just another morning here

I maintain that moving house every year or so during the first ten years of our marriage did wonders to keep our clutter accumulation tendencies under control; since we’ve lived in one house for the past 5 years (5! how did that happen?!), we’ve held on to a lot more stuff than we would otherwise have done I’m sure!

Anyway, this summer has been a de-cluttering one, in many ways all the worst bits of moving without the shiny new house to be excited about, but never mind! Four out of the five of us have moved bedrooms, and the music room moved as well, so we had a lot of sorting out to do. I didn’t want to take photos of ‘before’, as it’s just embarrassing but suffice to say that both our bedrooms had much too much junk and mess in them!

The first job: sell or otherwise get rid of all furniture that we really didn’t use, need, or that we need to change. This included Misty the lovely rocking horse (handmade by Steve’s grandad, owned by Steve’s parents, on loan to us, really too small for our kids now and takes up a lot of space), our exercise bike (severely underused other than for hanging clothes on), the girls’ high sleepers (they won’t fit in the top room, and the girls want something they can lounge on more easily anyway). Also a couple of old chests of drawers that were car boot sale purchases when we were first married!

Misty has gone back to live with Steve’s parents, that way the cousins will get some use out of her and she can have some TLC from Russ when she needs it.

Sold the exercise bike and the bunk beds in the local paper, which was good. Took me blummin’ ages to wash all the wretched stickers off the beds (what is it with kids and stickers?) but it was worth the effort to get a bit of money back for them. Spent the first day of my holidays taking them apart along with the buyer, and then helping him take them over to their house – nice to see them go to a good home, some other small children will be as pleased with them as ours were 5 years ago.

Secondly: the girls and their stuff moved up to our room, to share with us while we cleared the first floor rooms in turn to be decorated. As if my sex life wasn’t dire enough already, I finally get to the holidays and a chance to not be so knackered, and have two pre-teen girls sharing my room. Bad planning or what?!!

Then we were left with more sorting out and getting rid of junk. Days and days of sorting out and getting rid of things – not even junk so much as things I’d kept thinking ‘we might need this’, and now wondering if we will need it. Of course now that I’ve got rid of it, we will! Stopped after three days when both the recycling bin and the other bin were full, and took some of the best of the lot down to the car boot sale. Made enough money to pay the fee and then the kids split the rest three ways (it was mainly their stuff after all!) so they were happy.

After that the first room to be decorated was clear.

Decorating started the week after holiday club, cunningly aligned with Josiah’s week at Laser Camp. I’d planned it that way, imagining that I would be doing the work, but in the end we had some help from our friendly decorator, phew. Neither Steve nor I are any good at it, or even like it, so we always think it’s worth paying someone who is!
Phil seemed happy to have the girls’ chatter and ‘help’ alongside, which was even better! They really enjoyed working with him. I used the time to do more sorting out in various places, and when we got bored of helping/sorting out, we did nice things like shopping and geocaching!

The new music room was decorated first, so we moved all the music stuff into it quickly in an evening to make space for the next room to be done. Actually really happy with the way we’ve arranged the music room, it’s far more useful than it used to be.

The front bedroom that had been the music room, is now our room. Imaginatively we chose ‘ivory’ for the walls with white paintwork … more excited about the new handles on the wardrobe and chest of drawers, how sad is that?!

In addition to all this there was the saga of the fridge. One night we woke to find that all the power was off in the house, and had been for a couple of hours. In the morning we managed to narrow the problem down to the fridge, which kept blowing the trip switch after variable amounts of time. It had had a relatively reasonable life so we decided not to bother calling out an expensive engineer and instead replace it with one with a bigger freezer, which we needed anyway. Of course after we’d bought the new one, the old one started working perfectly again Ah well, at least it meant we could sell that too, and get some money back. But then when we sold it it reverted to former fuse-blowing behaviour – argh! It is going to the recycling centre TODAY!

The decorator finished on Friday, and handily my sister & brother-in-law were around, so they gave us a hand moving our bed down the awkward spiral staircase (our mattress is a bit wrecked though!), we had dinner together, then they watched a film the children while we put together the girls’ new beds.

Then came yet more sorting out – putting our things away neatly in our room and then sorting the girls’ upstairs room out so that all stuff has a home, then there are no excuses – allowance is going to be linked to room inspections (for them *and* us) every weekend, we think! Haven’t taken photos of ‘after’ either, yet – I may do in due course …

Very pleased with the end results and I really hope that the new arrangements will work well all round (tough luck if they don’t!). Just a few finishing touches to go, like putting pictures back up on the walls, etc. We have plans for the next phase of work too … although I have to save rather a lot for it first, but it’s good to have a goal!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 7:15 and is filed under home improvement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.