These lilies are tigers

Most of our friends like to travel and eat at nice restaurants. Gorgeous George and I renovate crappy old houses. I don't think we ever set out to do that and it certainly has never been an investment strategy. It just sort of happened because every time we manage to make our latest renovator's delight a pleasant place to live, we make a life decision that means we need to move on. Our latest home is a case in point. A 1920s worker's cottage, it was completely unrenovated when we moved in. When we first saw it six years ago, I fell instantly and passionately in love. Gorgeous George could feel the next 10 years of his life slipping away in a haze of electrical and plumbing disasters requiring costly intervention by a veritable hoard of tradesmen. He was right.
It was tiny, higgledy piggledy, and within a few months of moving in, the back stairs started to fall off. The garden was a classic overgrown nanna garden and I fell instantly in love.
Then GG and I took to the garden with a chainsaw because we couldn't actually move through a jungle of enormous overgrown azaleas and crepe myrtles - there were at least 20 large ones. Then we started building an extension and knocked half the house off, including the pantry in the kitchen, meaning what little space I had was draped in jars of pickles and cans of beans. Then the Boho Babe moved back home with her two cats, meaning we suddenly had four cats and a dog all living in a teeny tiny timber cottage with a bathroom you could only get through by walking along a timber plank. She spent six months sleeping on a mattress on the floor of the "spare" room which also housed our home office and the only wardrobe shared by three adults. The Geek had more sense and lived in a very nice share house in Lane Cove with all mod cons.
And then it rained ... and rained ... and rained. I spent all my spare time mopping up the mud than ran merrily under the boarded up space where the back door had been. The dog was permanently mud brown and the cats were even more bad tempered than usual.
But anyways, the extension has been finished, the roof has been fixed, the Babe has moved out with ONE of her cats - and that is another story - and the garden is coming along nicely. And one thing from the original garden I kept are the tiger lilies. Every year they come out, all glowing orange and covered in velvety brown spots, and every year I dance a little jig even as I manage to cover myself in chocolate brown pollen. There is just something about an orange lily that makes every day a good one, even if you live in a teeny tiny worker's cottage that has seen better days.