Stuck Inside a Cloud

We don’t have a washing machine yet and haven’t had one since we moved back into the house on 19th December. You may be aware that there are several options available to you in this situation;


A Go to the laundrette

B Visit friends and ask if you can use their washing machine.

C Pop your laundry into a large jiffy bag and post it to your mother.

D Febreeze

E Extend the amount of time you wear your clothes for (a lot).

F Keep buying more clothes.


I won’t tell you which option has been the favourite in this house but we’ve been using an increasingly fluid definition of ‘fresh and clean’. There has even been some sniffing before deciding if one can risk to wear this item of clothing for yet another day and even asking each other to sniff, asking “Is this clean?”. I always have to put a statement at the end of my reports outlining my professional responsibilities to the court. I feel I should now add “This report was written whilst wearing a shirt originally placed in the laundry basket on 16th January, removed on February 2nd and worn again, returned to the laundry and worn again today. I apologise”. Since I largely work from home the dress code has always been fairly relaxed but has now become a health hazard to others.


An issue that had been holding up progress on the house was that we couldn’t find anyone to polish the kitchen’s concrete floor. Three different companies came over and polished a small patch and give a quote. The patches all looked slightly different and one company wanted to charge ten times what another did. The problem was the one of the patches was George Michael and the other was distinctly Andrew Ridgeley (topical reference) so it was an easy decision to make and then Marianna just had to negotiate until they’d relinquished all of their profit. They began on February 28th, thinking it would take four days. However, by the third day it was clear that for some reason they couldn’t achieve the finish on the whole floor that they had some weeks earlier on the patch. A supervisor, manager and then company owner visited and agreed the finish wasn’t good enough and on the fourth day they stripped off the work they’d done and began again. It took them eight days to complete. It looks great but came at the additional cost of damage to the kitchen radiators, damage to the kitchen door when they took it off its hinges and damage to the wall they rested it against.

On the 3rd and 4th of March the carpets were fitted on the first and second floors and stairs. To select the colour Marianna and I went through a process longer than the X Factor auditions which involved many, many samples spread over the floors. It appeared that our carpet fitters were unable to stand upright without leaning on the walls. This is fine but they seemed to have washed their hands with soot before arriving so our white walls were covered with handprints. Also, as the carpets were carried up the stairs they had marked the walls. All of the walls it seemed. Greg, the painter, had advised that some of his lads should come and do touch ups before the carpets were fitted and they did but just forty eight hours later the walls and skirting boards were even more marked than they had been. As overjoyed as I was with how good the carpet looked I found the damage to the walls deflating. The mantra in my head is ‘What a waste of time, money and effort’ and it’s hard to silence. Still, once the carpets were fitted we could live in the whole house. Well, not really because all of our belongings were piled in the dining room and the furniture they might normally be stored in was still in storage.

With the carpets down we could move two bed bases we bought on Ebay some weeks before up to the bedrooms. These were a real bargain. I’d been working away and set an alarm for half past midnight to get up and bid on one of them. No one else was bidding at that time of day so I won it for 99p. When the seller sent me a message about payment he said he’d been selling another but no one had bid on it so I could have that too at no extra charge. I found a courier who collected and delivered them for £30 so for on only £30.99 I had two bed bases worth well over £200. Once the carpets were down we attempted to move them up stairs. But, of course, they wouldn’t fit. After an hour when my mood had gone form a normal one to anger and then to misery we had discovered that, by a few millimetres, they were just too big. We may ask Max if he’ll remove a bedroom window when the scaffolding goes up for the front of the house to be rendered in a month or so. Or sell them on Ebay. Or give them to a local charity.