Small Job, Big Task

As part of sparkly VikLit’s happy bloghop, Celebrate The Small Things, I’ve been challenged to talk about the small things which make us happy. And I happen to have some big news about a small project which took on unprecedented proportions but is today, finally, finished.* It’s my beautiful, re-painted, re-furbished and inflated (it really wasn’t this big before) study. And its wonderful calm and cleanliness is making me supremely happy. Work, you say? Bring it on!

*Ok, it isn’t completely finished, (I only started on the project five months ago and did you ever hear about Rome?) as my notice boards still need to be hung up. Essential as they are, they will make the study seem a little more cluttered again so today I’m going to call it finished and show you a picture before we all start to unpick the good work.

  

Shameful! Click to see how it got quite so bad.

‘Sorting Out The Study’ had been on our to-do list since we moved into this house eight years ago and finally, we had a date: December 2012. Meanwhile, in November, I would, ‘clear it out’. I took the job very seriously, sifting through the junk, every photo and every piece of paper in my determination to keep only the absolutely essential. The five months the task took I blame on the ‘photo box’, reams of my teenager’s pre-school artwork, my slightly baffling need to keep copies of every freelance project ever worked and several notes to boot and, ah yes, the diaries I wrote between the age of 13 and 23. But all that work! It would be such a shame if nobody read them from cover to cover, wouldn’t it?

New desk beginnings.

There was a gremlin in our plans. With the hugely expensive debacle of the boiler in December, as detailed in A Damp and a Freeze A Damp and a Freeze, I’d put the new study on the *back-burner* for a while. However, my very lovely and equally handy husband, who likes few things more than an excuse to browse an internet auction site which begins with ‘E’ and ends in ‘bay’, secretly sourced some end-of-line wood officially assigned to kitchen work surfaces and set about building a desk and shelving. He paid £400 for the wood. The nice man at the wood merchant’s, who agreed to saw the pieces down to size for a few pennies in the ‘beer pot’, assured hubbie, with much in-taking of breath and nose-tapping, that we would normally have paid five times as much.

Nearly there.

With some careful planning of how to re-use parts of the old desk and re-arrange some of the existing cupboards, and with the purchase of one pot of paint and two packs of dye for the curtains, the entire job came to less than £500. Wasn’t that the budget for Changing Rooms? And not a staple in sight.

Et voila! Note to self: tidy pc cables.

Every day’s a school day, as my French friend frequently quotes and this is what I’ve learnt, or perhaps been reminded of, over the past five months of the Study Job.

Even if the tax man says, ‘Keep This’ with a demonic point of his stubby cigar of a finger, it doesn’t mean you have to keep a record of every pencil ever bought since 1998. Ditto electricity statements, last year’s totally defunct house insurance and the MOT certificate for the car you sold three years ago.

It’s so much easier to discard children’s artwork if it can be left alone for ten years after its production (NB. Factor browsing and cooing time into its disposal).

Photos which do not make it to the photo album do not need to be destroyed and thus should not heap guilt onto the shoulders of the principal house keeper on every sight of the bulging box. Ok, boxes. Indeed, the small house required to store them should be off-set against the great waves of reminiscent joy on their re-discovery. However, easy access is not required, and frankly not conducive to the industrious purpose of a study, so a dusty corner of the loft might be a more suitable place for their housing (loft conversions may be possible).

A4 plastic wallets were of far superior quality in the good old days, as were cardboard index dividers. Gosh, things were made to last in the much maligned nineties!

Notice boards benefit from a clear out, rather than an additional box of pins.

It’s ok not to be able to get rid of cherished favourite novels but they don’t need to be on sight for you to know they’re there. Double rows of books are perfectly acceptable.

Just because something doesn’t have a specific purpose, doesn’t mean it does not have a place in a room where many hours are spent. Although, for the greater good, it is reasonable to fabricate a use to help the husband’s understanding – the door hanging heart, for example, would it double up as a stencil?

I have a lot of notebooks. I’ve spoken of my love of notebooks here before. It will be a sad day for me if I-pads, smartphones, tablets etc. etc. usurp the art of hand-writing. I know I should embrace the times but I’ve always been something of a luddite, way before I reached three score years and something. Besides, they do look pretty, don’t they?

I hope you’ve had a happy week and may all your projects be fun ones which unexpectedly take half of the allocated time!

Flowers

Still in my pyjamas, ironing school uniform and admiring the precise angle on which last night’s left over washing-up had been stacked tight in the sink, I heard the doorbell. It was 7.30am.  I suspected it would be one of my eldest’s daughter’s friends at the door, asking with a text-book politeness whether we had any porridge oats for the domestic sciences’ flapjack baking later or nail varnish remover for fear of those pink, chipped nails attracting a negative.

But it was better than that, sweethearts that my daughter’s friends are, it was a tiny woman carrying an enormous bouquet of flowers. They were mainly gerberas, happy flowers, I call them; my favourites.  I really didn’t deserve any but gosh, I’d welcome them with open arms.

‘Thank you,’ I said. “You shouldn’t have!’ Granted, it wasn’t my wittiest line but I hadn’t yet had my three cups of tea.  The lady didn’t even flinch, merely continued to search for something in the delivery note.  “Can’t believe they’re for me,” I tried again.  It was a rhetorical question really, my husband not being prone to receiving mysterious bunches of flowers and my children also yet to discover the delights.

The small lady didn’t speak, simply shook her head. ‘They’re for number ten, will you take them for her?’ she asked eventually, more than a little gruffly.

“Oh, right,” I said, “Didn’t think I’d done anything to …”

“Is that alright then?” she asked again.  “I’ve got loads of deliveries this morning,” and thrust a pen and flimsy note into my hand to be signed.

I did take the flowers.  Miranda at number ten was very happy to receive them.  She gave me a single gerbera for my troubles which now has pride of place in an especially rinsed milk bottle on my kitchen window sill.

As I walked back over the road, I thought about the delivery person who was clearly having A Bad Day.  Part of the flower giving is surely to complete the process of making the recipient feel special, rather than wondering why they bothered to get up that morning.  And I decided that, whilst I’d hate to criticise when untold disasters could have befallen the lady before she left her house, there are certain jobs where Bad Days are not allowed and delivering flowers is probably one of them.  Grumpy holiday rep? Not what you signed up to.  Presenters? There’s only one way Chris Evans is getting out of bed at 4 every morning. I’d think I’d feel short changed if the midwife had delivered my babies into my arms and spoken about how fed up she was with the awful place the world was, these days.  And then there are motivational speakers. You never see them in a bad mood, chance would be a fine thing.

Thankfully, I have a job where I can get away with being incredibly grumpy.  I can be absolutely foul to myself and nobody but the study walls and the pc needs to know.  In fact, I’m quite regularly terribly rude to my computer but that’s another story.

How about you? Can you get away with your smile slipping?  Or do you have to wait until you get home for it to droop a little?