Jonathan Dodd‘s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
My life is never simple. The upside of this is that I never seem to get bored. However, I dream about getting bored. The mere idea of the concept of boredom is like a half-remembered school holiday glimpsed through rosy-tinted lenses back across the decades. Boredom would be my luxury item on my Desert Island.
The downside is that apparently simple ideas grow like bindweed and get out of hand in no time at all. Every new activity develops into a tangled morass of different things to be done, each of which turns out to require lots of effort and time and usually a degree of discomfort.
A long incommunicado cruise
I often wonder if we’re alone in this. I fantasise about circumstances in which a simple idea just happens with a smoothness that makes it virtually unnoticeable. The only way I can imagine this happening usually involves a large amount of money, a whole team of people, and a long incommunicado cruise while it’s going on. Sadly such facilities aren’t available despite my best efforts so far, and I have to make do with what’s available.
The most recent – and on-going – example of this is our decision to move house. It sounds simple. But the first thing we asked ourselves was whether our current house was in a fit state to sell without potential buyers demanding money off because of the state of a long list of things we’ve not yet got round to.
A Round Tuit
A friend of mine once gave me a present. It was a small round bowl with text on the centre, going roughly like this – “This is A Round Tuit. You always said you would get A Round Tuit, and here it is.” I keep it on my bedside table and put small things in it that I need to find a home for. I’ve used it a lot in my life.
We’re not lazy people. We work hard upkeeping and improving our house. It just so happens that it has a lot of very good points, and a few interesting quirks. Every job that involves removing one thing, whether it’s paint or wallpaper of plywood or floorboards, reveals a whole new set of surprising things that have to be done before the original thing can be completed. And these things take time.
Just the usual things
Anyway, we made a list of things we really must do before putting the house on the market. The first thing was the replastering of the kitchen ceiling and the living room that we had been putting off. It seemed like a simple idea. Just get a plasterer in and then paint the new surfaces. But both rooms were crammed full of things. Just the usual things. Tables, chairs, settees, shelves, more shelves and more shelves, full of books and CDs and nick-nacks and treasured possessions. And ornaments. And pictures on the walls. And rugs. And numerous other things. OK, we thought. We’re going to have to move these out or the plasterer will never be able to reach the walls and ceiling.
So we packed and carried everything upstairs to the next floor. We pushed up everything in those rooms and filled up the spaces with the contents of the downstairs rooms. Now upstairs began to resemble an overstuffed second-hand shop, where you have to squeeze between stacks of things to get from one side of a room to another. We perched on one side of the settee to watch one half of the TV in the evenings and climbed over the end of the bed to get at clothes for the next day. And we couldn’t find anything anywhere anymore.
Our beautiful smooth new walls and ceilings
We found an excellent plasterer who is also a very nice man. He didn’t mind moving the bits of furniture that we couldn’t get up the stairs and working round them. He did an excellent job coping with walls that were in various states and made of various combinations of materials with various surfaces and coverings. In a few days he had completed the job and we were able to contemplate our beautiful smooth new walls and ceilings. Thank you Pat. Job well done.
Of course we had forgotten that we couldn’t simply move everything back. First we had to wait until everything was dry. Then we had to start painting. We’re still doing that. The next thing will be to sand the floor and revarnish it, then we’ll have to get new skirting board and attach that. Then the kitchen will have to have new flooring and all the cupboards and equipment will have to be removed bit by bit and replaced on top of the new floor. Then we’ll be able to bring everything down again from upstairs and put it all back.
Things that will mysteriously not fit any more
The new rooms will look lovely and we’ll be really pleased, as well as relieved that it’s over and frustrated because there’ll be things that have disappeared and other things that will mysteriously not fit any more where they used to go. And we’ll wonder why we bought a house in the first place that needed so much doing to it. And it’ll make the rest of the house look shabby…
I’ve decided that we should either sell everything and move into an empty house with a bed and a couple of chairs, or just go for a one-way cruise.
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
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