Downstairs of our house is almost finished – needs shelving, new floor, new window, but other than that, it’s done. It looks lovely, it looks .. grown up, somehow, which is not like us. The bathroom looks a tad post-apocalyptic, but we know where we’re going with it, and it will be really nice when done.
But the bedroom and study. Oh dear. We have Too Much Stuff, and the bedroom has been a bit of a junk room since we moved in, and I just hate it. There are three huge boxes of vinyl records in there, waiting for Pete to rip them to MP3, together with his Manticore Mantra turntable and his Moth record cleaning machine, but none of this has been touched for years, because there was no access to a powerful enough computer anywhere near where they lived. The path to the door from his side of the bed was narrow, and paved with obstacles, though my side is OK.
The room is difficult – the chimney breast isn’t quite centred, there are two lovely tall windows where the sun floods in, but their sills are low so we can’t really put anything in front of them, and indeed Pete likes them like that. One window is only about 25cm from the corner, so we can’t put fitted wardrobes down the obvious wall. It’s all a bit difficult to plan.
The study has also become a bit of a dumping ground, and I don’t find it a very sanguine working environment. Pete is less fussy than me, of course 🙂 I walked into the bedroom yesterday afternoon and something just snapped – I felt I had to at least get it tidied up, and had a bit of a rant about all the clutter, and how I hated the rooms being “studenty”. Pete responded with “well, I don’t want them sterile”, which caused a bit of a frosty moment, because I worked really, really hard on downstairs, and didn’t think it was remotely sterile, so a bit of back pedalling and clarification was done!
We started measuring things, and discussing things, and after a fair bit of hard work, by 10.30 p.m. the turntable and cleaning machine are in the study, and they’ll be hooked up to my big Mac Pro which has oodles of processing power and disk space, for ripping to commence. I’ve set up a user account for Pete to do that. Space was made by firstly moving his big toolchest to somewhere more sensible, then moving the filing cabinet to where that was, beside my desk, thus creating the space for the record stuff. I tackled the bedroom – his big chest of drawers did fit where I hoped it might, beside the bed. The three boxes of records have been stacked up and an old curtain draped over them. I’ll construct one of the deconstructed shoe racks for the many pairs of footwear owned by a man who “doesn’t understand shoes”, but yet seems to have masses of them.
There’s still some work to do in the study, but we’re getting there, and the bedroom is a lot nicer – you can actually get a sense of space in there, as indeed you should, as it’s about 4m x 3.4m. Onwards and upwards – it’ll be lovely when it’s finished. As we keep saying.