Goodness me, I am grubby.
I am so sawdusty that it is billowing off me in clouds whenever I move, despite having tried my best to bash it off outside.
We have started the nastiest and most dreaded part of the renovation project, being taking the floor up in the bedroom to lay the pipes for the new kitchen.
This means that we have had to empty the bedroom.
Our bedroom is tiny. There is a double bed in it, and we have just about got room to walk around it and open a drawer, if we are careful not to step backwards. I do not mind this because I am a bit of a minimalist when it comes to hoovering, but it does mean that things are rather a squeeze.
Today we emptied everything out of it, except the bed, which has just been shunted against the wall.
The bed is staying there because the house is full and the only other place to put it is the front garden. We are not expecting rain, but all the same probably we should not move out there. I do not wear any pyjamas in bed, and I think it might upset the people walking past to find the early-morning bargains in the Co-op. Also it would squash the newly-planted sunflowers and the neighbours are very tolerant but would still think we were weird.
Even without moving the bed there was still a very lot of stuff to be moved. The wardrobe was full inside it, underneath it and on the top of it, as was the chest of drawers. Even the sides of it were occupied, I had stuck a poem on it, written by Lucy before she entered her teens, and which has never ceased to enchant me because of her ingenious rhyming of ‘experience’ with ‘apper(i)ence’.
The very horrible thing about having a tiny bedroom is that you can’t easily move things to clean it, because there are lots of other things in the way, and so obviously I don’t bother.
It is two years since the last time I dragged the bed out, and a mass immigration of spiders had built themselves a huge housing development at the back of it.
Mostly they had already moved on, because the weather conditions at the back of our bed seem to include a permanent, slow rain of fluff and bedroom dust, which can’t be nice even if you are a homeless spider.
In short, there were no terrifying spiders, but there were a very lot of filthy cobwebs, weighted down with dust, and awful black grime and stuck to some of the black mouldy bits.
It was not a cheering discovery. It filled the hoover twice.
Mark hauled the wardrobe out. It is a massive black oak affair, inherited from my grandparents, and weighs so much that it has to be dismantled before it will budge an inch.
Between us we dragged everything downstairs.
I have been looking speculatively at the chest of drawers and the wardrobe for some time. They are from the very earliest days of mass-production, and they are splendid, heavy and solid, which is why they are still here, almost a hundred years after they were first dove-tailed together.
The thing that has been bothering me is the colour.
They had been stained a dark brown colour, and varnished, many, many years ago.
This morning when we hauled them outside we could see in the sunshine that the varnish had chipped and peeled in lots of places. Also I know that I ought to love them because they are historical artefacts and have their own home-furnishing story to tell, but actually I have never liked them very much. They have squatted darkly in the bedroom for years, determinedly absorbing light like household-sized black holes.
I looked at them again this morning.
Whilst Mark bashed floorboards about and swore in the bedroom, I spent the day in the back yard, listening to the swifts calling their piping summer calls, and sanding the varnish and stain off the chest of drawers.
I grew more and more excited as I did it.
Underneath the flaking bashed varnish and the ancient black woodstain was the most beautiful piece of honey-coloured furniture. I could hardly believe that I have owned it for all of these years and not looked at it.
It has a warm oaky glow to it. It is bright and beautiful and will look wonderful in our bedroom.
We have had neighbours popping round to the back gate all day, to see what I have been doing in the yard, and we have talked and laughed and shared our adventures. We took the dogs out this morning, and walked through bluebell woods and gazed at blue skies. We have built things and done things and basked in the sunshine.
Today I have become joyful about owning my own furniture.
I love this lockdown.
