The Turnaround Treasure Shop Read Online Free PDF Page B

wondered. It seemed too much to his way of thinking. She worked an eight-hour day at Kookaburra’s five days a week then spent two afternoons of those days cleaning for the town’s good.
    â€˜Good thing you found me, Nick,’ Janie-Louise said. ‘I’d have been seriously late if I’d had to walk home. Mum would have been frantic.’
    â€˜Well, we don’t want your mum worried, do we?’ He turned the ute back into Main Street and headed south out of town. ‘We’ll have you home in five minutes.’
    Nick found a worried kink in the muscles at the back of his neck. Looked like he was going to get a second look at Lily this Sunday. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. It broke his routine, which was fine. He wasn’t so sure how it sat with him emotionally.

Chapter 3
    Lily licked her thumb and wiped the small trail of glue from the edge of the rosebud wallpaper she’d used to line the drawer of a washstand. She’d sanded off the original ugly varnish and given it a coat of bluebell-coloured paint, using fine steel wool to sand that back until parts of the wood grain were visible. Now all that was needed was to fix the metal drawer handle back in place. She’d aged the handle by soaking it in a solution of vinegar and salt until it turned a bluey-aqua colour.
    She stood back and admired her perfectly distressed work then checked her watch. Five thirty. Time to get dinner on the go. Sunday night; pizza night. Lily made the dough and the kids chopped up the toppings, according to wants, needs and what was available in the pantry.
    She opened the bi-fold shutters from her workshop — the back lounge room — and walked into the open plan kitchen-dining room. ‘Open plan’ was a term suggesting that Lily lived in a modern brick and tile house when, in fact, she lived in the old weatherboard and metal-roofed house she’d grown up in. The open plan area came about when Lily, her mother and the children had decided they needed more space and had taken an axe to the dividing wall. The house was lavish all the same, to Lily’s mind. Especially with the re-decorating she and the children had done over the last few years, gathering junk and buying second-hand paint from neighbours who’d over-ordered or were throwing out, and giving their house a brand-new lease of life.
    That’s how her hobby had started, along with her boundless enthusiasm for everything out-dated and considered useless. She’d managed to pick up lots of interesting tools for her lounge room workshop from what had been her father’s shed, now old and rickety. It also held numerous pieces of furniture her parents had discarded, stacked and stored over the last 30 years. In case they might be needed again.
    Nothing went to waste in the Johnson household.
    With lessons from Dan and Ethan Granger, Lily had discovered the art of ripping old furniture apart and piecing it back together with care. Not always as it had begun life. A wooden bed-head with knobs could be turned into a garden bench if it was put together with a slatted coffee table. She’d learned the art of distressing, waxing, ageing and sanding. She was damned good at it too, if she did say so herself.
    Her teachers had smiled indulgently at her use of floral wallpaper, decoupage and candle wax to distress her household pieces but nothing deterred Lily from her quest, not even the cynical raised eyebrows of the two males.
    Lily checked her watch again. The kids should be home by now. Andy was probably lurking around the agricultural museum at the back of the Town Hall, checking out the pioneer machinery and how it worked — but where was Janie-Louise?
    She looked out the kitchen window when she heard the sound of a vehicle coming up the rough-hewn hill of the driveway through the back paddock.
    In a split second she took in two things. Nick Barton’s ute and Janie-Louise’s bicycle in the