Picnic By The Motorway

Not a very good quality shot I know, but I posted this on Twitter the other day and figured you guys might want to see how our doors turned out… so here you go:

Hi you guys. Apologies for being slack.

This entry isn’t going to be witty and colourful because today I came down with the sickness and I’m struggling to put my words in the correct order, let alone be  clever about it.

I really want to be able to show you photos of the work we’ve done on the bedrooms but progress is slow, and I don’t want to show you until all the boxes are ticked. Since we last spoke the blinds have gone up (I’m really happy with them) and we’ve bought hinges and ordered door handles, but the doors themselves are still leaning against the hall walls.

We realised that we can’t really seal the doors while the weather is so bad as we don’t have a space inside that’s big enough to coat them and then dry them with decent ventilation. Not having doors is driving me crazy, so we’re just going to hang them in the meantime and then seal them when spring comes to town. I’m hoping that we can get them up this week because it’s really flippin weird not having doors. Especially when it comes to going to the loo.

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I wrote all that yesterday, and then I guess I just gave up, rolled over and went to sleep. Today involved a lot more of the same – I took the day off work in the hope of kicking this cold, but it just got worse throughout the course of the day. Come evening time I had convinced myself that I’d developed some sort of fatal aneurism because I was experiencing a headache like I’d never known, but after a few hours and a few painkillers my head is feeling much better. Am not going to die after all.

It’s getting late and I’d like to make it into work tomorrow, so I should probably tuck myself up in bed. Hope you guys are doing okay!

I am pleased to report that we have our bedroom back, and stepping out of bed in the mornings onto brand new soft, springy carpet is bliss. Man, that sounds so lame.

While we were in the process of fixing up the bedrooms we decided to see if there was anything interesting going on underneath the veneer panels on our interior doors. I know, doesn’t that just sound like a riot of a time? Well it’s good news my friends, because underneath those nasty veneers we found these gorgeous solid Rimu paneled doors. We sent them off to get stripped and now we’re drying them out so that we can seal them next weekend and re-hang them.

This means we are currently doorless – which is making for a very cold house. We’re also window-covering-less in both the bedrooms. We’ve constructed a crude blanket/dining table alternative in the master bedroom while we eagerly await the arrival of our new blinds. We’ve ordered those fancy blinds that use cellular honeycomb technology or some shit. They’re supposed to be good insulation-wise and they’ll have a nice clean classic look. Nevermind that I now have to start selling my body in order to afford them. JOKE. Did I really have to point out that was a joke? Probably not.

In other equally uninteresting news, as I type I am waiting for some dough to finish proving so I can bung it in the oven and hopefully produce a delicious loaf of homemade bread. I say “hopefully” because this is my very first attempt at baking bread so there’s a high probability things won’t go according to plan. Heck, up until a few days ago I didn’t have a clue what it meant to “prove” dough, and even today I had to google “knocking back dough”.

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(The stars are to indicate passing of time, just in case you are not familiar with the conventions of children’s storybooks)

Okay, so since I wrote that I have completed the bread-making, and here is a little photo essay of the process:

Overall I’m pretty happy with my first ever loaf of bread. It was a little stodgier than it should be, but hey, it was my first go so cut me some slack yeah?

Have you had a crack at cooking/baking something intimidating lately? How did you get on?

Also, sorry for leading you up the garden path with my rather literal blog title. No bebe to report I’m afraid.

Crappy tradesmen can kiss my ass. Not literally of course.

One of the light bulbs in the dining room exploded without warning tonight.

We bought new fluffy white towels and some flannelette sheets today.

The carpet is being installed tomorrow.

The ad for Bridesmaids on the telly doesn’t do the movie justice. It’s rather good.

I gave myself a French Manicure yesterday and it is totally passable.

What about you?

Whoops, I didn’t mean for a fortnight to pass between entries. And after promising to write more often as well… I’m such an arse.

I guess I have been taking advantage of  the fact I don’t have to write so regularly, though there have definitely been moments of late when I’ve thought (and even said out loud) “if I still had a blog I’d write about this”. Except that I do still have a blog. Must remember that.

Leroy is staying with us now, and he hasn’t been too much trouble. In a week and a half he has pee’d twice and pooped once inside, but only on the lino so no biggie really. That’s a vast improvement on when he was permanently living with us and would pee and poop inside on a daily basis. He’s been getting on fine with Stella, and they only seem to go for each other’s throats occasionally.

I write to you from my bed in the lounge. It’s been nearly four weeks since our life went all topsy turvy because we moved all our bedroom furniture into the lounge, and half the lounge furniture into the dining room,  and all the spare room furniture into the study. The bedrooms will be painted tomorrow, and the carpet goes down next Monday. Then we can move back into our bedroom and I will bow down to the God of Home Renovation and thank him for finally showing us mercy.  That is to say, I am over being displaced.

Sleeping in the lounge has made everything about life all a bit weird. For some reason it’s harder to keep my normal routine and it’s also difficult to keep the house clean and tidy. Joel thinks it might be because our bed is facing the opposite direction to what it normally does and it’s messing with my head.

Hey, here’s something, the builders threw away our blinds from the bedrooms. Seriously, what the heck, right? We were planning on replacing them with curtains eventually but they didn’t know that, and we certainly weren’t planning on having to replace them quite so soon. They had taken down the blinds to do their building-y stuff, and then just hiffed them out with all the other renovation rubbish – presumably by accident. So yesterday we looked into some new options for window furnishing, and HOLY HECK window dressings have increased a lot since my days working at Levene’s. Suffice to say, all the reno work we’re doing is costing more than we anticipated. This is not new information to anyone who has ever undertaken any home improvement activity of course.

Doing up the bedrooms has done my head in. I can’t imagine what fun will be in store when we get around to tackling the bathrooms and kitchen. My eyes glaze over and throat closes up a little at the thought.

Okay, it’s 11.42am and Joel is busy sanding in the bedrooms while I am still in my PJs, so I’d best get up and give him a hand. Gah – what a shit way to spend a beautiful sunny Sunday. The novelty of DIY-ing has definitely worn off.

Please tell me your renovation stories so I don’t feel so alone, okay? I shall leave you with a shot of the spare room at the height of the destruction:

Well something pretty awesome happened on Friday night…

I won an award. More specifically, I won a Canon Media Award for Best Online Commentary/Blog for The Girls Guide. This is a very big deal to me because I devoted a lot of time and headspace to that blog for three years, and I haven’t won anything since I was twelve, so yeah, a big deal for sure.

There wasn’t an opportunity to do a little thank you speech at the awards because they rattle through the many categories at an incredible pace, but if I had been able to step up to the mic I would have thanked you lot. I’m not sure that many ex-Girls Guide readers are now visiting this blog, but for those of you who have been following my ramblings from there to here… THANK YOU.

I know I haven’t blogged much lately, but that’s because things have been going on. Our house is in disarray because we are doing up the bedrooms. All the furniture from our room and the spare room is littered around the house. We’re sleeping in the lounge (which is as close as I’ll ever get to being allowed a telly in the bedroom) and everything is all topsy turvy. It will be a few weeks before we can move back into our bedroom, and I think when that happens I will likely cuddle the new carpet and kiss the new walls.

Work has also been busy, but is now looking more settled.

So – without making any rash promises – I should be popping in here more often from now on.

How are you?