Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to the tip I go.

Oh joy - my rent inspection is coming up on Monday, the day where my family of four pretends to not be a typical slightly messy family of four and has every single thing in every single room absolutely ship shape and ticketty boo.

Which will last all of the inspection really before my kids resume their duties of distributing any and all toys in every single room of the house...

Still it's a great opportunity to do a bit of a clean up and marvel at the amount of stuff that builds up in the house in the space of roughly four months. And it's yet another reason why I love my Japanese wagon - carries four (five in a pinch) in relative comfort - carries half the house to the tip if need be too.
Still, I didn't think we'd clocked up this much junk since the last inspection..

So off to the local reclycling centre I go with a wagon full of the following:

USED MOTOR OIL

Fresh from the latest home garage oil change (and the one before that) and ready for the big bin of various old oils at the recycling centre. Funnily enough my son (6) spied these bottles in the garage and asked if we could open one up while having dinner that night. Which resulted in a quick lesson in not drinking anything in the shed.

LUGGAGE FROM 1988

Well that's a rough guess of when these bags may have been fashionable. I think the last time they got used for a proper holiday was back in...er...2001 in a trip to Bali. So aside from transport clothes from one house move to another, they really haven't been doing much aside from falling apart and attracting dust under the bed so off to the clothes bin where someone can live in them or pretend they've gone back in time to 1988..

BAGS OF BUSTED TOYS

Broken toys, toy wrappers, games with 95% of the pieces missing, boxes that once held toys, cheap maccas toys with half the pieces missing. And then there's all the food wrappers the kids insisted went into the bin. What they thought they were going to do with them in their room is anyone's guess but we can see the floor now. It's been a while.

ENOUGH CARDBOARD TO CHOKE A BATTLESHIP

Everytime my pile of unwanted cardboard is nearly depleted, something comes along and adds to it. So wedged into the back are the former boxes of the kids desk and half the cardboard from the recliners we bought yonks ago. For some reason I saved that cardboard....not that I actually had a use for it but still..

• the remnents of my wife's craft projects. She likes to sew, she likes to get crafty. The floor likes to get drowned in threads, scrap material and other bits and pieces.

I must admit though that even though it shocked me slightly that we had accumulated so much stuff in only a few months time, it was a VERY theraputic feeling emptying the wagon of it and coming home without a single back in the back.

Well until the next time we do a clean up of this scale of course..