For the last year or two (or seven), I’ve desperately wanted to move house. The problem with that, though… well, actually, there are LOTS of problems with that, but the main one is that we just can’t afford it right now, so, in a bid to make the best of the house we have, way back in December we made a list of improvements we’d like to make, things that need to be replaced, etc.
And then we ignored all of them*, and went out and bought a bright red chair which we then spent the best part of the evening trying to cram into our tiny living room. Along with the new rug that also wasn’t on the list. Or rather, Terry tried to cram them into the room. I just… supervised.
Here is a quick glimpse of our rock n’ roll lifestyle. Or, as I think if it, “The Sims Come to Life”.
* OK, not quite ALL of them: Terry DID replace the bathroom foor on Friday. Yes, AGAIN. Take it from me, kids, never use white floor tiles in your bathroom. Or, indeed, anywhere else you might actually want to STAND.
It’s taken four weeks, a lot of cursing and the last remaining shreds of my sanity, but at last – at long, freaking last – we have a fully functional, shiny new kitchen. You know, like normal people.
Photographing a really small kitchen = much harder than you’d think, which is why you get two pictures featuring more or less the same view. I promise we DID do the other half, too, it’s just that I couldn’t really get a decent picture of it without hovering somewhere near the ceiling. I did take a video of it too, but I’m going to take a wild guess that my kitchen isn’t of so much interest to you that you’d want to watch it in glorious Technicolour, even although it has consumed Terry’s every waking thought for the past four weeks. Mad props to Terry, by the way, for his kitchen fitting skillz, and to my dad, for giving up his Sunday to cut worktops: always a good way to spend a weekend, I find. (I went shopping while this went on, of course. So I can take no credit AT ALL for anything that’s happened in the house this month, but I DO have a really nice new coat.)
As well as the kitchen, we also have shiny new floors throughout the house, and will be moving into the garden shed now, so we can keep them that way FOREVER. It’s the only way, really. I mean, last night, for instance, after the final boards had gone down and I was lovingly cleaning the new kitchen, I happened to glance out of the window to see this:
Clearly someone had been digging in our long plant pot thingy (which, actually, I have no idea why we even have that, or what’s in it. That’s the old flooring beside it by the way. We don’t just have random bits of rubbish in our garden. Well, not ALL the time, anyway). Now, I knew the culprit couldn’t be far away, and sure enough:
Rubin then proceeded to walk around the shiny new kitchen, placing his dirty paws on the shiny new doors, and wiping his dirty face on… everything. And why had he been eating the dirt in the plant pot thingy? Because Terry put FISH OIL in it. It’s testament to how stupid trusting I am that I have no idea why he did this, despite questioning him about it twice now:
CONVERSATION 1:
AMBER: Terry, Rubin seems to be eating dirt from the plant pot. WHY?
TERRY: Oh, that’ll be because I poured fish oil into it.
AMBER: Okay!
CONVERSATION 2:
AMBER: Terry, Rubin’s still eating dirt from that plant pot. Why did you say you poured fish oil into it again?
TERRY: Well, it was better than pouring it down the sink.
AMBER: Oh! Okay!
And this is why no plant or flower we’ve owned has ever lived for more than a few weeks. And why Rubin’s been smelling of fish oil for the past few days, now I come to think of it.
Anyway, the house is now complete. And I promise that this is the last post you will have to read about my house decorating woes for … oh, how about forever? Because that sounds good to me round about now…
So, it turns out we COULD actually fit more kitchen stuff into the living room after all:
Kitchen sink: not even visible under all that MESS.
The rest of the kitchen stuff was delivered yesterday. The things in the picture above are the bits of the old kitchen that are currently sitting around in the living room before we turf them out into the back garden, where they will live in peace and harmony along with The Tree That Scratched Me. Or, at least, they will live there until the council come and take them away. IF, of course, the council agree to actually take them away, and that’s not looking at all likely right now, let me tell you.
Conversation Terry had with the council:
Terry: Hi, I’d like to arrange a bulky uplift please. There’s quite a lot of stuff because I’m putting in a new kitchen and throwing out the old one.
Council: No problem. What do you have for us?
Terry: Well, there’s a cooker.
Council: Uh-huh, no problem.
Terry: A bunch of old worktops. They’re pretty long.
Council: Sure!
Terry: There’s laminate flooring that used to cover the floors of our entire house.
Council: No problem!
Terry: And the old kitchen units.
Council: Coolio!
Terry: A chair.
Council: Bring that chair on!
Terry: The kitchen sink.
Council: We love uplifting kitchen sinks!
Terry: Oh, and there’s some small bits of wood that used to be the front of the kitchen drawers, but they’re really small, so I don’t know if they count.
Council: WHOA THERE, daddy-o! Did you say “small bits of wood?!”
Terry: Ummm, yes. Yes, I did. Old drawer fronts. Small, you know?
Council: We’re not picking THEM up. They’ll never fit into our van. And how will we carry them?
Terry: Well, I can pick them up in one hand, easily. They’re small.
Council: Oh hell to the no. We’re not taking them. What we’ll need to do is send someone round to “assess” them, to see if there’s the remotest possibility of us being able to uplift them for you. But I’ll tell you now: there isn’t.
Terry: Ummm. OK. But the cooker, worktops, large units, miles of laminate floor, office chair and kitchen sink: they’re all OK?
Council: Oh yeah, they’re no problem.
* headdesk *
So, once again we are faced with being “assessed” before the relevant authorities can help us. Great. And the beat goes on….
In other news, the more observant of you (and those not reading via RSS or email) may have noticed a fugly little doo-dah called “scribit” sitting in my sidebar. This is a new thing I am trying out, which basically allows you to ask me questions which I can then answer here on the blawg. Which means I don’t actually have to think for myself, EVER. I am convinced this experiment will fail miserably, but until it does, if you have a burning question, or just something you would really, really like me to write about, ask away. (You just click the “What should I write about?” text to enter your suggestion.) All I ask is that you not make your questions:
a) rude
or
b) maths related. So none of that whole, “If a train leaves the station at 2pm travelling at 70mph….” nonsense, ‘kay?
So, this Saturday is my mum’s birthday, so over the weekend I went to the shops, and this is what I bought:
Yes, platform pee-toes: the shoes of champions. So, yeah, Happy Birthday, mum! And don’t worry about these not fitting too good, because, as luck would have it, they both fit me perfectly, so whew, disaster averted there, eh?
Oh, and I also bought an entire new kitchen and new flooring for the entire house. Because, you know, that whole “re-doing the bathroom” thing worked out so well, and was just SO! MUCH! FUN! that we thought, “Hell, let’s put ourselves through another couple of months of that crap.” I mean, it’s not like we had plans, or anything…
Of course, I say I bought this brand, spanking new kitchen and flooring-for-the-entire-house: what I mean by that is we bought it, and what I mean by that is: Terry did it. I contributed financially, obviously, but in terms of actually organising the whole thing, Terry did it all the measuring and boring stuff, and I just walked around the store going, “I like that one. Let’s get that one.” I don’t really “do” buying kitchens, you see. Me, I just buy shoes…
Anyway, what all of this means is that the next couple of months, they’re not going to be so much fun for either of us, but particularly not for Terry, who will be installing the new kitchen and laminate-for-the-whole-house. Poor Terry. I will be suffering too, of course, because I am a compulsive neat freak, and this is how our living room looks right now:
That silver thing you can only just see at the top of the picture? Is the kitchen sink. And I just know that this sink is probably going to go all “bathroom radiator” on us and sit there for months now, unable to fulfill its destiny as a sink, because we’ll be just too darn lazy busy to install it. God, I love it when we do home improvements, I really do.
The worst thing about this? That’s not even half of the stuff. No, the rest of it doesn’t arrive until May 1st, so we have AT LEAST one month of living like this ahead of us. If it’s anything like the whole bathroom saga, we’ll end up camping out in one room for the duration, like savages, although, looking on the bright side, at least I won’t have to clean the house any more because seriously, what is the point? Fun times, folks, fun times. Most exciting purchase BY FAR, though: one of those trays that holds knives and forks and stuff, which is made completely out of wood. OF WOOD.
God, I’m getting boring in my old age, aren’t I? Let’s look at my shoes again:
It’s done. Yes, folks, I know most of you probably assumed that we finished redecorating the bathroom weeks ago, and just forgot to mention it (as if!), but no, it really has taken us THIS LONG to get it done. Given that I started writing about this on January 8th, and the bathroom, hall, living room, kitchen and spare bedroom have been like building sites ever since, you can only begin to imagine the torment I have been through with this.
There has been blood (no, really – Terry cut his hand and bled all over the wall. If the next people to buy the house ever remove those tiles, they’ll think they’ve bought a House of Horrors). There was sweat. There were tears. There was an entire weekend when I had to drive to the gym just to shower (literally just to shower – well, you didn’t think I’d actually work out while I was there, did you?). And now, there is a shiny new bathroom to show for it all. A bathroom which isn’t actually totally finished yet, but let’s just pretend it is, mm’kay?
Anyway, it was only as Terry put the finishing touches to said bathroom last night that it occurred to me that, hey, we totally should have taken some "before" and "after" shots to be able to compare it. Then I could have called this entry A Tale of Two Bathrooms. But we didn’t, and so you’ll just have to make do with the crappy title I did give it, plus this silent movie I took earlier today, the bathroom being too small for me to take actual photos in it. Watch out for a special guest appearance by The Radiator-Come-Towel-Rail.
Props to Terry for his mad bathroom redecorating skillz. We’d like to thank all our family and friends for their support during this very difficult time. Next month, join us on another crazy journey as we attempt to replace the kitchen without losing our minds or breaking the house again. No, I’m really not joking…
Yesterday, at approximately 2.50pm, the radiator-come-towel-rail officially heated its first towel, having been expertly attached to the wall during a delicate, four-hour operation carried out by the second plumber to get to grips with the unique set of problems presented by the patient.
"It’s about bloody time," said the Radiator-Come-Towel-Rail, speaking at a party held to celebrate the event. "Five years I’ve been waiting for this moment, and to be totally honest with you, I don’t even like towels, so it’s all been a bit of an anti-climax. I really wanted to be an extractor fan – they get all the fun – but my parents talked me into being a radiator-come-towel-rail, and, well, here I am at last. AT LAST."
Minor gripes aside, celebrations in the McNaught-Miaoulis bathroom went on for at least three minutes after the radiator was ceremoniously switched on.
"Maybe this will shut Amber up now," commented Terry. "And God knows, I think we’d all appreciate that."
"I don’t even know why I’m here," said the towel that was heated, who asked to remain anonymous. "They just roped me in at the last minute. I’m hoping there’ll be booze."
The last word, of course, went to Rubinman: "I’m totally going to pee on that radiator later tonight," said Rubin. "You can’t even stop me."
Amber and Terry would like to thank God, The Academy, their families, the plumber who made it all possible and, last but not least, all the readers of this blog who remained with them through the sheer tedium of All Those Posts About a Freaking Radiataor: thank you, both of you.
I realise I’m not making the process of having your bathroom re-vamped sound particularly easy (or, indeed, particularly interesting, come to think of it) here, but that’s because… Well, it’s because it’s NOT particularly easy, if you want to know the truth. Especially when you finally manage to get a plumber to return your calls, and he says he’ll come round on Monday to look at your radiator-come-towel-rack, but Monday comes and goes and the plumber… doesn’t… and then he gets his secretary to call you and say "whoops, the plumber was too busy to attend to your stupid ass radiator-come-towel-rack, can he stand you up on Wednesday instead?" and you say "yes" because there’s sod all else you can say, but in the meantime you’ve taken up the floor in the bathroom, so now you step out of the shower onto the kind of dirty, mess-strewn floorboards that would get you closed down if your house was open to the public, and then you spend the whole week trailing dirt from the bathroom floor to the whole rest of the house, which now looks a lot like a construction site, except NOTHING IS BEING CONSTRUCTED because you still can’t get a damn plumber to return your calls.
* BREATHE *
What makes all of this worse, of course, is if you haven’t slept properly since Friday night, because first your dog was sick, then he had diarrhea (Which you still can’t spell, by the way), and then once he’d recovered, he was all, "actually, I think I’d prefer sleeping in YOUR ROOM from now on, and preferably on top of your bed", so he barks loudly every ten minutes during the night, until you’re forced to bring him into the bedroom, where he alternates between snoring like a much larger animal and pattering around looking for shoes and other things he could possibly pee on ALL NIGHT LONG.
*BREATHE *
Oh yeah – if maybe your car could contrive to break down just four days after you collected it from the garage, where you paid the equivalent of a few good pairs of shoes to have a completely unrelated fault fixed, that would just finish things off nicely.
* BREATHE *
The plumber has promised to turn up today. The ceiling is still holding up, despite the massive crack in it. The floors… well, the floors still look like ten kinds o’crap, but that’s really the least of our difficulties at the moment.
Because I’m still aiming for that “most boring blogger in the whole wide world” award, this week’s Friday Photo depicts the new radiator in our wreck of a bathroom. The one that’s STILL not been actually attached to the wall, on account of NO PLUMBER WILL COME AND DO IT. I hate plumbers. (Note: Unless any plumbers are reading this, in which case, I totally LOVE plumbers. Also: will you come and fix my radiator?)
This isn’t the radiator, of course: the one that was the cause of Watergate. No, this is the radiator that has, you know, been sitting in our shed for FIVE YEARS NOW because we were too lazy to call someone out to install it. Five. Years. I actually think we may have owned the radiator for longer than we’ve owned the house. I’m pretty sure we rushed out and bought it as soon as our offer was accepted (because clearly it was, like, really important to us at the time to have a radiator that is also a towel rack. Warm towels rock. Or I’d imagine they do, anyway. I don’t actually know, on account of we don’t actually HAVE a radiator in our bathroom. Not one that works, anyway), and I remember it living in the spare bedroom for a few years, before it made its way out to the shed. Terry did try and convince me that we should stick it on eBay at one point (this was around about year three, I think), but I was all “NO WAY! We really need that towel-rack-come-radiator! And one day we will have it installed in our bathroom!” Oh, the innocence of youth. Or, you know, the innocence of a couple of years ago. Whatever.
Also shown in this picture is the mess that is our walls, sans tiles. It’s still only without half of the tiles, though, and this is because…. it’s something to do with the radiator. I think. Terry has now called almost all the plumbers in the phone book (Note: I totally made that up because I have no idea how many plumbers he’s actually called. I may be boring, but I’m not quite at the stage of counting plumber-phonecalls yet. OK, it was about five. And he emailed a couple as well.) For some reason, all of them just say, “Yes, no problem, we can do that! Can you call me back tomorrow?” And then when you call back tomorrow, they say the same thing. WHY? What’s with the calling back thing? Is it just to get rid of us? And if so: WHY?
What I’m basically trying to say here is: we are no further forward with the bathroom project. And I think it’s started to make me insane. I mean, where have all the plumbers gone? I’m not good at dealing with rejection, and these dudes just keep on rejecting us, day after day after day. WHAT IS WRONG WITH US? Is our radiator-that-is-also-a-towel-rail not good enough, huh? Is that what it is? Will it never enjoy a useful life, fulfilling the purpose it was made for? And will it even care, given that it’s now spent five years in the shed/spare room anyway?
Anyway, at least one person in the house is happy, and that one person is Rubin, who has just updated his blawg. And it’s not about radiators, either. (It’s about a Tennis Ball on Legs. Which is much more exciting.)
This is, of course, the latest chapter in the never-ending-story that is our attempt to redecorate the bathroom. Sunday night’s installment started like this:
Terry: You know, I don’t think I’m going to get a plumber in to move that radiator. I think I’m just going to do it myself.
Amber (wearing her rarely spotted “Voice of Reason” cap): I don’t think that’s such a great idea. Isn’t moving radiators really complicated?
Terry: Nah, I’ve watched a few videos on how to do it on You Tube. It’ll be fine.
And so it was that, a few short hours later, as I lay on the bed reading and polishing off the rest of the Christmas chocolate, I heard a shout go up from the bathroom:
“CALL YOUR DAD! CALL YOUR DAD!”
Now, most people, upon hearing such a cry, would instantly spring into action. Not me. I took a moment to reflect on what was happening. Terry clearly hadn’t injured himself, because my dad’s not a doctor. He is, however, a professional “dad” (who has moved a few radiators in his time), and his advice was required to help Terry tackle the small but mighty FLOOD that was now happening in our bathroom. Our what used to be our bathroom Before The Flood Came.
I called my dad and asked his advice. “Build an ark and send the animals in two by two,” he said. Nah, I’m just kidding. What he actually said was:
“Stick your finger in the hole and keep it there until I get there.”
Which was less exciting, but more practical, you know? At this point, before Terry reads this, I should probably explain that the hole in the pipe was NOT TERRY’S FAULT. No, the pipe had a BROKEN BIT inside, and even if we had asked a plumber to do the job, the outcome would have been the same. Only probably without the phone call to my dad, I would imagine.
So, Terry stuck his finger in the hole, while I gathered every last towel in the house, and threw them into the bathroom, in a feeble attempt to soak up some of the water. Once there, they joined both our bathrobes, plus the towel we use to dry Rubin’s feet when he goes out for a pee. I don’t know how that got in there.
The water, by this point, had managed to escape the bathroom, and was making its way along the hall, headed for the bedroom. I started to try and add more towels to the mix, in an attempt to halt its progress, but as I did so, I became aware of a strange noise coming from downstairs, and realised that someone had left the shower on in the living room. This struck me as strange because, like most people, WE DON’T HAVE A SHOWER IN THE LIVING ROOM. Or we didn’t, until approximately 9pm on Sunday evening, at which point, the escaping water thought, “ah, screw it, I’ll just get out through the light fixture” and started pouring out of the ceiling light.
Well, I ran downstairs and started placing basins on the floor, and also a mixing bowl (Which, actually, I was wondering when we’d get some use out of that. Every cloud.). The water was coming thick and fast, and I had already emptied the basin twice before another, very pressing problem came to my attention. You see, I’d drunk a lot of coffee that day. And water. And hadn’t had access to the bathroom for a while. And had now been listening to the sound of running water for twenty minutes. Folks, I needed to go, and I needed to go BAD. There was a problem, though: the bathroom was filled with two inches of water, plus a Terry with his finger in a hole.
“Just go in the garden,” said Terry, through gritted teeth.
“No!” I told him, horrified by this. I mean, it was COLD on Sunday night!
“Why not?”
“Because. I. Don’t. Pee. Outside.” I said, totally forgetting for the moment, that actually? Sometimes I do.
There was only one option. That option was for Terry and I to swap places, and for me to take possession of the bathroom and its leaky pipe while Terry manned the mixing bowls downstairs. So we swapped places, amid a shower of water that would have made us look a bit like we were in some kind of body mist commercial or something, were it not for the fact that actually, I was about to try and pee in a flooded bathroom.
I will draw a veil over the next few,awkward minutes of my life, and leave it to you to imagine what it might be like trying to use the bathroom whilst at all times keeping your finger stuck inside a leaky pipe, at ground level. And now I’m just going to take a moment to reflect on this new low I have reached, in both my personal life and in my blogging career…
* * *
Not long after this, my parents arrived to, um, relieve us. (Boom Boom!) and my dad availed himself of the opportunity to stick HIS finger in the radiator, while Terry assisted him and my mum and I spread more towels upon the floors and walked around with anxious expressions, repeating the phrase, “Do you think we’ll need a plumber? Should we call a plumber?” at regular intervals.
Luckily, we did not need a plumber. Between them, my dad and Terry somehow managed to plug the leak, and my parents headed back home, taking with them three carrier bags filled with soaking wet towels to remember us by. Thanks, parents! I’m assured that the bathroom will be lovely when it’s finished. The rest of the house, though? Not so much, really. The wood floor on the hall and in the living room took a bit of a beating, mess somehow spread throughout the entire house, and, as I write this, the final load of towels is in the washing machine.
Our trials were not over yet, though, for that night, as I lay dead to the world, dreaming confused dreams involving towels and plumbers, Terry became aware of the sound of that living room shower starting up at full blast again. Yes! The water left in the ceiling had finally found an escape route, and was pouring out of it, forcing Terry to go downstairs and prod a hole in the ceiling, before the whole lot fell down. This was what we woke up to the next morning (It actually looks worse in real life):
So that sucks.
Also, at the height of the Flood, as we anxiously waited for my dad to appear and make it all better, I appeared at the bathroom door with the camera. “Sorry, Terry,” I said, “But I’m totally blogging this…”
So, we are spending January re-decorating our bathroom. And with that single line, I do believe I may have already made myself a serious contender for the "Most Boring Bloggers of 2008" list. "What, she’s writing about her BATHROOM, now?" I hear you cry. "As if the entry about how she used to wear a bathing cap to bed when she was three wasn’t bad enough!" I know. I am sorry. But because I am old now, and don’t have much else in my life, decorating the bathroom suddenly qualifies as "interesting" to me, so I’m going to tell you all about it.
At the time of writing, we’re still not 100% sure what it is that we’ll actually be doing to the bathroom. We know there will be new tiles, a new floor, one of those fancy-pants shower screen, and hopefully some new storage. As to what colour this stuff will be, etc: pass. What we do know is that it’s going to be expensive, so, in order to try and minimise the shock to the old bank account, Terry has decreed that rather than just blitzing it and suffering through a few days of mess and disruption, we will do it "a little bit at a time", thus suffering through many, MANY days of mess and disruption, and possibly even a few days of it. So that sucks.
Stage one of "Redecorating the Bathroom" happened today, with the installation of a shiny new extractor fan. (God, even I can’t believe I’m bothering to write this stuff down). Because all of the electricity had to be switched off while this happened, Terry had decided to get up early and do it first thing, but instead he slept until his normal time then did it anyway, which meant that I was forced to lie in bed for an extra hour yesterday morning because there was no electricity and thus no shower, coffee or Internet. Sucks to be me, for sure.
I’m off now to admire my new extractor fan, which is so very shiny that I was going to post a photo of it, but I think that’s a depth of blog-boringness that even I am not willing to plumb. Maybe for the Friday Photo, though, who knows?
* No, you are right, there is absolutely nothing even remotely humorous about decorating a bathroom, so my apologies to anyone who is feeling horribly let down by that headline. I just thought it was a little snappier than "We Are Decorating Our Bathroom, Yo."
Because I’m still aiming for that “most boring blogger in the whole wide world” award, this week’s Friday Photo depicts the new radiator in our wreck of a bathroom. The one that’s STILL not been actually attached to the wall, on account of NO PLUMBER WILL COME AND DO IT. I hate plumbers. (Note: Unless any plumbers are reading this, in which case, I totally LOVE plumbers. Also: will you come and fix my radiator?)
