Farewell to some ugly stuff

Posted on | January 12, 2012 | 2 Comments

Thank you all for your comments on Thing 1′s demise. There’s nothing like pets to stir up strong emotions in people.

I still miss him. I look for him every time I go into our bedroom, and I miss the way (annoying at the time but sweet now I look back) that he drooled whenever he purred.

We have gone from three pets to one in less than a year, so it’s a relatively quiet household.

Munchkin is more than making up with it, however, with his growing vocabulary of battlefield sounds: guns, explosives, and the yelps of the wounded. And I am bemused to witness that the same phonetic array – exactly the same – is shown by each of his male friends too.

Munchkin is now five. (I blinked and I’m sure I missed a few of these last years.) His desire to constantly be in battle and constantly be leaping either from or towards a ship or spacecraft or fantasy island has led to some discussions  in our house lately. We know we need to replace our sofas, and it’s partly Munchkin’s fault. He found a thinned-out area of leather on one of them, worked at it until it ripped, then worked at that rip until it got bigger and a load of stuffing came out. The other sofa, meanwhile, with four back cushions and a few more scatter ones, is lucky to actually hold its cushions for more than five seconds in a day. They are usually to be found on the floor, either because Munchkin wants more space on the sofa to jump, or because he is constructing a bridge to the coffee table, or a series of stepping stones on a make-believe river that is the rug.

And so after discussing our ideal, perfect sofa, we agreed that that was a daft idea, that with a kid so bouncy he makes Tigger look like a sloth, we needed something mid-priced: hard-wearing but something we’ll want to throw away in ten years when Munchkin has (please God) stopped bouncing.

.

I have to wait a whole eight weeks for it to arrive though, this ‘Sinclair’ sofa from La-Z-Boy.

Meanwhile, take a look at these, the latest things checked off of my DIY to-do list thanks to the wonderful, unmatchable, invincible Ms Fix-It.

Last week we turned this:

into this:    

Yeh, ugly ceiling fan in our bedroom that we have lived with for six whole years got replaced with the famed one that travelled from here to northern Arizona and back via Phoenix. Remember that story?

We did the same thing in Munchkin’s bedroom too. I say ‘we’ but really all I did was put the blades together and unscrew a few screws in the old fan. It was Ms Fix-It work (for which read ‘my brain doesn’t stretch that far’.) Ceiling fans are a complicated business (for instructions see the instructions booklet, definitely not me). Electricity is. This fact was reinforce to me today when an electrician came to do a few jobs in the house. He blinded me with science. I think it was deliberate. There was a slight smirk on his face when he uttered phrases like:

“We’ll have to convert to a GFI on that one.”

and: “We’ll have to run conduit. Is that OK”

Hnnnnh? Blowed if I know, mate. Just do whatever the hell you have to do. Make it work. Don’t blow the house up. And no, you can’t take the dog as payment. (Seriously, he did offer to, so sold was he on The Mutt.)

And so, some more things checked off my list, like a plug whose wiring was set too far in for an outlet cover to go on. It finally got it cover. Yahoo!

The major job today, though, was removing this old cupboard in my now office.

In typical bitsy fashion I had repainted the whole room several years ago, painted over some wood panelling along one wall, and neglected to remove this cupboard, still with its 1950s tongue-and-groove wood. Nice, hardy workmanship (Ms Fix-It and I found out during demo) but godawful to look at, and very darkening.

Here is the space a couple of hours later:

Yeh, of course not perfect. Still have to paint the walls and get rid of that big bit of black cable that our TV company so kindly put there. But I feel like the room is already a mile wider. Ah, you say, but what about the contents of the cupboard? It held a multitude of light bulbs, a hoover and a mop and bucket. There had to be an upside to the death of our cat, and it is this: the removal of his food, treats etc made space in a kitchen cupboard (for the bulbs), and the removal of his litter tray from the hall cupboard turned it back into a storage closet.

Still would rather have my cat back though. :/

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