Cleaning furniture

I've spent the day cleaning and moving around furniture. Now that I've been living here for a couple of weeks, I'm getting a better idea of whether I'm happy with the furniture in positions that were planned on paper. There are those things that just didn't really go well in the place I'd planned, there are those things that I had forgotten to plan a place for and then you live with it all for a while and change your mind about what should go where. Trying to make furniture from one place fit into the next is always difficult and it's made somewhat more challenging by the fact that most of what I have is second-hand anyway. Sometimes I do think it'd be much easier to have some kind of modular system from Ikea or somewhere, just to have everything matching no matter how you move it around. A lot of what I have is from Ikea but when you're buying second-hand, you end up with lots of individual pieces. That has its own charm but even though I did get rid of some furniture before moving, I still have probably more than is ideal for the space I have. Since I have so much stuff, though, I need plenty of cupboards and drawers to put it all in.

I've been painting my tallboy white and although I thought two coats would be enough, I'm leaning towards doing three on most of it. I have to do a second coat on the doors and do the drawer fronts as well and then I'll decide. Wasn't in the mood to start with that today though and so I started on cleaning some more stuff. I've never been the best at dusting although I did do it on occasion. What I never did, however, was really deep clean the insides of drawers and cupboards. Is this something that normal people do regularly? It's really kind of disgusting how filthy the runners of the drawers and things like that were. I may need to start remembering to do it all again every year or two. As I've been cleaning I've been putting those small pads onto the bottoms of the furniture as well. The floor here is really nice parquet and I want to look after it well if I can. I also glued together the various bits of my bedside locker (a three-drawer type) that have been irritating me for years because they kept coming apart.

And then it was a bit like a game of tetris for a while. Can't move that one until I've moved that one but in order to move that one I need to move this one over here. I put all of the painting and deocrating stuff that was just in plastic bags into a box. When I've finished getting things in order, that box will be labelled and put up into the attic, everything all in one place. I did bring a couple of things up to the attic today as well, mostly christmas decorations. Similarly though, I've been gathering them into boxes in an attempt to have everything in one place, so the effort will pay off in the end.

Tomorrow I'm going to try and clean the writing desk and the drawers that I keep all my stationary in. After that, it's the bookshelves. I'm wavering on these now. It is taking me so much longer to paint the tallboy than I thought it would that I'm just not sure how quickly I can get the bookshelves done as well. The main problem is a lack of space as I can't do one set and then move on to the others while they dry. I may end up unpacking things onto the shelves after all and then, when I have the space that is currently being occupied by boxes back, I can paint them. I need to examine the two dark ones anyway to see how much fixing they need. The backs need to be secured again but I'm actually now considering removing them completely and covering them with wallpaper before securing them properly. I do have wallpaper I could use and that would probably be faster anyway than painting. Then I'd just have to paint the frame and shelves.

For now, my hands are destroved with having been in and out of cleaning water all day and I suspect I will have several muscles aching for the next few days. I haven't unpacked anything more but it does feel like I made some progress so that's something.