The house is represented as run down and shabby. Which words are used by Lawson to create this impression?

From the text:

The two-roomed house is built of round timber, slabs, and stringy-bark, and floored with split slabs.

She will not take them into the house, for she knows the snake is there, and may at any moment come up through a crack in the rough slab floor; so she carries several armfuls of firewood into the kitchen, and then takes the children there. The kitchen has no floor - or, rather, an earthen one - called a "ground floor" in this part of the bush.