No new hip but at least the rug is down and the shark is coming

I was supposed to get a new hip last week. Got a phone call while I was on the way there that too many staff had come down with COVID and all non-emergency operations had to be cancelled. Le big sigh. I got off the train and sat on the platform* for a while, txting people to share my frustration and, I must admit, letting a few tears fall. But at least I was now able to have breakfast so, silver linings and all that. 

It was particularly frustrating because I had worked late the previous two days, trying to get enough stuff finished to make it possible for my bosses to be able to cover my minimum four-week absence,** stayed up late to try and get my apartment in some kind of order and then gotten up really early on the day of the operation to do the washing-up, pack and get on the road in plenty of time. So I was tired. But I turned that into silver lining number two: when I got home, I ate, unpacked one more box of stuff lying around, went to sing with my local choir at a funeral and then spent the afternoon sleeping. 

I had so much stuff to organise in my apartment because I was planning on giving up the studio I rented a while back as an office/extra space*** but unexpectedly, through a friend-of-a-friend type situation, I was able to sublet it to a student who was just moving to start studying here. So, the desired result but at kind of short notice which mean a very busy weekend drawing up a contract for the sublet, trying to find the main contract to attach to it and then finishing the painting that I started......who knows......at least a year ago as well as move all the crap that I had moved over there back to my own place. A lot of it was just stuff needing to be sorted that had been thrown into big shopping bags and moved over there out of the way. I did actually give myself the space to move one or two at a time over the course of a week**** and sorted them a little bit immediately. I had some nice spare canvas organiser-type boxes and was trying to at least get all the smaller bits and pieces into them. I do still have quite a lot of stuff to go through more carefully and deal with but at least some of it has gone and the rest is sorted into relatively tidy-looking boxes and baskets. It was nice to find some items and realised that in the meantime, I have actually come up with a proper storage solution/place for that category of stuff. So often it feels like I'm making no progress at all but small little decisions or realisiations do end up gathering pace and resulting in actual improvements. I need to not lose track of that in the future. And I did get rid of three big bags of recycling and rubbish.

Best of all, for me, is the fact that the situation with the studio spurred me on to make some changes to the layout of furniture in my apartment that I have been thinking about for a good while. I bought a rug****** for under my dining table and had unrolled it in the studio to flatten out and air. And then it got rolled up and stashed in the bathroom there because I started painting last year. I do still have moths but, regardless, I brought it over and put it down in the place where I had moved the table to. I lived with that for a week but something wasn't quite right and so I used some of my newly-free time at the weekend to try something else. And what do you know, sometimes just turning a rug so that it's sideways instead of lengthways is just what you need to do. Bonus, now the chairs also actually fit on the rug. In fact, I think this is how I originally intended it to be and had just forgotten.*******

Just a quick photo that I took to send to my sister and a friend to show what it looked like in the new set-up. I skillfully didn't include the row of boxes on either side of that open floor space that still need to be dealt with but even with that, loads of floor space. 

I also finally bit the bullet and ordered myself a Shark cordless upright hoover (ok, a vacuum cleaner, but where I'm from, we always call all vacuum cleaners hoovers). The cheap Aldi version I got a couple of years ago gave up the ghost last week but even though it wasn't great, it was definitely easier to use, which meant more frequent hoovering. I expect great things from myself with an even better tool in my hands. Which increases the chances of me doing yoga and stretching exercises more frequently. It's kind of disheartening to get down on the mat, turn your head to the side, and be distracted by dust bunnies gathering closer and closer. 

I am choosing to think of this past week as one step back but two steps forward.

* Which is to say, I sat on a bench on the platform. Maybe when I do eventually get a new hip, sitting on the platform might not seem quite so impossible. 

** I still feel a bit like I haven't caught up since I had COVID in March and was off for two weeks. Three weeks holidays June/July, some random sick days, then a week off sick in August with a bad cold, followed by two weeks of doing the bare minimum because I was still not quite rid of the cold, followed by a week's holiday in September (went to visit my sister in France for her 50th birthday and it was lovely) and a couple more sick days and time off for doctor and hospital pre-op appointments. So, yeah, not my most productive summer ever.

*** Except for one regular monthly job, my sidegig of translation work has all but dried up and I haven't had the energy to go looking for more. So I have been paying the extra rent but not actually cutting back on any other expenses to make up for it. Debt is building up again. 

**** Still didn't want to finish the painting and this was as good a way of procrastinating as any.*****

***** Asterisking and foot-noting are fun. :-)

****** I just looked it up. NOVEMBER 2020. How ridiculous is it that I bought something I wanted to use, loved when I got it, and then left it unused and unloved for almost two years!!!!!!!

******* TWO. YEARS!!!!!!!!!!!

Dust as far as the eye can see

Housekeeping has been a very sore spot for a long time now. I was delighted to find The Organised Mum Method and app and I have used it more consistently that just about any other plan I ever came up with. However, after a good burst of starting to get back to it earlier this year, my back was so sore that I did nothing for a couple of months. Looking back through my app history I can see that I actually started on 14 November 2020 and kept going up to 31 March 2021. Then I picked it up again from 24 April to 25 May. That is more than I thought I had done. And on some days I even finished everything on the list. So, the background clutter wasn't really getting touched, but the day-to-day was getting done and no new clutter being added. 

Bits and bobs from shelves/window sill etc. in the bedroom

 At any rate, in mid-June I contacted the concierge service offered by work and asked them to find me a cleaning lady to come and do a deep clean. Unfortunately, I kept expecting it to be "any day now" and it ended up taking them a couple of months. Since my back was still pretty bad and I was generally feeling overwhelmed and not able to anything, I've just been letting the dust gather and doing just enough to maintain some basic hygiene in the bathroom and kitchen at least. 

Finally, on Sunday, after having the date moved twice, someone came and spent about four and a half hours cleaning. She was supposed to be there for five but after three hours I was already feeling very uncomfortable having someone I didn't know in MY SPACE, so I chopped a few things off the planned list and she left after four and a half hours. She seemed to think by the time she left that we were great friends, whereas I had landed more on the side of hope-to-never-see-you-again. A kind of strange person, not the best cleaner, but she did manage to deal with an awful lot of dust and I am managing to calm down a bit two days later and just appreciate the fact that she dusted things that I haven't even looked at for months or years.

The space in front of the dresser was full with boxes and bags of stuff - literally up to the drawers and about as far out as that black stool. You can see the marks in the dust!

It also forced me to deal with some of that background clutter. Now, I didn't manage to actually declutter and sort everything, but I did move most of it over to my other apartment/office. I will try to finish painting that this weekend and then start tackling the piles of bags and boxes one at a time. After already renting it for more than a year, it's time I had more than just one lonely table and chair in there! While the cleaner was here on Sunday, I mostly tried tackling my writing desk, which has become yet another incarnation of the Table of Doom. 

Bits and bobs from sitting room

I did loads of sorting, gathered a big bag of paper to recyle, almost filled six plastic boxes, and it still looks very much like a Table of Doom. So the plan is to first finish painting the office, but also to spend any spare TOMM time working on clearing my writing desk. I'll be most likely reverting to my old scheme of 3 Little Things to get it done. I started with the boxes of stuff that were lying around on shelves or window sills or the tops of cupboards and am making some good progress so far.

When it is all done, I can move the writing desk, and a small set of shelves and drawers over to the office, which will give me loads of space in my sitting room. I'd like to move the table down towards the window but can't quite decide where to move the couch to in order to get that done. We'll see.

This weekend for sure...

I am definitely going to actually write a proper blog post this weekend. Have planned to do so for at least the last five weekends and enough is enough. This week's Team TOMM Friday focus is Garden/Outside Space but I changed that a while ago to "Table of Doom". Yes, the table of doom is back, although now spread among my writing desk (haven't actually been able to use it for at least two years) and multiple boxes. But apart from the fact that there is a serious amount of filing to be done, the other reason I chose to name this Friday Focus Table of Doom was to remind me of this blog and encourage me to actually get back to it. So here we are. I am currently in work but wanted to look something up and found some horrendous typos in a post from long ago (here instead of hear, and it's instead of its. I mean really!!! At least I can pretend my instead of me was a typo!) and couldn't leave them and since I'm logged in anyway... I will come back tomorrow and do a longer post and also add a photo to this one. I took some quick photos as before photos the last time I was sure I was going to start blogging soon. Looking at the date of the pictures on my phone, that was 6th March. Ah, sure, that's only barely a month ago. Feels like progress. Or something.

Boundaries. Or, DON'T TOUCH MY STUFF!!!

I've been dithering for a couple of hours about whether to post this but I don't think the person concerned will ever read this and on the whole, even though I have already ranted to let off steam to both my brother and my sister about this, I think writing it down will, as always, also help me to deal with it and, hopefully, put it behind me.

So, short version: former work colleague/kind-of friend came to visit to help me with unpacking/to drive to Ikea maybe. It did not go well.

Much longer version with not a picture to brighten the place up, in which I will also reveal a bit more about what a fucked-up relationship I sometimes have with stuff and "my" space.

The woman in question is very nice really and we worked together, including having friendly chats (not every day or even every week but regularly enough), for just over seven years. Over the last year or two she has also been to my house a couple of times to attend Tupperware parties, and I've been to her house, also to attend a Tupperware party. Apart from that, and my leaving do when I finished up at the company last year, we didn't really have any contact outside work. So, for me that's a friendly colleague, for her, well, I think she thinks we're better friends than we are. Anyway, she did help one evening with painting my old place before I left there and we have always gotten on alright. But we're just not close in my opinion. So it was a bit surprising to get a text message from her not long after I moved asking if I thought I'd be finished unpacking in July or would I like her to come and help out for a day or two, as she'd have holidays. I quite frankly assumed she was angling for a cheap place to stay (judging by my standards again, I really shouldn't do that) and, since the offer of having a car to maybe go to Ikea to pick up anything I needed was also tempting, and just 'cos I'm fairly easygoing about having people to stay (I may not be in future!!!), I said sure, why not.

Last Friday I checked to see if she was still coming and was somewhat taken aback to hear that she was going to leave her place after breakfast on Sunday and stay until after lunch on Thursday. But okay, I really, really did think then that she was just looking for a cheap place to stay and would be out and about and enjoying the area, then maybe helping me a little bit on one or two days. Boy, was I wrong.

She arrived on Sunday afternoon and wanted to immediately get stuck into working. I was kind of expecting that we'd spend the afternoon catching up, having cups of tea/glasses of wine and just sort of chilling out. But no. So I explained to her that the thing I really wanted to get done was to finish painting the bookcases and get all the books onto them. That really is the task that I needed to get done in order to be able to make more progress with unpacking. And I explained that I was unpacking very slowly so that I could declutter a bit while doing so, as I hadn't had time to do much decluttering while packing to move. And I did say that I had to be the one to unpack, as I wanted to be able to know exactly where things were going and so on. Then I said that if we did manage to get finished with the books, maybe we could get the balcony set up nicely, including that trip to Ikea or somewhere similar to buy some furniture. And I thought that would be more than enough to fill a few days. Especially since I also explained to her that apart from the somewhat deliberate way I was going about unpacking, what with the mindfulness and decluttering and all, the other reason it was going slowly was because it has been warm and I keep needing to take breaks to cool down.

So after me explaining all that, I'm still not sure how we ended up moving all the boxes that were in the bedroom (several of which I had only moved in there that morning so that we'd have a bit more space to work in the sitting room) so that we could clean the big cupboard in there. She decided that made more sense because I'd mentioned to her that I used that for material, wool and hobby supplies in general and she felt that would be the quickest win. Only, I wasn't looking for a quick win. It may look like chaos here all the time but I've actually been fairly methodical. And most importantly to me, I have been really working on making sure that I don't repeat the mistakes I made in my last place and that I am dealing with everything properly, from a psychological point of view that is. So, I kind of let myself be railroaded on Sunday afternoon. We did get some useful stuff done, like carrying some stuff up to the attic, where I did push back on her suggestion that we rearrange everything to stack better (since I had done just that very thing the day before and was happy with the way it was). And it was good to get that cupboard cleaned when there were two of us there as it is quite heavy and unwieldy. I would have managed on my own but with two it was definitely easier.

But otherwise, I ended up doing exactly what I didn't want to do, namely, throwing stuff into the cupboard just to get it unpacked. And still ending up with boxes that weren't empty because in every single box there is a layer of books! She amalgamated some of them to being very heavy boxes of books that cannot be moved and by the end of the day we had nine completely empty boxes. Which means that I unpacked about fourteen or fifteen. When my preferred pace has been two or three a day. With two or three a day, I felt like I was really, consciously doing it and fully aware of what was going where, giving myself time to sort things the best way, giving myself time to live with things for a few days before committing fully to that place for that thing (lots of things ended up not being in the right place first time round and this way, I've been able to move things to more optimal situations easily) and, most of all, even though I hadn't realised just how important this step was, I have had time to mentally get to grips with each step and each box and each item in each box. There are plenty of boxes where I've been overwhelmed and just closed it up again and moved on to a different one. And that's okay. Sometimes I've opened up a box three or four times before actually being able to deal with it.

The part I hope I end up finding funny when I look back on this in years to come: I was not so gently hinting that it was time for a break by drawing her attention to the fact that I was sweating buckets. Her reply to my comment on how hot it was and look, this is what I mean when I say the heat really kills me was to say that surely I wasn't going through menopause yet, was I?!! When I said no, it's more because it's 27° and we're doing physcial work, she merely commented that she wasn't sweating so it should be ok. I pointed out that that's because she's not Irish. I guarantee that the majority of Irish people would be having the same reaction as me to moving and working at that temperature. Did you know that an official heatwave in Ireland means there has been five consecutive days of 25° or hotter?

Anyway, shortly after nine on Sunday evening, we called it quits but not before, while I was unpacking in the bedroom I could hear her moving stuff around in the sitting room. I wandered in once or twice and could she her trying to "sort" things. For example, she picked up some large bowls and said something like, "Oh, these belong in the kitchen", whereupon I explained to her that no, they were going to go into the dresser but were sitting on top of the writing desk because it is currently blocking access to the dresser. I firmly told her not to worry, everything that wasn't actually in a box was more or less in the position I wanted it to be, close to it's final storage place. But she still bugged me by continuing to pick up this, that or the other and say things like "You don't need this, it's old, I'll just throw it out". No, you will not throw it out, leave my stuff alone! I'm the one who gets to decide what to throw out WHEN I'M GOOD AND READY!!!!!  I found a couple of things that I knew needed to go into the cupboard where I've hung my coats and since that was one small cupboard and I knew it was a bit messy (I also shoved my bicycle basket, helmut and pump in there) I asked her to put these extra things in that cupboard and maybe tidy it up a bit. Thought I'd make her feel useful, less likely to poke around other stuff and get something done that did need doing. And in return I got a comment about how I have hoarding tendencies. Not untrue but the reason she made that comment? I had also shoved a bag of bags into that cupboard. This is one thing that I really did declutter when I moved, partly because I used so many bags moving and clearing out what I did manage to clear out and partly as a decision to get this one thing under control. So I reduced down to one reuseable shopping bag full of other reuseable shopping bags, Ikea bags, small plastic bags....you know that kind of thing. Most people have a drawer or a cupboard or something with a similar pile. I'm actually proud of the fact that I restricted it to one bag full and decided that was more than enough for anything I'd ever need. Her opinion? No-one should have more than three shopping bags. Since she made that comment though I decided, having been more or less silently hating the way the day had turned out and what I was doing, to enlighten her somewhat about my complicated relationship to stuff, partly arising from my past, partly tied up in my struggles with depression (which she was aware of), explain about some of the therapy I've done and the improvements I've made and so on. Thinking it would help. Ha!

We went out for dinner, things pleasant enough and then she asked me what I wanted her to  do on Monday while I was at work. I said "What you can do is relax and enjoy yourself, go into town, visit the castle ruins, sure I'll be home by three and we can work on the bookcases then". I told her I'd probably be leaving for work about seven or half-seven as I had a meeting I needed to prepare for. At quarter to seven on Monday morning I was awake but not yet up, having not slept terribly well and feeling generally very unsettled and unhappy after the way Sunday had turned out. And she knocks on the door, "Moonwaves, it's time to get up". Jesus, talk about making me want to roll over and just stay in bed. So fucking annoying. Off I went to work, where I vented a bit to the first person I saw (wasn't intended but I just couldn't hold back). And then a bit to my boss when I was explaining to her that I was going to work my hours on Thursday and Friday this week instead of Tuesday and Wednesday. Heard nothing from her all morning and headed home about half-two. I was just getting off the tram when I got a text from her saying that she had washed all the cupboards (the one small one which did still need doing as well as two others that I had already done, which just needed a quick dusting), fixed the holes in the bookcases (paint got into some of them, making them a tight fit for the yokes you rest the shelves on - but how stupid to do that before the final coat of paint went on?), cleared up the balcony and sorted all the papers together. But not to worry, she didn't throw anything out, just gathered everything neatly.

Let's just say that text had me dreading getting back home. The thing is, yes, things looked really messy but there was a system going. I had important stuff in one place, urgent stuff that it was important not to lose track of somewhere else, and non-urgent, non-important stuff somewhere else again. And now? I have two big piles of papers all put together. Neatly, admittedly. But what the fuck? They are, to a certain extent, private papers. Things like my salary slip, my health insurance stuff, correspondence from the social welfare office. I'm very open with people about just about everything in general but that is not an invitation to do something like that!

As the afternoon went on (so glad she went out for a walk with her dog as it meant I was able to ring my sister to give out) I kept seeing more and more things. Folks, she didn't not touch anything! I'm scared to look in my little box of sex toys as it wasn't quite fully under the bed.  If I look in that and everything has been neatly lined up I may end up having to check myself in to a mental clinic. And I am not joking about that. Something like this has happened once or twice before when I was sharing houses but not for a long time and never in MY OWN PLACE. All my own. This is not shared housing. MY HOME!!! Seriously, she seems unable to have anything crooked. One one shelf in my bedroom, on my unread books shelves, only half of it is taken up with books and I have used the front half of it as a bit of a dumping ground. Fine, it's it was a bit messy but I knew what was where, things were where I could get at them and even if a collection of stuff like multi-vitamins, perfume and small nails might not seem to fit together so what? It was all straightened out, the old cards that I am slowly moving out of my purse as I get new ones (as a result of my move) were stacked up together like books. The scissors was neatly lined up with the pinking shears.  My mooncup!!!, neatly lined up with the cotton wool. My nightdress, which I had thrown on the bed in the morning, was neatly draped over the end of the bed. The pile of books on the other shelf, which I have read but not yet added to my list of books read this year, was pushed back against the wall - no angles in this house! In went on and on. It seems like there was nothing she didn't get her hands on and I feel so violated. In the bathroom, she'd taken the washing powder and colour catchers out of the bag they were in and placed them neatly beside the full ones, with the bag folded neatly underneath them. Fuck all use to me when I just want to grab the bag and head down to the washing machine with it. Why did she think it was in a bloody bag? My toiletries bag, left open with the small boxes I use for travelling (soap and cloth holders, toothbrush holder): everything neat and straightened, lids on boxes. The lids are left off on purpose - trapping oxygen in there just leads to stale oxygen and smelly containers next time I want to travel. Hint for anyone who didn't already know it: never store empty containers with the lids on. It just went on and on. The one bookshelf I've already put stuff on is one I've planned out for cooking and gardening books on top and choir stuff on the bottom. And even though it wasn't full, I've deliberately not added any other stuff to it. It has its purpose and that's what I want it for. Now? It's chockablock with things that were placed near the cupboards/drawers I actually intended to use for them. But it's all neat and straightened.

My stress levels were really going through the roof and I was kind of starting to be a bit passive agressive, making comments on "oh, you did that, too". I know she meant well but she really, despite me again explaining that I need time to mentally deal with all of the unpacking and sorting, just did not get it. I flat out told her over our late lunch that I was not planning on unpacking any more boxes while she was here, that Sunday was just too much for me. I got on with painting the bookcase and asked her to do the shelves. All fine. Except then I went into the kitchen and noticed the bin had an ordinary plastic bag in it (rather than the bin bags I normally use). Since I'd emptied it just before she arrived, I wondered why she had emptied it again. And my stress was so high at this stage, so many of my triggers already triggered. I had noticed she had thrown out one thing: the empty toilet rolls bags, i.e. the plastic bag that the toilet rolls are sold in. Not at all a big deal to get rid of that, right? Well, no, not really. Except that I had brought the recycling bag down with me on the way to work to empty it (she wanted to do it on the way to dinner on Sunday night and I disagreed as I didn't want to carry the empty bag around with me, to which she replied she would have just thrown the bag out - it's a reusable bag that is still perfectly fine, why would I throw it out?) so I knew those plastic bags weren't in the recycling (I had only just put the empty bag back in place). As a matter of fact, I use those bags as bin liners for the bathroom bin as they happen to be the exact right size. Which is why I had another empty one just thrown into the cleaning basins in the bathroom. I was keeping it to use. I mentioned that to her, explained that I usually used them and asked her if she had thrown anything else out. She said no.

After I had noticed that she had indeed emptied the kitchen bin, however, I couldn't relax. It was another hour or so when I just couldn't stand it anymore and actively started trying to figure out what else she had thrown out. Next up was the washing-up liquid bottle (and again, something that should have been recycled). Now, it was getting near the end, I will admit but I would have gotten at least another week, probably closer to another month out of that bottle. I asked her and she said it was completely empty after she'd wiped down all of the cupboards. Okay, fine. Then I saw that she had moved one carton of eggs into the little holder in the fridge. Now, I'm not one for keeping my eggs in the fridge and since I buy my eggs from the market I always re-use the carton. At that stage I asked her again, what had she thrown out. Nothing, was the reply. People, I am somewhat embarrassed to say that I just couldn't take it anymore and I ended up going down to the big bin, dragging the bag out of it and opening it up to dig through it. I was nearly in tears I was so upset. She claimed to have only brought the bag down because she had seen the lettuce in the fridge (it was stored in a plastic bag), taken the outside leaves off and they smelled a bit because it was so hot. Reasonable enough. Except, if she wasn't having salad for lunch, why was she digging around in the fridge at the lettuce? Why did she feel the need to find the eggs in the cupboard and put them into the fridge? Whatever about being untidy, if I had left the eggs out on the counter I might have understood why she thought I just hadn't gotten around to/hadn't bothered putting them away. But they were put away in the cupboard.

So, digging through the rubbish was not one of my finest hours but you know what? Totally justified because of course, she had thrown other stuff out. Even if some of it stayed in the bin, at least I've now seen it and I can handle it, because I know it's gone. Even if I do prefer to shred envelopes that have my name and address on them. And I was able to fish out a guarantee for a little gizmo (no-one ever needs those guarantees really but you never know. I have a small drawer dedicated to things like that so again, keeps it in bouunds but allows me to be a bit anal about hanging on to maybe-but-probably-not-ever important stuff). And I also recovered the instruction manual for something that I only purchased a couple of weeks ago and haven't yet set up! There were some receipts in there as well although a quick glance was enough to reassure me none I needed to keep. The thing is though, she didn't know that. I can keep receipts for all sorts of stuff to claim on my taxes now that I'm a freelancer and it's my business to go through what receipts I have and decide, not hers. I think after she saw that, however, she started to actually accept that when I was talking about my issues with "stuff", I really do know what the hell I'm talking about.

After making a show of myself (although in my opinion a fairly justified show), I decided to, as it were, take the high road. I apologised for making a scene, explained again that these really are serious issues that I deal with and hugged to show there were no hard feelings. And I cooked a nice dinner and we ate and drank a bottle of wine she had bought earlier. And then watched some Father Ted, as I had been trying to explain my "Feck it, sure it's grand" poster to her and remembered Mrs. Doyle "feck" scene. I still felt invaded but in my head was thinking, when she's gone, I can pull everything out of the cupboard again and start over. I can pull all the stuff off those shelves and get back to where I was before. I suggested to her that the next day (today) we put the books onto the now finished shelves and then go and get balcony furniture and buy some soil while we're at it and then we could spend the afternoon potting plants and enjoying the balcony. Thought that would stop any further issues.

But this morning I just could not make myself get out of bed to face it all again. Woke up several times during the night and just don't feel relaxed or comfy or, well, basically I still just felt like my home had been invaded and violated. After txting a friend about the whole situation and then receiving a phone call from someone else who never fails to make me feel good, I bit the bullet (about half-ten at this stage) and headed into the bathroom. I was in the shower when I noticed the straw that finally broke my camel's back. Last Friday, I bought a two-pack of drain protectors, you know, the little round things you put in the plughole and they stop hair or anything else from going down the drain and clogging it up. That packet was in my bedroom as I hadn't yet gotten around to clearing out the hair that has accumulated since I moved here (I forgot to take the old one with me from the old place). Not anymore though, as yesterday, she obviously opened up that packet and took one out to put in the shower. I really did cry when I saw that. Again, it is such a stupid, silly thing but I feel like she robbed me of a piece of making my home my home. As if I've missed out on a small piece of ritual that would have been another satisfying click of another piece slotting into place in making this place a home. Now, whether I did it or she did it doesn't really matter in the greater scheme of things, really the important thing is that my hair won't be clogging up the drains. But, still. I felt and still feel robbed of that moment. And the sense of violation just washed over me so strongly it left me weak. And so, to end this long and for everyone else boring story: I got dressed, went out to see her where she was sitting on the balcony, told her I had a migraine, was likely to be in bed for two or three days with it and asked her to leave. Not quite the assertive way to do it but I just had to get her out of here.

Even since she has left, I have been prowling around, trying to see what else she's done. Noticed that when she cleared up the stuff on the balcony she threw out the box that I was keeping pots and things in. Okay, it was a fairly beaten up box but now I just have stacks of pots and the tools are shoved into a bucket and have been placed under the barbeque. What happens when I need to use the bucket? Or want to use the barbeque? At this stage, I'm even annoyed that she pulled all the dead bits off my aloe vera plants, something I've been meaning/threatening to do for at least four years. I'm slowly trying to undo what she did but hey, at least two of the bookshelves are finished and I can move forward with the things that I wanted to move forward with. It's going to take me a while to get over this and I've already asked a couple of friends to come and visit soon so that I can clear out her "bad" energy imprint. :-)

So there you have it. Yet more longwinded insight into the fucked-up mess that is my brain and my life. I only seem to be normal sometimes, never actually am.

I have too much stuff

It feels like I may never be finished packing but the movers are coming tomorrow morning at eight so I have to be finished before then. I suspect I may be having another late night tonight. I'm nearly at a stage where I have one room (the bedroom) completely finished, which means I can start shifting boxes in there. That moves those boxes out of the way of the few cupboards in the sitting room that aren't quite finished yet. And then it's the bit I've been dreading, the large built in, stuffed to the gills, cupboards in the hallway. If I don't quite have the kitchen packed up it's not the end of the world as I'd be able to finish it in the morning while the movers start on everything else. Since I'm on the 4th floor and there's no lift, they'll be taking a while to get everything down. But the hall cupboards are right beside the front door so they absolutely must be emptied before they start.

I went through most of my jars at the weekend. Any of those which were just empty jars of bought foodstuffs (friends used to donate them to me, it all got a bit out of hand) have been deposited in the bottle bank. I've only kept the ones I actually bought - the glass is defintely tougher and, to be honest, most of what I want to do involves actually processing the jars in a water bath so they need to be proper canning jars. I do still have quite a lot of chutney and jams but since I didn't make any at all last year, and very little the year before, anything I do have is a few years old at this stage. Much as it pains me to do it, I'm trying to be at least a little bit ruthless and keep telling myself "new beginnings, new beginnings, new beginnings". So, I've decided to dump the contents of anything left and just bring the cleaned jars. That's work, of course, but a friend is coming over this evening to help so I think I'll set her to that task. People have been very good about offering to help but I find it very difficult to let people be at my stuff and so much has to be sorted first that it's hard to find things where I can just say "pack that, please". My poor sister was over for a few days visit, planned long before I ever knew I'd be moving so she didn't exactly have a relaxing holiday. I'm so glad she was here though, I'm not sure I'd have been able to do it without her and I'm very certain I'd be far closer to being a complete basket case if she hadn't kept me going the last few days. She left yesterday so now I just need to get finished. And when I'm in Ireland in two weeks I'll return the favour, as she'll be moving house then. No rest for the wicked...

Flea market

Well, it all ended up being a rush and a hassle in the end. Perhaps a better mood overall might have helped me react a bit better to several irritations but at least it's all over and done with now. On the morning, although it wasn't due to start until 10, there were people coming around at eight o'clock already. So instead of a nice neat stall, with nicely folded clothes in lovely piles, I ended up with something looking more like this

I'll add more photos to the what's on the way out page - really couldn't get any good ones as I was trying to take photos and set up and fend off the eager early customers all at the same time but it's important for me to have a visual reminder so that I don't start panicking about not having certain things anymore.

Oh well. I did sell some clothes, and the women who bought them were all happy to see larger sizes for a change, since you don't necessarily always get that at a flea market. And, since I priced to sell (50c for one, €2 for five), people weren't too hesitant. I also got rid of a few other bits and pieces and some of the stuff a friend had given to me. She was going to get rid of some stuff anyway so told me I could have it to sell instead. I didn't manage to sell the hand-made lace edged white linen bed clothes that her great-aunt made in about 1860 - that was one of two things that she wanted to have money for (€50, in case anyone is interested in some antique Swiss bed linen). No-one was interested in the singing bowl either, even though she was prepared to let it go for €30 (about half what she paid for it). Apart from those two things almost everything else that wasn't sold at the end of the day didn't come home with me again though. We detoured to the charity clothes collection bank and then to a local Give Box to leave the rest of the stuff.

It's getting shorter (each ring represents €20)

It was a cold and rainy day and I managed to get myself a cold over the weekend (not helped after Saturday's market by spending Sunday afternoon at an open day on the farm I get my vegetable delivery from) but all in all, I did come out with some money. Not a huge amount, but enough to tear a couple of rings off my paper chain.

All up, it came out to €28.10 profit. I paid €25 for the table and €20 for a deposit. Got the deposit back and made enough to cover the cost of the table and €28.10 was on top of that. So, €60 gone to savings and the rest into my purse, since I needed money anyway. I raided my 50c tin (which isn't actually sealed) for change for a float so that money also went back into the tin. I am thinking of cashing all of that in to add to my savings, though. It was intended to be the start of a moving fund but making sure I have enough money to cover a month off work is more important now, I think.

So, I've had two days at home to try and shake off this cold because I decided trying to drag myself into work and letting it drag on for weeks would be counter-productive. I haven't been able to do much so I still need to get all of the clothes I'm keeping back into the wardrobe but I have managed to get the stuff I had put to one side into the washing machine with some dye, which means I have refreshed a few things back to being wearable for another little while.

The light is not cooperating but I might do more photos at the weekend. For now, here's what I dyed yesterday - all of these things were dyed either black or dark brown. I love the way colours interact with each other.

The tiniest of babysteps but it's something at least.

The mess always gets worse before it gets better

At least, hopefully, it will get better eventually. I have a stand at a local flea market tomorrow and am kind of regretting now that I said I'd do it, as I haven't done the slowly but surely gathering of stuff over three or four weeks that I had planned on. A ridiculously bad mood has been plaguing me since my last post and I've totally lost my good eating, cooking, exercising and keeping things going mojo. Well, I have mostly managed to keep on top of the washing-up, only leaving things lying once or twice for a day.

Throw in an upgrade to Windows 10, a resulting/coincidental issue with my anti-virus followed by an hour or two searching the web for a solution and an incredibly frustrating 45 minutes interacting/trying to interact with Microsoft's online tech support during which I managed to burn the white beans that were going to form the basis of my first healthy lunch for two weeks, not to mention leave me leftovers for tomorrow, and, well, bad mood all over again today.

But I'm trying to get through some stuff at least and trying to be as ruthless as possible in deciding what to get rid of. So a lot of clothes that have survived previous purges are on the pile - even some that actually would fit in to the KonMari standard of "does it bring you joy".

A lot more are staying, many that don't actually fit at the moment but once again I was faced with the fact that I have quite a lot of good quality clothes, better quality than is sometimes available these days and, the last two weeks notwithstanding, I am losing weight and will be able to use them again soon enough. Still, I have a fairly big pile going and more to sort through so it's something at least.

January Cure - Day 4 (Assignment 2)

I wasn't too impressed when I got today's assignment email, I have to admit. Make a List of Projects. Sigh. I know what I have to do and I'm so bad at getting it done I wanted to try and do this cure in the hope that doing other stuff would spur me into getting the long overdue stuff tackled. Anyway, I didn't have time to click through to read the article in work and I was in work until ten so now it is after half-eleven and I've only just gotten a chance to read the full text. And it's not quite as bad I was thought, once again proving that your split-second reaction to something, especially if it's a negative one, might well be worth revisiting when you're a bit less under pressure.

Anyway, given that it is nearly midnight and I am tired, I'm not going to take the hour or so they suggest to go through the whole place but I am going to get down most stuff. Some things just as big, general items and some more specific, smaller tasks. So, in no particular order:

• Clear workroom half of bedroom (so that it can actually become, you know, my workroom)
• Paint
• Clear sleeping half of bedroom
• Clear pile beside blanket box
• Clear pile in front of cupboard unit
• Clear telephone table
• Clear out locker
• Glue locker drawers properly
• Sand down locker and paint?
• Clear shelves of cupboard unit
• Paint
• Patch duvet cover
• Check blanket box for potential bedclothes for dying
• Finish emptying box (which the Table of Doom contents got transferred into last week when I had guests coming)
• Find good way to store magazines
• Go through loose recipes, get rid of what I'm never going to use and file others properly
• Hang Van Gogh postcards
• Wash rug
• Clean couch
• Clear out crafting cupboard so that two bags on top of it can go in it
• Sand and paint crafting cupboard
• Sand and paint tallboy
• Sand and paint bookshelves
• Re-paper end wall
• Move bookshelves
• Strip old paper
• Hang new paper
• Clean all doorknobs and window handles
• Set up wifi
• Hang keep calm poster I got for my birthday
• Paint hallway
• Clear built-in cupboards in hallway
• Put black backing paper in picture frames of Strasbourg pictures
• Finish stripping paper in bathroom
• Re-paper and paint bathroom
• Hang pictures in bathroom
• Get and hang new bathroom cabinet
• Clear top of fridge
• Put up shelves in kitchen
• Strip paper in kitchen
• Re-paper kitchen
• Clear filter on washing machine
• Deep clean cooker
• Pot up aloe vera plants

I'm not going to do the final part of the assignment just yet because I really am too tired. I'll have a think about that and come back to the list to highlight the 3-5 things per room I want to focus on. 

January Cure - Day 1 (and 2 and 3, since it's a weekend task)

Day 1 of Apartment Therapy's January Cure and the assignment couldn't be better for getting me off to a good start. Buy flowers and clean floors. Since I had people over for dinner on Monday I got the floors done then. And I'll be putting up my new bed this weekend so will have to do them again then anyway - I suspect that despite my hoovering under the bed every time I hoover there will still be lots of dust. Since the bed that's coming out of the bedroom is also the sofa that I am longing to have back in the sitting room, the sofa currently in the sitting room will also be moved and it's a few weeks since that happened so there'll be plenty of dust to clean there, too.

As for flowers, well, one of the friends who came to dinner on Monday, brought me a gorgeous flower. I think it's called an amarylis. So I'm all sorted. Although I'm also kind of tempted to buy a few more flowers tomorrow at the market. Am having people over next Saturday and I'm sure flowers would still look nice by then.

Must remember to find my camera so that I can document this challenge in pictures as well.

8 things to get rid of

I saw a few people mentioning Apartment Therapy and their January Cure and decided I would sign up, too. Since then, even more bloggers that I read regularly have signed up and I'm kind of starting to get excited now. I have a very busy January and February ahead of me so I might only actually manage to do one or two days but that's still more than I would do otherwise so it's all good. I've been browsing the apartment therapy site and found an article that seemed like it would be a quick, fun fix for a bit of decluttering. Seems like I've already done most of them though. Oh well.

1. Coffee mugs - while I do have quite a few, I don't have many more than I use on a regular basis.
2. Travel size toiletries - don't have any, never take any the odd time I do stay in a hotel.
3. Old medication - did this a few years ago and now check everything at least once a year.
4. Vases - ha! I wish. I usually end up using jars for flowers. I have four vases, three of them quite small and only suitable for one or two flowers.
5. Food storage containers - well, we all know how much I love Tupperware and between that and preserving activities, I do have a lot but again, I do use it all so nothing much there to get rid of. I could, admittedly be far better organised though. 
6. Party supplies - I think last year I finally managed to use up the last paper napkins I had (I think they were five years old). I have one set of birthday candles and as for ordinary candles, well, I have an awful lot of them but use them every day. I've actually got very little in the way of plastic cutlery left and will need to keep an eye out next summer - I try to buy sturdy stuff that can be washed and re-used often.
7. Craft supplies - okay, probably could do with getting rid of or starting to use some of this up. On the plus side, what I have is more or less restricted to one cupboard and is semi-organised.
8. Books - did a huge clearout before leaving Ireland and am strict now on only keeping paper books that I will read again and again.

Of pies and Tupperware

Yesterday I spent the morning whirling like a dervish in an attempt to get my apartment into the kind of state that I wouldn't mind other people seeing. I also needed to move my sofabed out of the bedroom and put it back into service as a couch so that I would actually have enough seats for the ten people who I was expecting at my Tupperware party. First party I've had for years and years and it was just as much fun as I remembered. Had beginner Tupper-Ladies though, so it was all a bit chaotic.

Good fun though and the turnover was pretty good so I have a couple of good freebies to look forward to. I do find myself somewhat torn between not wanting to be encouraging consumerism and actually hosting an event that I know will involve almost everyone spending money on stuff. But since I do use almost all of the Tupperware I have on a regular basis I know how good it is so at least I can know that even if it's expensive, it's not a complete waste of money. I know my first couple of pieces of Tupperware were presents when I lived in Germany before and that's 18 years ago but they're still going strong, despite the heavy use I give them. I did buy several things as well and I have to admit that I know I will get a thrill when I see it all piled on the table after I receive the order.

So now I have to decide whether to leave the clutter in the bedroom or move it back out to the sitting-room and to be honest, I'm leaning heavily towards leaving it in the bedroom. Even though I've only just started getting that space clear a few weeks ago. I think the clearing of the living room has been way more effective though and that I'll start to invite more people over, even just for coffee. Always a good incentive to keep the place halfway tidy. So I'll see how it goes with trying to tackle one small pile/one bag/one box every week and maybe I'll end up with a properly decluttered bedroom pretty soon, too.

This evening I'm off to the pub quiz again. I brought an apple tart with me last week and everyone was very impressed so I got carried away and promised a cake for this week too.

I decided to make the easy jam tart I've done before. Wish I had thought to look back through the archives before I made it though because I've made exactly the same mistake and it's a bit better done than it should be. At least I did remember about the almond so I just used some of my homemade vanilla extract instead. But hopefully it'll still be edible enough to satisfy the lads and lassies in the pub.





Maybe I should wait until everyone's had a drink or two to take it out. At at least I'll be giving the lads another chance to annoy me by telling me it's not a tart, it's a pie. If one of them remembers his promise from last week though, I should be taking home a bag of rhubarb with me this evening, so it'll definitely be worth having made the effort.

That's all from me for now. Hope everyone is having a nice weekend.

It's a start

All I've done is move the furniture into the space and already I feel like it's more than enough. I'm going to not move some stuff back in at all - need to just get it sorted, dumped or stored in the appropriate cupboards. Looking forward to actually being able to use these drawers again. And really need to make sure enough floor space is left clear that I can use a chair to sit at the desk!

Writing desk to the right, leaving enough room to open it without hitting the drawers. The table is blocking the radiator but what the hell, that was blocked anyway. This winter was mild enough that I didn't use it at all and by next winter I'll have decluttered way more, I'm sure. The four boxes under the table and the suitcase in the corner are what's left of my former lodger's stuff. I'm going to ask him if he has another friend who could take it. Just don't have the room and have more than enough of my own clutter!

Dust

It was a bank holiday yesterday and so I took today as a holiday in order to give myself a four-day weekend. Since it was my boss' last week before two weeks holidays and she spent the three days this week clearing everything from her desk that has been undealt with for months (meaning working till around nine every night), I am more than happy to have today off. Even if I do have mountains of work waiting on my desk for me on Monday.

Yesterday, I had a very lazy day, sleeping very late and only graduating to the couch at about one o'clock. If I hadn't had to go and meet someone at six, I wouldn't even have bothered getting dressed. I spent the afternoon setting up a LinkedIn profile for myself (handy for when I start my job search later in the year hopefully), surfing the web and exchanging emails with ecopunk, who doesn't believe I'm a hippy. Funny man.

I had been trying to convince myself that I'd spend some time this weekend sorting out the mess that is my bedroom and last night, when it was getting a bit chilly and I wanted to just go into the bedroom to grab a fleece and close the windows, I ended up spending half an hour dragging lots of that crap out to the sitting room. So no choice but to continue it today. And I'll have visitors tomorrow so I have to make some headway today. My main goal is to be able to move the writing desk into the bedroom. A lot of the stuff piled up will simply go back in but at least I'll have an idea again of what is there and it'll be a bit more tidily piled, allowing me to work on it in smaller amounts at a time over the next while.

It seems like after a certain amount of time has passed though, your eyes become accustomed to sliding over the dust and not realising just how horribly dusty and just plain old dirty things have gotten. I'm not bad at cleaning around things but that end of the room has gotten so bad that it wasn't even feasible to move things and clean around them. So I'm faced with sights like this (it was worse than it looks in this picture, believe me)

Still, that section has now been hoovered and well washed (hoovering alone just wasn't going to cut it!) and I'm just waiting for the floor to dry before I go back in and start rearranging furniture. I did manage to get a good look at one small basket that I have had for years and used for many different things over time. And in the bottom of it what looks suspiciously like that dusty stuff that is moth eggs. So out it has gone. Cost a pang but I cannot take the chance. Baskets are lovely but they just don't go well with moths!

What's it called when you finally do something you've procrastinated about for years?

Whatever that is, I'm doing pretty well at it this weekend. The chairs I bought a few months after I moved here (more than five years ago now!) were 'free' with the table I bought for sixty euro. Since the chairs I actually wanted cost 15 euro each, it only made sense to get the table that was similar to the one I was looking at, but which came with four chairs included in the price. They weren't all wood though and were covered it a not terribly nice fabric. They were also fairly flat and have, obviously, only become more so since I got them.

I always intended to recover them (I'd bought a staple gun just after moving here, so figured it couldn't be too hard) and even got material and foam a couple of years later. Actually, I bought three cushions that were on special offer, took the covers off and cut it into pieces the right size for my chairs. And then because there were only three, I bought extra foam a year later. And it has all been sitting there for at least two years, waiting for me to just do it.



So, yesterday I set to. I've washed the material, taken three of the chairs apart and cut the foam into the right sizes. The leftovers from the three cushions actually give me enough for the fourth, so I didn't even need to buy extra. All of this is just prep work, of course, but I should get them finished tomorrow.

And just starting to tackle that seemed to have spurned me on to even more. I've loaded the clothes that have been hanging around my bedroom for the last year or two, waiting to be washed ('cos of the moths) into my suitcase and will bring them to the launderette to get it all done next weekend. I've even thought to bring some plastic bags and I will sort through them and anything I don't really need/want anymore, will go straight into the clothes bank on the way home.

I opened a drawer in the sitting room to take out some incense and ended up emptying half of it straight into the bin. Bottles of perfume and body spray and nail polish remover and hand creams - none of which I have used or missed in the five years or so since I put them in that drawer. I had forgotten there was anything but candles and incense in there, as they were covering the rest of the stuff.

And finally, simplest and best of all, I finally washed all of the punnets that have been sitting in my kitchen all year from the strawberries I bought last year (there may even be one or two from the year before!). I'll bring them back to the market next weekend, as they re-use them.

Mostly I bring Tupperware with me to put the soft fruit straight into so each of these punnets reflects a week when I was too unorganised to do even that.

Bedroom - before (another photo-heavy post)

And on to the bedroom. This is a long, narrowish room and I don't have enough space otherwise to not try to make the most of the space. Much as I would love to have a bedroom with nothing more in it than a bed and a wardrobe, it's just not going to work out with this space. I've had a few different set-ups with this room as well and so far this is the closest I have come to the ideal - by dividing the room more or less in half. The ideal would have the sleeping area at the other end, near the window so that coming in the door, I would have a work area and I could walk through a curtain of some sort to a small sleeping area. However, living on a main road, the noise closer to the window is much worse. And the temperature is also somewhat cooler. My first few months here I did sleep down that end, so I quickly discovered the disadvantages.

 The door to the sitting room is just beside the blanket box on the left. The mess is actually mostly gone now - I've tidied up a bit. The small bedside locker is the very first item of furniture I ever bought. Just a cheap one, and possibly the one piece of furniture I'm not actually particularly attached to. The bed is the sofa bed I bought from Ikea when I moved here. The blanket box was a supermarket save-up-tokens deal. I bought it originally as a memories box but for now it serves its traditional purpose and contains bedding.

This is the view then to the other end of the room. The green cupboard on the left is full with mostly empty jars. The green unit on the right has some of the books that don't fit in the sitting room, paper shredder, first-aid kit, underwear, records (of the vinyl variety), choir music (my personal stuff) and in the bottom cupboard, more empty jars. I may at some stage hang a curtain of some kind between the two (purchased as a set second-hand from Cash + Raus) to really properly divide the two sections.

I was quite happy when I figured out dividing the room like this would give me two distinct spaces. Unfortunately, the second end has never gotten finished and in the meantime has become something of a dumping ground. As you can see. It's the Bedroom of Doom!

The wardrobe on the left (purchased new from Ikea when I moved here) has my clothes - it's a three-door wardrobe with the hanging part on the left (so not really visible here). There are two small drawers underneath the door you can see - just have speical occasion shoes in there. Behind the door there are four shelves, the top two of which I use as extra storecupboard space for dried goods, pasta, beans and so on. Since I need to get into the wardrobe every day, this is not the worst of the dumping ground. That's on the other side. Oh, note the colourful material up on the windows, got that my first weekend here and, as in the sitting room, still haven't ever gotten round to putting up proper curtains. You can just see the curtain rails I did buy in the background here and the plastic bag on the floor has all the bits to mount them. Just need to do it!

And this is the other side

The blue trug is overflowing with clothes - since the first time I tried dealing with the moth problem. I took everything out of the wardrobe to wash properly but that fell by the wayside at some stage and stuff has just been hanging around. I've dragged things out at various times when I wanted to use them but given that I haven't used or missed most of this stuff for a good while, I will probably end up bringing a lot of it to the clothes bank. But just in case, do still need to wash it all, I think. That trug is standing on top of a couple of boxes of books, along with the cardboard box and the suitcase near the window - all of which belong to my former lodger (the friend who never turned up a couple of weeks ago). Will have to get rid of them sometime and it'll cost me since he will prevaricate till the cows come home so the only way to do it will be to hire a car and drive down to the Black Forest with the stuff. Not high on my list of costs I want to incur so for now the stuff just gets in the way. Behind them are two large plastic boxes which contain wool. Again, rescued from the big cupboard in the sitting room after the first bad moth attack. Once I get around to cleaning that cupboard out properly, and I'm thinking of varnishing it inside just to make sure there really aren't any moth eggs lurking anywhere, then they can move back into that space. The shopping bag on top holds the dark blue curtains I want to hang here.

I'm not sure why the steam juicer ended up in here - that'll go down in the cellar with the canner for the winter. It's standing on a basic table, which also has my sewing machine on it (not used once since I moved here!). That table is a second-hand purchase from SVP in Dublin many years ago. The legs detach so I may end up dismantling it for storage or else will move it to position against the back of the green unit. Then my writing desk will come in from the sitting room to replace it and I will have a small office/work area. The dark coloured set of drawers currently sticking out behind the green unit is what I used to use for my underwear and also some spare computer parts storage. I find bottom drawers great for that kind of thing that I won't be going looking for very often. They're not usable in the current position, which is why I just have my underwear in a box in the green unit now. So when I rearrange, I'm looking forward to having a proper underwear drawer again - and especially being able to have a separate drawer for my socks. Hey, it really is the simple things in life that make me happy.

There is a lot to do here but I want to concentrate on the sitting room and other areas first so don't expect to see any progress here any time soon. As for colour schemes, well, the sleeping area is where I wanted to paint a yellow/beige/champagne colour. And that, along with a deeper green are my guiding colours for here. Yellow and green again? Well, yes, but not really. Definitely deeper colours than the sitting room. And while it may be a cliche, given my Irishness, green is in fact my favourite colour - and not even just because a green background might bring out the green of my eyes nicely. LOL.

When it comes to wall art for the bedroom, I have this small picture which was my first (and until this year only) original artwork to buy. I got it maybe eight or nine years ago when I was looking for a graduation present for a friend. I just kept coming back to this one but I knew it didn't suit my friend at all so I couldn't understand why. Eventually I gave in and admitted I wanted it for myself. And out came the credit card (my friend got two hand-decorated tealight holders which she loves and still uses regularly) - it cost 75 euro and is one debt I have definitely never regretted. I still love this picture as much as I did when I bought it.

Sorry, it's my typical not great photo and the flash blends out the gold spirals a bit but without the flash the green was really off. It's green and the sun is front and centre so it shouldn't make me think of a beautiful sunset but it does. And I can gaze on those spirals for ages, losing myself completely in contemplation.

It's by an artist called Honor Hales, who had a shop in Dublin then but now seems to work from a studio and sell via website and other retailers. She's a friend of a friend and I first became aware of her when I was meeting him for breakfast and he dragged me along to buy a present for someone there. When I went back a few months later to buy a present myself I was very struck by her opening line, "If you want to touch, please do." Not something you hear often when it comes to art but music to my ears. I'm a very tactile person, something I only realised quite late as "don't touch" is so often what we hear, I thought it was the way you were always supposed to behave. 

I also have a print that I want to frame and hang here. It's a limited edition print of a painting by Derek Beggs, which I bought as part of a special fund-raising effort for a fellow ex-pat's young son (after he, that is, the father, had died unexpectedly). Derek generously auctioned a painting for that fund and since I didn't have a lot of money and hadn't thought the painting anything special anyway, I didn't bid and just made a small donation instead. When the auction was over and the winner posted a photo of the original painting hanging in her home, though, it looked completely different and I was quite taken with it. I don't know. Maybe I had just gotten so caught up in the whole thing. It's strange when someone you know quite well but exclusively online dies and you're left with just nothing to do. So when he also decided to sell a limited amount of prints (25 euro each), I went ahead and got one. Still haven't managed to get a frame for it, it's actually difficult to find large square frames. I thought I was going to have to have a custom job done but recently spotted some on the Ikea website so the next time I'm there I'll get one. In the meantime, it lives in its envelope and just comes out for a quick viewing (or photo) every once in a while.

Loch Asynt by Derek Beggs, 30cmx30cm print no. 16/48 sold in memory of Poppet

The yellow I'd like for the walls in the bedroom are a shade or two closer to beige than this yellow. This picture is actually what reminded me of it and started my thinking in the direction that has landed me here. Hoping to use the various elements I already have to pull together a more harmonious whole, making a home of what is currently mostly just a space to live in. Hope you've enjoyed the glimpses of that space, here's hoping it won't take me too long to be back posting lots and lots of 'after' photos!

Sitting-room - in progress and plans (and yet more photos!)

Cleared off table - white side-table moved over to other side of room and drawers moved from corner.

Smaller pile of stuff to still sort - working on it! Eventually I want to move the writing desk into the bedroom and then these drawers will move over to where the writing desk now is.

 Still not properly hung curtains but I took down the white ones, strung up more stable twine to replace the wool and hung these long tablecloths up. I got these on very special offer (they hadn't sold as no-one wanted the extra long size) last year sometime, thinking I might be able to turn them into curtains. So I'm just trying them out now to see if I like the colour. I do but not sure it really works with what I want to do.

 I bought this rug at the beginning of the year, using a refund from something or other. I kept waiting for a time when I had properly tidied up and decluttered to put it down and when I had my bout of clearing-up a couple of weeks ago, I decided it was time to stop putting it off. The colours aren't quite right, the orange stripe is a lot closer to red in reality - still orange but a very red tone, if you know what I mean. The yellow stripe ties in nicely with the couch and the green is my main colour inspiration for what I want in this room.

These are the curtains I bought, oh, two or three years ago probably, to hang across the bookshelves which are all along one wall at the end of the room. Again, colour is not great but you get an idea of the pale blue and green. The green in these curtains matches the lighter green in the rug quite well, it's maybe one slight shade darker. And the blue, I think, complements the turquoise of the Van Gogh print quite nicely.




The felt landscape I want to hang here is mostly yellows and greens as well, so that works, too.

Essentially, it's going to be a very pastel kind of room, really, which is surprising as I'm not a big fan of pastels. But I wanted something light and airy.

The walls on three sides were re-painted white last year and I don't plan on changing that. The fourth wall, behind the bookshelves, is a yellow paper I have come to loathe - just as well since it has started to peel off in places. I bought a nice white paper with a swirly green design on it which I will put up at some stage - but there are other priorities first. Like trying to get rid of/find a home for some of the excess stuff here.

I've toyed with the idea of fitting overhead cupboards (the type you have in a kitchen) above the bookshelves but then realised it would make more sense to hang kitchen cupboards in the kichen and move the stuff that's in the tall-boy into those. If I used vacuum bags I should be able to fit most of what's in the cloth wardrobe into the tallboy. That's my next stage of work. I do need to get all that stuff washed first though, to make sure I'm not vacuum-packing any vialbe moth eggs or larvae! Will attempt to do one extra load of washing every week in January perhaps. I'll get through it soon enough. The duvets will have to go out to be cleaned as my machine is not big enough for that so that will need to wait until the end of the month, when funds allow. I am very tempted though to unpack all of the stuff from the tallboy into a big box to shove under the kichen table, just to have made a start.

So, what do ye think? While I like the ecletic collection of furniture well enough the numerous colours of wood do get to me a bit sometimes. There are one or two pieces that are too nice to mess with but at some stage I think I'll try sanding and painting the tall-boy, the dark bookshelves and the crafting cupboard. Very taken with the idea of painting them white to lighten the place up even more. It's more likely a project I won't do until I move again though.

P.S. If anyone notices that in any of these posts it is possible to clearly see people in photographs that may be in the shot, please do let me know - it's very important to me that I don't impinge on people's privacy (my own included!) by posting photos of them on an accessible to all website. So far I don't think you can but someone with a better system or bigger monitor than me might be able to so please do let me know if so and I'll try and do that swirly faces thing you can do.

Sitting room - before (another photo heavy post)

Okay, enough dilly-dallying, on with the warts and all expose of my living space. See the following posts for other rooms: Hall, Bathroom, Kitchen.

Today, it's the turn of the sitting room. I actually took most of these photos at the start of the month, just before I went away, and then December caught up with me and it's only now, after a couple of quiet days, that I'm coming back to it. If you read my post from a couple of weeks ago, some unexpected visitors (who never did turn up in the end and still haven't contacted me to say why) led to me spending a few hours sorting out some of this mess so things are already greatly improved, at least from one angle.

Sitting room
I've changed this room around a lot, from when I had almost no furniture and then as I got bits and pieces and tried out different things. I quite like the way it is now, or at least will, once the excess stuff hanging around has been found homes. But let's start with a picture of the Table of Doom from April. This was when I thought I was nearly finished clearing it and then moved a box and remembered there was a load of stuff on the side table as well. So I cleared off the side table, like so,

which left me with a once-more crowded table...

By the start of December, it all looked a bit like this.

This was the view of the sitting room taken from the bedroom door. The boxes in front of the big cupboard (which holds wool, material and 'stuff' for all that crafting I'm going to get around to doing sometime) have reduced now as I got them filled up with presents and sent off around the world. Since this post is going to be long enough though, I'll stick to the before photos and do a second post with the partially-after later.

This is the other side of the room, taken from the hall door. Note the suitcase on the floor which was in the previous photo of the kitchen. As I was going away, I had to take all of the music out of it and that has ended up stacked on top of the side table (which was beside the table above), now moved to in front of the bookshelves. The blankets on top of/behind the couch are actually resting on a mattress - used for visitors (or for me, when visitors are using my bed more like) - it's covered in a decorative throw so not immediately obvious.

This is the other end of the room, taken from the corner where the table is. The door you can see is the door to the bedroom. This red and white cloth 'wardrobe' is one I had in my bedroom for ages but moved out here during my last round of trying to get everything sorted. It contains mostly spare duvets and bedding. To the left you can see the stacks of music from the suitcase, topped with the lilac folder. They are still there but now nicely arranged on the white side table that I moved over there.

There are shelves all along this wall and my plan is (or was anyway, I dither on this) to hang curtains all along that wall in order to hide the mess and hopefully bring a more calm vibe to the room. Anyway, behind the cloth wardrobe in this photo you can better see the tall boy, which is currently full of kitchen stuff, lesser-used baking stuff and larger serving bowls, for example. The small set of shelves on top of it are my 'unread' shelves.


 At least mostly. The bottom shelf has the complete set of Harry Potter and the complete Wheel of Time Series. The rest is all my unread stuff and since I got so many books for my birthday, these shelves are now absolutely groaning with books.

And here we have the very messy "curtains" - for the first year or so I just used the black venetian blinds that the previous tenant left. I had tried to put up curtain rails but the wall directly above the windows is thin plasterboard (I think there used to be shutters there, of the type you roll down outside the window but now there's just a big gap between the plasterboard and the outside wall) and I gave up, then got depressed and didn't get around to trying again. When I got sick of the black venetian blinds though I just got rid of them and decided I could live with nothing for a while. Then I had a visitor, who was going to be sleeping on the sofa-bed, which at the time was in the sitting room and so I had to do something at short notice. So I dragged out these white curtains I had gotten on special offer before leaving Ireland and hung them over some wool strung around the top of the window. And there they have stayed. For, oh, probably about two years now. The picture is just a cheap print my sister gave to me, along with a second similar one. I cannot find that second one though and think I may have given it to my brother or a friend moving into a new place. When I do get around to painting the hall, I'd like to move this picture out there. In it's place I'll hang the felt landscape I bought at the Craft Fair earlier this month (still need to do a post about what I bought there, too). Along with this print and the Van Gogh print you can see in the table photos above, I have one small wooden butterfly picture that I bought, I think, at a school jumble sale as a teenager. It hangs from a nail on my CD shelf.

Furniture in the sitting room (yes, there's too much of it but I don't want to get rid of any of it and hope it will all fit better in the next place I move to)
1 light-coloured CD shelf (freecycle)
1 up-lighter (is that what they're called? I mean the white lamp in the photo above - originally bought from Argos in Ireland and for my first year here the only lighting I had in the sitting room)
1 yellow couch (gifted from a friend when I moved here - I think when I'm done with it she'll take it back though - one of those things she had replaced and didn't have room for any more but which she didn't really want to get rid of)
1 armchair (from my parents' house - hate the blue covering and will get it re-covered one day, in the meantime it's covered with a white/green/yellow throw - I rescued a few things from there when my stepmother sold up after my father died. Was really pleased to get the couch and two armchairs, as well as two small chairs but then moved into a tiny house with only room for one armchair. So the other armchair and two small chairs now live with a friend in Ireland and my brother got the couch, which he then had to leave behind him when he moved and the new place was too small to get it up the stairs. It would have cost me in excess of 600 euro to get it collected and shipped to me in Germany at that time so I just had to let it go)
2 old wine cases which serve as end tables either side of the couch (free from a wine festival I went to a few years ago)
1 writing desk (second-hand from Cash + Raus, I think it cost 40 euro but it might have been 60 - it's a really solid piece)
1 tall-boy, darkish colour (from my parents' house)
1 small, mid-tone, book shelf (second-hand from Cash + Raus, part of a three-part set that cost, I think, 20 euro, again a really solid piece)
2 large dark bookshelves (from my parents' house) -  1 has just fiction, 1 has cookbooks, reference books, photo albums.
4 smaller sets of light-coloured shelves, 2 x 3-shelf, 2 x 4-shelf, currently stacked to give me 2 x 7-shelves, exactly the height of the other large bookshelves (bought these new about ten years ago)
1 light-coloured large bookshelf (second-hand from Cash + Raus) - contains files and folders and some old school/college books.
1 light-coloured wardrobe (originally Ikea but purchased second-hand from Cash + Raus) - wool, material and other crafting supplies
1 light-coloured set of five deep drawers (originally Ikea but purchased second-hand from Cash + Raus) - contains candles, hardware stuff (tools, etc.) and the 'present' drawer
1 smaller set of mid-tone drawers (second part of the three-part set mentioned above - the third part is a corner shelf unit which I have in the kitchen) - contains all my stationery stuff - card, envelopes, plastic covers, jiffy-bags to be re-used and so on.
1 table with three chairs (purchased second-hand from Cash + Raus - there are four chairs but I use one in the kitchen)
1 white side-table/telephone table (freecycle)
1 darker wood small cupboard/telephone stand with three small drawers and one cupboard (second-hand from Cash + Raus) - DVDs in the cupboard, address book, candles, battery chargers in the drawers