Improvers

We have been Improving the living room all day.

Mark has been tiddling about building walls and shelves, and I have been painting things. 

It was not a very long day, because we did not get up until one o’clock, and then obviously we had got to come out to work tonight.

We eventually got to bed at about five o’clock this morning. I helped the nodding off process along a bit with a handful of drugs. 

I have got the sort of irritating cough that keeps waking you up. It was a Christmas present from my father. 

I have got three pillows and a glass of black currant juice and some drugs. This happy combination meant that I slept all the way through last night until somebody rang the doorbell at nine o’ clock this morning.

I do wish that the rest of the world was less enthusiastic about getting out of bed. 

It was some men with a truckload of mirrors.

People who leap out of bed in the pre-dawn hours always seem to look very disapproving when they bounce up your garden path only to discover that you are answering the door in your dressing gown and your eyes are stuck together.

They left the mirrors and buzzed off, full of virtuous wakefulness. 

We thought that we might get up and make a start on the day, but we didn’t. We went back to bed instead. 

The next time we stirred it was noon. 

It was nice to wake up and think that we had got some new mirrors waiting downstairs. We went and had a little look, like children on Christmas morning. 

They are lovely.

We have not stuck them on the walls yet.

There has been some getting ready to do first.

Before we can stick the mirrors up we need to move the grandfather clock, which we can’t do until we have taken the broken plug socket out from behind it. 

We can’t move the plug socket, because first we need to move the fridge, which we can’t do because there is absolutely loads of clutter on the top of it. 

First we need a new shelf for the clutter.

Fortunately we are engaged in creating a handy new cupboard. 

Mark spent the day building a shelf in it.

He hasn’t finished yet. He had to put the wall there first. 

This is made difficult by the detail that our ceiling is about four inches lower in the middle than it is at the edges. Once upon a time, long before we bought it, our house collapsed a very little bit. We know that it did because when we moved in to it, it had lots of disturbing cracks all over the place.

Mark said that there was nothing to worry about, and fixed them all a long time ago. It was quite difficult. He had to build a lever to force the stairs back together, because there was a huge split in the post that runs up the centre of the house. It is not there any more. 

The house stopped collapsing about a hundred years ago, and does not collapse in these modern, more stable, times. Mark has mended everything so well that if you did not happen to have a spirit level in your pocket, you would never know that once bits of it almost wobbled away.

Now, however, when you are building a wall you cannot just nail up two four foot wide boards. You have got to nail up two four foot wide boards and then one long thin triangle of board, which starts off at four inches wide and diminishes to a point somewhere near the far side of the ceiling. 

It makes Mark swear a lot whilst he is doing even the smallest of building jobs.

 Whilst he was swearing and sawing things up, I painted things. I painted the drying rack.

We want to move this. It hangs in the middle of the living room and is very handy but unsophisticated. I bet the Queen never has to welcome visitors underneath rows and rows of gently steaming knickers. 

Once we have got a covered yard and a conservatory then it will be easy to dry washing, but at the moment we haven’t, and so the drying rack Must Go On. 

It looked much better when I had finished. We have got one colour of woodwork paint for the entire house, which is appropriately but mysteriously called Line Dried.

I like the names that paint manufacturers choose. Paint is never called things like Yellow, which is the real colour of Line Dried. Paints are called things like Tutu, or Fairy Cake. These names give you a nice feeling but don’t  tell you much about the colour. Better still, if you buy Farrow & Ball paint, which we don’t, then it is called properly upmarket things, like Oxford Stone, or Manor House Grey, so that you know you are getting your middle-class money’s worth.

We don’t buy Farrow & Ball paint because the colours are really dull.

Today we painted the new cupboard.

It is purple, and we are going to paint the shelves pink.

It will look nice with the Line Dried woodwork and the orange curtains.