Tanya's Blog

Ever get the feeling where there is too much to do and no time to do it in? My life is so cluttered with stuff at the moment that I just want to throw the whole lot away and start again. Essentially I’m disorganised and when a disorganised person has to pack a household up and move to another one – it gets interesting. Wouter told me about a dream he had over the weekend where he was moving and every time he opened a cupboard door there was more stuff – That’s my life at the moment!!!  Of course I’m freaking out about how much packing and unpacking I have to do – whereas Wouter has the real worries – getting the house to a point where we can actually live in it.

We do have our priorities straight though.

Yep, we have books on the book shelf.  I’m a huge Terry Pratchett fan – have been for years and I have every one of his discworld series.

I was fortunate enough to meet the man when he came out to South Africa in 1998 for a book signing tour.  What a delightful person.  At the time of his visit I was involved in amateur dramatics and we were putting on a production of Wyrd Sisters – he came to a cast party of ours and signed my t-shirt!! He reckoned I was the sexiest demon he’d seen *preen*,  ‘course that was a long time ago.  it was devestating to hear about his early onset of altzheimers and all I can hope is that he writes a ton of books before it is too late.

We have had a bit of a set back with our other book shelves, we assembled the one unit on Friday and I looked at it and said the fateful words “are those shelves wide enough for a book?”

Turns out they’re a couple of millimetres too short for even the smallest paperback. Oops. We have two of them that now have pride of place in each of the girls bedrooms. They’re going to make really pretty ornament stands.

We went furniture shopping on Saturday – browsed in all the second hand furniture shops down main road Plumstead and surrounding areas. Bought a desk for Tamsyn, saw a gorgeous wardrobe in oak with lots of drawers, not much hanging space though. Found another wardrobe in a different shop which would suit Wouter’s needs and a really lovely looking dressing table, again in oak. Wouter has some pictures which he’ll hopefully post on his blog.  The way we see it – if we were to have wardrobes built for us, they would cost as much or even more than the second hand ones, the quality wouldn’t be as good and they certainly would not look as magnificent as these do. We measured the area in our bedroom and the wardrobe, dressing table should fit in perfectly down my side of the room and Wouter’s wardrobe should fit too.  Oh and we found two oregon pine pedestals for the bed as well. All in all a very fruitful shopping expedition (not a cheap one though).  I have more hanging space in my scrapbook room which I can utilise for clothes and the way I see it, this is the impetus I need to throw out clothes which I’m never going to wear again (the fact that I can’t fit into them anymore, is entirely beside the point).

We have also organised for the carpets to be installed on Friday – can’t wait for that.  Of course we have to clear out all the crud before they can do that – this week is going to get busy.

Last night we assembled one of the cupboard units Wouter ordered from Lansdowne Boards, would have assembled more if the twits had supplied all the correct stuff – but I’m sure Wouter will wax lyrical about that. I was an integral part of the assembling – vacuuming up the bits of sawdust Wouter was generating and I am super impressed with the vacuum we have. Practically took the paint off the walls it sucks so hard. Actually I did do a bit more than just vacuum – we had to assemble the unit upright as it would have been too big to assemble on the floor and then lift into place, any cupboard that Wouter has to stand on tiptoes to access the top shelf – is large!

It’s going to be our linen cupboard and after a bit of discussion we opted to leave out the other four shelves would have made the gaps between shelves far too narrow – not that we have a lot of linen but no-one wants to have to force stuff into a tiny space.

Assembling the unit was fun most of the time I was perched on a bar stool holding parts of it up whilst Wouter fixed everything in place, as you can see by the picture – there wasn’t a lot of space to move around in.

We’re putting a bookshelf on the side of the cupboard and I suspect there shall be a few minor altercations over whose books will get pride of place, between us, we have A LOT of books.

The glass mosaic tiles arrived for our bathroom as well, can’t wait to see the end result. I’m a trifle disapointed in my choice of main tile for the bathroom – it’s more blue than green – but I figure with all the glass and accessories – the green theme should prevail. Apparently according to some magazine (can’t remember the name) green is the hottest shade in decorating right now – woohoo, for once I’m on top of things. Actually I couldn’t give a rat’s *beep* as to what is in or not, I just like the colour green.