Dangerous!!!!

[supertinks]

Normally I wouldn’t bother with an update halfway through the weekend, but so much has happened already that I feel I ought to at least try and get some of it down, so I can concentrate on having as much fun today without having to remember all the tiny details from Saturday, so that I can tell you about them on Monday!

This weekend is the weekend of moving house. Only without the actual house changing. This is the second time we’ve had to do this in this house now, the first time being when Kieran moved out two years ago, and we moved our bedroom from downstairs in the front room, upstairs to the back bedrooms.

This time its even more complicated! Andy has gone, so we had to empty his room of the furniture we didn’t want any more (like the bed, and the dressing table, and the chest of drawers etc), move a lot of the furniture and stuff from the front room (which looked like a bomb site, incidentally), swap over the furniture in the front room and the living room, tidy everything up, and await delivery of the dining room furniture.

It didn’t seem like it was going to be such a huge task, to be honest. But as we’ve progressed we’ve encountered lots of minor things that we ought to do as we’re going along, because then its done properly! So its taking longer than previously thought.

The plan is to get it all done by the end of today, and I believe that aim is still achievable. Ros is coming over this morning to help out, so an extra pair of hands and an extra brain should give us the edge. She will come in particularly handy I think when we start having to put everything away up here.

So, what did we achieve yesterday? Lets see. 

We hired a transit van, and picked that up at around half nine ish. Then we got straight on with the task of loading the van with the furniture we didn’t want but was still good. I had arranged to deliver this to a lady who lives on the other side of town. Sounded like a stinking chav single mum. We were not disappointed on that score. So the bed, bedside table, chest of drawers, dressing table, spare dining chair and video rack all got loaded into the van and driven across town. 

Then we came back and got on with the delightful task of clearing out all the man-made rubbish from our health-hazard front garden (the letting agent’s label for it, not ours. To us it’s a wildlife haven). It was covered in glass bottles, plastic  bottles and cans which had not quite made it into the recycling bin, old packaging, old plastic crates full of stuff I’d thrown out ages ago... plus it had been raining a lot over the last week or so, so it was all full of water and soggy and muddy and not very pleasant. We managed to get most of it out, discovering many wonderful and interesting things along the way (Such as the large green toad, and the harvestmen). Jamie was diligently rescuing all the snails and slugs that were attached to the stuff we were chucking out, it was very cute. Once we’d made a pile, we loaded up the van with the addition of more crap from the house (old CRT monitors, 3 old desktop PCs, a steam cleaner that was broken and a cheap hand held vac that doesn’t really work) and drove to the tip. Which has CHANGED! We’ve got one of those new fangled recycling centre places now (www.re3.org.uk), so it’s all under cover, and there’s loads of parking, and everything’s really well labelled and set out properly, so there’s no confusion about where anything goes. The un-smiley face next to the household waste sign made me smile. The amount of rubbish I had that had to go to landfill did not. But we managed to recycle most things, so I am mostly happy with that.

After the trip to the tip, we got on with the business of tidying up and moving things. The main job of the day was “move Jamie’s computer upstairs”. Of course, this involved much cleaning and tidying of the new study, now that the old furniture was gone, and the carrying upstairs of lots of stuff from downstairs, which had to be dug out from behind piles of crap! We had all kinds of fun running the network cable up the stairs and round the room, plus the power cable had to be clipped in place along two walls as well, because there’s only two power points in this room and neither are anywhere near where the computer is now! So there was lots of bashy bashy with a hammer, which was fun!

Jamie then set up the computer, while I tidied up the living room a bit (by which I mean threw lots of stuff in a box). Then to finish off, we emptied the metal shelving unit of games and stuff, took all that upstairs, and then took the shelves themselves upstairs.

End result of the day? Living room is a complete mess. Front room is a lot emptier, but still a complete mess. Study is a complete mess, but a neat mess, as its just full of piles of stuff which do belong in here, just on the shelves not in big piles on the floor!

The only furniture left to come up here now is the wardrobe which is downstairs. However, unlike the wardrobe in our room, this one flat packs, so we’re going to take it apart and rebuild it! Then the focus today is on moving the living room into the front room, which means rerouting the sky box wires into the front room, so more clipping of wires to skirting boards, and Jamie has to drill a hole through the wall for it as well. Good job the wall is stupidly thin. 

So – on to the funny anecdotes I would like to share. You would imagine that doing all the work we did, Jamie and I would have gone mad. Fortunately a combination of Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance administered at regular intervals, plus lots of occasions for some very serious hysterical laughter kept us sane. The dust didn’t help much.

The first thing that made me laugh – when we were loading the furniture into the van – I was outside bungee-ing something down inside the van. Jamie was inside, bringing down a section of the divan bed. I hear lots of thumping noises, I hear Jamie shout. “Gods,” I think to myself, “Jamie’s fallen down the stairs and the bed’s landed on him!” So I run inside, Jamie’s still shouting. A sort of repeated “Ah” very loudly. I get to the stairs – the divan bed is leaning crazily against the stairs and the opposite wall. No Jamie. But he’s still shouting. I duck under the bed and run through, still thinking he is in need of some medical attention. But no, he’s in the kitchen trying to force Crotchspider out, as he’d nipped in through the open back door and was munching on Mr Fidget’s breakfast. Fidget was just sitting there, doing nothing!

The second thing was a bit later on, when we were bringing down the items from the bedroom that were going to the tip. Jamie was upstairs, I was downstairs. I hear a cry of “Dangerous!” coming from upstairs. It doesn’t sound urgent. I carry on making piles. Jamie keeps yelling. “Dangerous!! Dangerous!!! Dangerous!!!” only each time the word is more high pitched, louder and somehow more urgent. At some point my brain kicks in and I realise the only reason he isn’t shouting “Help” is because somehow his brain has fixated on the word Dangerous. So I run up the stairs (tripping halfway up) to discover him at the entrance to the study, wrestling with a CRT monitor. I try to help him (he’s still yelling “Dangerous!”), but in my haste to grab hold of the monitor I grab the base which just spins round in my hand and we nearly drop the whole thing. Eventually, we manage to get hold of it, but by now we’re both hysterical. Laughing our heads off. What had happened was the cables had dropped while he was walking across teh room with it, and got tangled around his feet. He’d thought to himself “Ooh thats a bit dangerous”, then it kind of went from there. It took us a while to recover from that, we were laughing so much.

The other really funny thing (well, this one was funnier for Jamie than for me) was later on. In order to move the desk, we had to first bring up my rickety, falls-apart-when-you-pick-it-up DVD shelf thing, as it was going right in the corner. So we emptied all the games etc into a box and put it to one side. Once the shelves were in place and the desk was moved, I decided to pick up said box and refill the shelves with the games. Halfway up the stairs, I feel something tickling on the back of my hand. Bearing in mind I’ve had stuff brushing up against me in various ways throughout the day, that in itself doesn’t bother me. Just tickles a bit. However, this time I looked down to see what was causing it, and saw a spider crawling over my hand. My body reacted unexpectedly. I started to flail madly with my right hand, to get it off, while shrieking like a small girl. This of course meant I dropped the box, which spilled its contents all down the stairs. Jamie came rushing out, thinking I’d fallen down the stairs or something. By this point my brain had kicked back in, and I’d realised that my body had completely overreacted, that I wasn’t scared of the spider at all, and that I had been rather foolish. So I was all extremely embarrassed, while Jamie was trying desperately not to laugh at me.

The only other major incident happened much later on, after we’d finished for the day. We were sat in the remains of our living room playing on the Wii, just relaxing and having fun. And then the enormous mirror hanging on the chimney breast decided to fall off, and land on top of me, knocking two other pictures off the wall and smashing my shaving mirror in the process (the shaving mirror was on the coffee table underneath the big mirror). Cue more me shrieking like a banshee. I was a little shaken by it, but I am just relieved that a) my drinking glass was empty at the time so I didn’t get covered in Coke as well, b) my drinking glass didn’t break and c) the big mirror didn’t smash either. The chain on the back of it had snapped. So now we need to fix that too.

All in all, quite an eventful day! I wonder what today will bring... I am currently moving stuff up from the front room to here, while Jamie does the washing up. Ros is arriving sort of 11ish, the Sainsburys delivery is coming between 11 and 12 (and bringing tasty bread and salad for lunch). Hopefully we’ll be able to get through today with much less in the way of calamity and shrieking and danger!