it and that's enough for the next few years.

At times (generally while throwing rubbish into the skip) I felt like Derek Zoolander having a go at being a coal miner (with less posturing).

Now I'm resting, fully fed by the boy's home-baked pork spare ribs and a very large slice of framboise, with a big box of tissues because my sinuses are going absolutely CRAZY.