Friday 13 January 2023
Our first visitor, Carla, was due to arrive (plan A) tonight or (plan B) early tomorrow morning. The current thinking is (plan C) that she’ll postpone her visit as the weather forecast incorporates snow and we don’t think it would be at all enjoyable driving the last twenty miles to the house on largely single-track roads, in the dark, on your own, never having been here and with no phone signal. There are far fewer visit-postponement reasons when you live in London, though with rail strikes and reduced timetables and cancellations, the train service isn’t anywhere near as viable as it used to be. I feel really sad, we were both genuinely excited about seeing her and also having our first guest. However, I am going to hold on to the hope she might be able to come to keep me motivated to finish off some bits of tidying/cleaning/de-flat-packing.
Yesterday, I had a great Zoom chat with a friend, which incorporated talking about some collaborative writing projects, I took in two deliveries (fourth time lucky for the DPD delivery we’d been expecting since Monday), did some writing and other desk work and by late afternoon I was on a roll. I put up the IKEA curtain poles and curtains, with help from Chris. I had a headache and drilling into the ceiling and trying to fix six Rawlplugs, six screws, curtain pole bits and bobs and then the [many expletives] curtain fixtures was not the best activity to be adamant would be done that night. Very. Tense. I am not at all convinced, for more reasons than I care to dwell on, they will stay up and have accordingly moved all breakable objects from beneath the curtain poles. But, we have one set of curtains up. I’m choosing to overlook the fact there’s about two-foot of excess curtain piled up on the floor, but other than that, the change to the room is enormous and I keep going into the study/spare bedroom to admire them and the overall effect on the room.
The DIY-type activities didn’t end there. We made an IKEA office chair (a lot easier than expected) and a two-cube unit that I’d intended for LPs and CD cases but which I realised was not sturdy enough to form part of a unit with another IKEA ‘TV bench’. The TV bench would not have withstood the cube unit on top, with a heavy amp and half full of LPs. Chris has now taken my LP storage unit as his underwear shelves. We still have no wardrobe or chest of drawers. Well, we did buy a chest of drawers but that has ended up in the hallway (genius; full of reusable bags, summer shoes and useful outdoorsy things).
At bedtime, for logic I didn’t want to challenge, because when I’m in the mood to clean, nothing gets in my way, I cleared everything from the bathroom floor and units and started cleaning. At some point today, I will restore the bathroom to being a fully functioning bathroom but with some order rather than stuff just piled up here and there, as it has been for the past – well, since we moved in. I finished that up by having a shower (to wash away trace of my cleaning and to clean myself) at around 11pm.
Chris went out to the shops and was out when our colourful Indian rug arrived. I swept the floor in the small living room offshoot and put the rug down. It was unbelievably good to see some colour amidst the shades of brown. A couple of hours later, the large metal cage-locker and old Indian bed (charpai/charpoy) and its futon-like mattress arrived. I am so pleased with them. The charpai is now on the Indian rug. The cage’s use has changed slightly. My plan was to make/have made some basic plywood shelves so we could keep shoes in it. Chris has hung scarves in one of his two sections and I have followed suit. Not sure what to do about shoes though as they’re the problem the locker was supposed to sort. As that’s now in situ, we have a proper jute rug in the hallway rather than sheets of cardboard. Unsurprisingly, the hallway now looks pretty much like a hallway that isn’t just a dumping ground of stuff and shoes – ah, yes, do need still need to address the shoes issue, sigh.
Today, I’d like to get the house looking presentable just in case we have our weekend guest and because it’d be nice for us to not have stuff lying around waiting to be dealt with. I also need to spend a good few hours at my desk, on my new desk chair.