There’s an electrician crawling around in my ceiling today. As he came down out of the cavity, he mentioned how ‘clean’ it was up there. I beamed because, yes, I am rather anal about being tidy in that ’50s housewifely sort of way.  Then he told me horror stories about “all kinds of gross stuff” he’s come into contact with while re-wiring inside roof cavities. For him, the rodents have been the worst, the most disgusting, the most horrifying.

For me?

Well, two weeks ago I had to crawl under my house to fetch a stack of spare of roof tiles we’d stashed in case of a roof tile failure. Thanks to having the gutters on the house replaced we wound up having a roof tile failure, which is why I was under the house with the rat bait, the dirt…the spiders.

I can do vermin. Honest. I can pick up a dead rat or mouse, say a little prayer for the little animal’s soul, and dispose of them. Of course, there was the one time, when the experience from my real life made it’s way into A Basic Renovation, and it was my darling husband who had to perform the duty of, shall we say, ‘taking care of’ the thrashing, still very much alive rat that was caught in a trap under the stove. However, ordinarily, I slip on a plastic glove, grab a plastic bag and away we go. I wish I could say I have the same level of balls when it come to things with eight legs.

Two weeks ago, when I was under the house, I discovered my propery was free of vermin (which probably had something to do with the bait), yet my abode was not free of those things that build webs at head height, crawling on my knee height, shoulder height, face height.  Or the kind of spider that roams and leaps upon unsuspecting idiots who venture under the house to fetch spare roof tiles. This is Australia, people.

Kids, the spiders here are:

a) Deadly

b) Huge

c) Fast

d) Like something out of a nightmare mixed with a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon Know that Gary Larson Far Side cartoon, the one where the two spiders build a web across the bottom of a slide (or Slippery-slide, as they’re known here) on a playground? The one that says “If We pull this off, we’ll eat like kings!” It’s webs like that you come across in the Land Down Under, only bigger, and they seem even more gigantic when you’re under the house, foraging for spare roof tiles. And they result in you doing the on-your-knees-on-your-belly-flop-I-have-a-spider-on-me dance.

That about sums up what my experience under the house was like. And that photo up there? Out of respect for my friend Swell, that’s as much as I am going to show you of the horror that dwells beneath my house.