Juggling
It's been a weekend. I've spent the majority of it building flat-pack furniture, and re-arranging children's bedrooms in preparation for the new school year. New desks, new lamps, new shelving, and the subsequent shake-out of the several-years worth of detritus they have accumulated.
Quite how we managed to go through the six weeks of the school summer holidays, and then finally re-build the kids rooms in the last two days of the holiday is a very good question. Of course we know the answer – I got sent all over the country with work, and my other half ran the local summer camp for everybody else's kids.
After a visit to IKEA yesterday afternoon, I spent the evening building a desk while my other half built a wardrobe. Then while she took our middle daughter to watch a rugby match today, I busied myself with re-arranging her room. This sounds simple on the face of it, but when you figure in a colossal book shelf full of books, a storage unit with a television, DVD player, and Wii on it, and a bed filled with clothes in sliding drawers – all of which needed to switch places around the room, you can imagine the bizarre shape shifting puzzle I had to complete. It took HOURS.
So – over the course of the summer we have finally moved our daughters rooms.
Miss 15 is now downstairs in what used to be the “play room”. It has been gutted, re-decorated, and installed with a new desk, new shelves, new carpet, new wallpaper, and various pieces of furniture migrated from her upstairs bedroom (don't ask how I got the wardrobe down the stairs – I must have been taking Hercules pills that day).
Miss 12 now has the entirity of the room she used to share with Miss 11 – the room I spent today re-arranging, and re-wiring. The audible gasps this evening when she opened the door to her “new room” made it all worth it. She can finally sit at a desk, and use her laptop while listening to the radio.
Miss 11 now has the room vacated by Miss 15. It's not the biggest room, but then she doesn't have much stuff either. We had to buy her a wardrobe from IKEA yesterday – built in-situ by my other half. Her prized posession – a signed Fran Kirby football shirt – now hangs in a frame on the bedroom wall. She too now has a desk for her laptop to live at, complete with a lamp, and chair that's oddly identical to her sister's (the chairs cost 2 each).
It's odd really – the kids rooms are the first to get decorated since they came to live with us 8 years ago. We have held off doing anything to the house until they were older, both out of fear that they would wreck it, and because we simply couldn't afford to decorate. We still can't really, so will probably be living on all the value options from the supermarket over the next few months (and then of course Christmas will arrive, and blow another hole in our bank account).
While writing this (At 10:30pm) the old desktop computer – the one I often refer to as “Trigger's Broom” is re-installing itself with Ubuntu Linux. It has been acting up for weeks, but I finally lost my temper with it late this evening when it took half a minute for the Windows 10 “Open With” dialog to open for a graphics file. I've flip-flopped between Linux and Windows on it for the last year or so – but this may well be the end of that entire argument.
Anyway... it will be 11pm before I know it. Time to go make a hot drink, and think about hitting the sack. Big day for the kids tomorrow. The first day of a new school year. First day at a new school for our youngest, and the slightly scary prospect of a taxi arriving to pick her up.