One Of Those Days

Today I started on daughter's room.

At nine years old she does her best and there is generally a clean patch in the middle of the room around her bed, okay bits and bobs and craft things and the like do live in well separated but mismatched boxes and containers that somehow end up stacked badly, all askew. Little things like necklace beads, hama beads, sequins and odd dolls shoes end up on the floor a lot of the time, mostly lost in corners, so moving something large is always cause for surprise.

Part of the problem is the space taken by a dolls pram, a rocking dolls crib and a huge pile of soft toys - too much sentiment attached for her to allow them to go, too juvenile for her to play with them much anymore. She gets occasional enthusiasm for the cot or the pram (mostly that guilt complex about being in a nice warm bed when her best dolls are sitting up and giving her accusatory glances). When this happens, two, perhaps three dolls are installed in the cot or pram and the multitude of more usually resident teddies are piled in a corner.

Today I found some energy, or some energy found me. We have been given a portable TV for her room. Whilst theres no aerial at that end of the house, it would play videos well enough, but there hasn't been a corner to stand it, so today I started to reorganise her life - moving guinea pigs, desk, drawers, bookshelves, a complete re-sort. I even went into the garage and reclaimed the old TV floor unit that we'd been using to house wallpaper ends and old paint tins, to go where the soft toys had been. That took some cleaning.

The bulk of the job is done. I've sorted her books, thrown old colouring books etc and made a pile of childhood favourites for longer term storage at the top of her wardrobe, freeing up shelf space. The nick-nacks are no longer on the tilt.

12 0'clock lunchtime I climbed over the bin bags, hoover, piles of teddies etc that are all now in the hallway, and went to the kitchen, thinking along the lines of coffee and toast.

I got neither, and as you can tell, I got no further with her room.

There, in my kitchen, was a puddle. There, beneath my mains sink tap was a leak. A nice, fat, blobby, drippy leak that had obviously already spent all morning trickling down the pipe and getting the cheap and perfunctory 100% chipboard sink unit to a state of super saturation. The shelf inside is bowed and the plastic coating has curled back off the main strut, its that bad.

I know the stopcock is in the huge airing cupboard which is situated off the bedroom hallway, but so is a whole lot more than things being aired - all the towels, all the bedding, vacuum packed summer gear, boxes of coat hangers, you name it. I think my wedding dress is in there somewhere. If the shelves werent in there you could walk right in, even the old and defunct immersion heater is installed to one side of the door. It needs a light fitting.

Oh, and even if I knew which tap was which and where to start hunting for it in there, I can't actually reach the door that well, for teddies and stuff, which are taking up all the floorspace I would have used to fling down towels etc.

Meanwhile I don't have time to move these items as I am bailing out the kitchen unit, swapping baking trays in the gap every five minutes and filling a mop bucket with their contents.

Husband is on his way home. Two pairs of hands would be really useful and I look forward.

This post was brought to you in fits and starts!