light at the end of the tunnel!
And about time too after a fairly lengthy return to the days of everything being covered in dust and filth, piles of furniture heaped up all over the place, endless vacuuming and everywhere smelling of paint. There’s still a fair old way to go yet, but as the handful of visitors from the last few days (after I threw a serviceable area together as best I could) have seen already, the worst of it is over and four and a half years almost to the day after picking up the keys, the flat is nearly done and very nice it looks too! At least it will soon. Hopefully.
A knackered shower (and resultant flood so impressive it managed to overflow the bathroom altogether and make it’s way into the bedroom – thanks for that) and the subsequent breakdown of the washer dryer, which I assume got sick of the endless pile of wet and dirty towels I’d used to mop up and decided to take it’s bat and ball home, did not help. Thankfully as somebody who knows their way around a tool box all was quickly patched up, is behaving itself for now and the coming week should be something of a return to normal – yay! I’m also thinking of starting a swearing box, since the ten minutes or so I spent trying to prop up a pissed off washing machine on tins of paint so I could get properly into it would have paid for a brand new Zanussi all by itself.
A couple of trips to B&Q and a lot more to Wilko to cover all the basics later and finally IKEA for the peripherals and fun stuff; the good people at the home delivery have done their bit and true to form I did mine, remembering to order virtually everything on their website except the big shelf I really needed. Cost of shelf £15, delivery charge to bring it here – £39. We’ll just put stuff on the floor for now.
The race against time to get finished is slowing down, and since this time next week I’ll be settling in comfortably to my favourite London hotel for the first time in quite a while; Waterloo beckons for the first half of the week and then a swerve over to Pimlico for the last couple of days before a much-looked-forward-to trip to the Gherkin for yoga and home the following weekend. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it few days later I’ll be heading off again for a well-deserved Easter break at my longtime favourite weekend (or one of them, anyway), Dead By Dawn in Edinburgh; not too much of a break, since I had lots of fun with the locals last year and will thus be hanging about for a bit. It would be rude not to, after all.
Meanwhile I’ll be cracking on with the decorating; ample notice for bookings recommended! One thing being stuck indoors for days with a list of jobs as long as both arms does bring the opportunity for is a whizz through a few old playlists and a bit of a dance and a singsong – Song Of The Week is a classic I remember well from the school discos, although looking at the video I hadn’t realised it was cut from the Wicker Man. Odd.
More soon! Fingers crossed for another good week, and it’s high time I clawed that hour back we lost last night.
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