neat is my favourite colour

Yes, I am still here. Things have been happening. Wild excitement. Fabulous developments.

Okay, not really. Just the usual. Just life going on. Just the moon getting all fat and then getting all thin and then disappearing altogether and then coming back again once or twice and meanwhile I’ve achieved very little in the way of writing or blogging.

On the plus side I went on a holiday with Beloved, the kids are well and more stuff has gone on around the house. Although we went away for the first week of our break, the second week was pretty much devoted to Doing Stuff At Home. A lot of this did consist of sleeping in, yelling at cats and taking trips to Bunnings that started at around lunchtime and didn’t finish until after dark, but that’s another blog. This one is to be about what we have achieved over the past week, and a little about what we haven’t.

Okay, so I’ll start with the bad news. I really did think I was going to get painting done. Lots and lots of lovely paint slapped all over the walls and making them look fabby. I’ll get it over with: not one drop of paint was spilled, looked at, applied or in any way sloshed about in this house last week. The lids remained firmly on the cans as plaster refused to dry, or, worse still, fabulously and even brilliantly-applied plaster had to be scraped off the wall in order to get at errant electricity, and then re-applied, and then scraped off again as devoted but not very experienced plasterer had forgotten to put the tape stuff on first.

About half a tub of plaster bog was applied to the walls of what was once Radio Boy’s bedroom and will someday be the library, as RB’s method of hanging an A4 poster was to grab a 4″ nail and bash it into the wall. Yep, nice, solid bit of poster-hanging there. Maybe put another nail in, just to make sure. I’m not even going to mention the 2cm holes drilled into random spots up near the ceiling so that he could hang up speakers. Nope. Not saying a word about that.

But we did make stuff happen (and by “we” I mean Beloved).

This is just to catch you up to the state of the pantry. No lining, lighting only by way of a couple of lights stuck in the wall cavity, light switch and power point likewise just sort of hanging there. What you can’t see in this picture (but believe me, it was there) was the two black plastic garbage bags which have been taped to the back of the louvre door on account of it’s pretty draughty having a room with no lining. Draughty and dusty. And messy. Look at all those untidy wires. Kind of weird, isn’t it, all those wires all over the place in a simple thing like a house.

The laundry, though I haven’t included any pictures in this blog, was in a similar condition from the middle up. It had no ceiling, just the floor joists for the loft and the loft’s floor above them. Its light was stuck on the wall where it had been for months, and it meant that when you stood at the laundry trough you were completely in your own light. The pantry has looked pretty much like this for about a year now, but last week was our week to make a difference, and Beloved rolled up his sleeves and took it on.

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Now there are some people who say that they love a man (or woman) in uniform, but for me, it’s the guy who knows his way around a shed full of tools. Is this one of those situations where they say that all girls fall in love with some aspect of their dads? I don’t know (my dad was a carpenter). But I do love it when Beloved dons the proverbial tool belt and gets out his tape measure. You have no idea how much I love it when he gets out that tape measure, mainly because it’s a minor miracle when he can find the bloody thing. Many’s the day that has begun with the phrase ‘Have you seen my tape measure?’ and fallen into a complete shambles not long afterwards. What really sucks about this is that Beloved has at least three of them.

During a fact-finding* mission to Aldi last week (*that’s not true. We actually went there to get a new kitchen toy.) I came across a package containing TWO (count ‘em) tape measures. As you do in Aldi. I love that place. ‘Hey love, nick down the shops and pick up some bread and milk and a couple of tape measures and colouring books and a 42″ TV and a USB drive and a compressor and some A4 paper for the printer and a printer and some motorbike boots, please.’ All there in Aldi. Plus chocolate. Anyway, I’ve kept the smaller tape measure for my kitchen drawer (now also featuring Allen keys, a box cutter and a multi-tool with pliers as well as bottle-openers, nut crackers etc) and set the other one free to roam about the house with the rest of the tape measure pack. I’m hoping they breed up enough so that at any given moment Beloved will never be further than an arm’s reach from a helpful tape measure.

You may have noticed the empty condition of the pantry as Beloved works in it. The sad fact is, it’s very hard to wrangle plasterboard when there are boxes and plastic stacking thingies in the way, so this is what had to happen. It was like the kitchen of old, looking at all that clutter over my nice, empty bench. I shudder now, just looking at this photo with its mess everywhere (and yes, that’s my computer sitting on the table, why, one might ask, is it not in its correct position in the study? Because laptops are migratory).

I was torn here, between the mess and the fact that work was being done in the pantry. In the end I just wore a completely painty and plastery track suit for the whole week as a form of camoflague and I sucked it up, buttercup, because sometime the needs of the pantry outweigh the needs of the tidy kitchen. Cooking was a challenge and all of the cats spent their time trying to get into their food box, but we lived through it, and someday we will sit around the campfire with our grandchildren and tell the tale of how exciting it all was, living in this mess.

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Now to get you up to speed with what’s happened. Yeah, that’s the same room. There it is, all plastered up. Okay, still not finished, there’s no archetrave and we haven’t patched up the cracks and (in this photo) the lights aren’t in,  and there’s no paint at all (but I warned you about that) but it’s plastered. There are no big spidery gaps and you can’t see al lthe dust and cobwebs and I’ve even ripped those two big black bags off the back of the door.

It took Beloved the best part of a day to wire the lights in, but they are fabulous. There are 6 in all, 3 above where the sink will go, the one you can see in the foreground, and two more behind where I was standing to take the photo. They are only 11 watts each, and I’ll probably drop that down to 9, because they give a tonne of light.

You can see the tap fittings just next to the broom on the wall’s end. Beloved is going to make a box to fit on the timber just below them and we’ll put the sink in there. There are going to be LOTS of shelves, nice wide wooden ones for storing jars full of stuff, and all of my plastic boxes have been moved back in because even though it isn’t finished, we deserve a couple of weeks of tidyness (and rest) after our hard-working holiday.

So the kitchen is neat again and the laundry is lined as well, with the light now overhead, so you can see what you’re doing in there, and with the shelves I’d always planned to live in the laundry now doing what they should. It’s wonderful. Unpainted and in need of a bit of plastering and probably a bit of tiling as well, but looking wonderful. (The tiles in there at the moment are the same as the ones that were in the old kitchen, and, like those tiles, have now begun to fall off the wall.)

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So here is my hero, just having driven home the last nail. I helped a little, I mean, there was no way he could have got that ceiling plaster up without me on the step-ladder, standing on my tippy-toes, holding that plasterboard in place with my aching arms and my head. What can I say? It’s a skill. Not as much of a skill as measuring stuff though, or cutting and handling that drill like a pro, or knowing exactly how much of the blue goopy stuff you need to put on the wood to help stick the plasterboard in place. Beloved is my hero, even if he does lose his tape measure all the time and expect things to work properly just by swearing at them. Who knows, perhaps he’s right and we just need to employ these magic words with a bit more gusto in order to make them effective.

Maybe that’s the true skill of blokiness that I’m missing out on.

In other news, Radio Boy is doing well and Poss and BF are happy in their new home. Miss Puss went to live with Poss for a little while, but she’s come home now. She’s very much an outside cat and wasn’t allowed out of the flat. I am thinking about what sort of kitten I can get for Poss that she and BF will be happy with. Everybody needs a cat and I know how much Poss is missing Miss Puss.

I’ve actually spent a bit of time working on my novel, and although I won’t get much time this week to do more, at least my brain is getting into the right place, and that’s a start. I know that the words are all in there, falling over each other and trying to get out, I just have to make a nest for them to live in.

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Oh, and one more bit of kitchen awesomeness:

This was my Mothers’ Day present. It’s a red one, so of course you know it goes faster. I’d kind of been wanting a new mixer for a while now. My old Kenwood just wasn’t cutting it any more and I’d seen these about and rather fallen in love with them. I know they are on the trendo side, I mean is there any self-respecting TV chef who doesn’t have one of these somewhere in the background of the set? Even if all they’re making is cheese on toast, you’ll see the KitchenAid there on the bench. They look great, they’re well made and darling they come in such FABULOUS colours.

I had saved up my pocket money and paid for half of the mixer. Now I’m going to have to save up more pocket money and get some of the fabby attachments. I mean, what’s the point of having one of these unless you also have the pasta maker, vegie slicer, grain mill, ice cream maker and mincing attachment to go with??? I’m just wondering where to start. Pasta maker, I think. Beloved and I have an old, broken pasta maker and I do like to make my own. It’s fun and it’s just so much nicer than what you can buy. Besides, it’s winter so we don’t need the ice cream maker just yet. I think I’ll ask Father Christmas for that )

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