It’s a trip more than 18 months in the making. 18 months of planning and preparation, hopes and anticipation, making plans then changing them then changing them back again. Tickets have been bought, reservations made, details checked and double checked. 18 months of planning on an epic scale and all held together by The Planning Binder…
So why, one week away, do I feel so completely disorganised?
Maybe it’s because the house, as ever, is in chaos. Having carefully selected a trustworthy house/pet sitter (or rather our sort of trustworthy best man!), the race is on to put the place in some kind of order acceptable for guests. I’m not just talking cleaning here – that would be easy. Instead we now have less than one week to rid the house of The Curse.
You might recall The Curse from a previous blog post. If not, here’s a quick recap: in this house, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. When you live here you sort of get used to it – if an asteroid was to hit our street and leave every home untouched but ours, it wouldn’t exactly surprise me. It might be a bit of a shock for a house sitter thought! So the plan was to pull every room apart and check for any hidden problems and head any disasters off at the pass. Good plan, right?
The good news is that so far we have not found any leaks, breakages, ruptures or cracks. Roof tiles appear to be where they should be. The windows and doors are all working. The taps are all still attached. We even have working lights in the hallway. The bad news, however, is that the house is in total disarray. Ever notice that when you clear out one room, the others miraculously appear more cluttered?
It’s my own fault. I would insist on keeping every CD, DVD and book I’ve ever bought, none of which I have the storage space to accommodate. Keeping old movie magazines is also a bad idea – putting aside the clutter, every time I find one I have to sit down and read it again. It's not exactly speeding up the process!
We’re almost there, though. Another few hours work and we will have finished tidying the spare room, a room used for storing anything and everything that makes Hogwarts’ Room of Requirement look minimalist. After that it’s just the living room, the kitchen, the hall…
We have six more days to go – plenty of time…right?
No comments:
Post a Comment