Whatever you do, do not attempt to put together an Swedish kitchen with your husband unless everything is going well in the marriage. If we didn’t like each other a lot it could have been all over.

There has been a fair bit of swearing and frustration and bickering about which way something is supposed to go. My hands are swollen and sore from having a screwdriver in them for the past four days straight (let’s not even talk about the pelvis), I haven’t been getting much sleep but I do have a few splinters .

We have been hardcore kitchen building.

But I’m actually pretty impressed with us. For the most part we worked harmoniously as a team. We didn’t fuck anything major up. Beefcake only threw a few tantys and I remained hysterical calm and serene throughout the process.

We did a pretty good job and today I have finally unpacked most of the boxes that go into our kitchen. It is not completely finished. We must tile above the benches, we must finish off a couple of other things but we have a usable kitchen and dishwasher. I can feed my family something other than toast and I do not have to wash their dirty dishes. Such joy.

And it is beautiful. I will post pictures tomorrow hopefully but for now I am just totally exhausted. I deserve some internet time and a cup of tea, I think.

The situation, as you may have gathered from the title, is dire. The interent was supposed to go on today. We were too busy* until after business hours to actually check that it was working. It was not. I am using the backup wifi on Beefy’s computer. The stupid help desk person has told us someone will call tomorrow or maybe the day after. This is not satisfactory. I am miserable. I had planned a glorious night of wading through the hundreds of blog entries clogging up my feed reader. So, so sad.

Beefcake’s keyboard has a dreadful action that I loathe and it is larger than mine in order to accomodate his dinner plate hands. I keep hitting the enter key by accident and it is making typing this a complete chore.

So.

Bullet points:

• Move went well, although I have never been more exhausted or sore or swollen pelvised in my life. We shall never move again.
• The new house is slightly more in need of renovation than we had deluded ourselves into believing but it is still lovely and more importantly, it is ours.
• The new house desperately needs a kitchen. The current kitchen consists of two cupboards, a sink and a manky old stove. No benches, no other cupboards. Nothing. We had the ultimate day of shopping high yesterday and purchased super special, very swanky oven, rangehood and dishwasher as well as new kitchen from large Swedish flat-pack icon. Much money was spent. This was quite scary but all in all we are very excited.
• We must now prepare the room and install the kitchen before Beefcake’s leave ends. He returns to work on Monday. We may have our heads up our arses.
• The plumber told us that he would come towards the end of the week to do the plumbing work that needs to be done before we can install the kitchen. We are now both paranoid that he meant next week, which would be an absolute disaster.
• We have no connection for the washing machine either, it really would be a disaster.
• We are okay with DIY. We have renovated two other houses. We do tend to fly by the seat of our pants though**. Pray to the gods of DIY and renovations.
• Pudding was so bored when we were very busy this afternoon that he decided to copy the dog and poo in the back yard. He ran the idea past Beefcake first but was not deterred by being told “no”. I was not best pleased.
• The dog was confused by her new doggy door for the first 24 hours and peed in the house as well as whimpering by our bedroom door that she was busting to go outside at 6am. I was not best pleased.

* Beefcake needed to “chase” channels into the walls to conceal electrical cabling. He did this with an angle grinder. He did not take appopriate steps to protect the contents of the back part of the house from brick dust. It took us four hours to clean up all the gritty red clay dust. Dish pan hands have a new poster girl.

** By fly by the seat of our pants I mean we laugh at the thought of stupid things like planning for prevention of billowing clouds of bright red dust filling the house.

Without jinxing things, I would like to say that we are reasonably organised.

There are teetering towers of boxes lined up against every available wall, shoved under tables and behind doors.

We have ebayed and organised and made a large pile to go to the tip and some for charity.

I have been cleaning. I clean a bit, some muscle group or other spasms, I rest for a bit and then try again.

We are our own worst enemies. We have confidently assured our landlord that he can have the keys back on Friday night. This means the house must be cleaned before we actually move the furniture out of it so that it requires only a cursory sweep and mop here and there once it is empty.

Now our house is not completely filthy, despite what certain dishwasher repairmen* might think. Messy sometimes, yes, but reasonably cleanish usually**,  nevertheless I am sure Friday will be hellish. I have plans within plans. I have it all neatly aligned in my mind. How each phase of the move will go. It will all go to shit on the day but what matters is that I feel serene and organised about the move now.

We drove past the new house today and it looks as though the current owners are nearly moved out. The “for sale” sign has come down. I am so extremely happy with this house. It felt like home from the moment we walked in at the first viewing. To be honest, we had discussed how much to offer before we even saw it in the flesh (should that be brick?). It was always meant to be ours.

The last of the money we had to put towards the purchase came out of our account today. It seems unlikely that it will go wrong now. We both keep grinning and elbowing one another in the ribs. It is a hilarious joke that we have been able to pull this off. We both feel that together we have a rare kind of luck.

Maybe our aspirations are more modest than some but we feel pretty extraordinarily lucky to have our wonderful family and now to have been able to buy a home that we just adore. I feel more calm and settled and right than I have in years.

I didn’t know that I was lacking that but it feels very nice to have found it.

* Dishwasher is completely shafted by the way. Apparently there is some sort of unfixable leak that shorts the machine out every time it runs and then dries out, hence his being able to get it to run yesterday. I almost forgave him his ‘tude, only making gestures and faces behind his back  once or twice (alright, possibly three five times).

**Could I possibly be more non-comittal about the cleanliness of my house than that – “reasonably cleanish usually”- go me!

Thank you for your visit today. I know it was not your fault that when you arrived this morning I was still in my pyjamas. I assumed we would be waiting for you for hours and was not rushing to get dressed. It did enhance what was to be an unbelievably tedious encounter though, didn’t it?

I would just like to say that I was especially impressed by all of your eye rolling and muttering at our description of the dishwasher’s problems. It is sometimes hard for us moronic plebs to avoid irritating the highly talented and gifted, such as yourself. We do try though and to this end, believe it or not, we had checked for a kinked hose ourselves.

It was very sweet that you pulled out the dishwasher filter and scrubbed away at it. I have never felt so festy as I did when you pronounced that it was merely a blocked filter that was preventing our dishwasher from running AT ALL. You managed to get the blasted thing to run, I was forced to concede that it did appear to now be working. You explained, as if speaking to a very small child, that we must clean the dishwasher filter every time we use it and repeatedly told us that you could not stress that enough. We get it, we’re filthy. Oh the shame.

I suggested that you could wait and see if it stopped part way through the cycle, just as it has been when we have managed to get it to run. I felt cowed by your insistence that it was our lazy, periodic filter cleaning that was to blame. No one would behave like that much of a smartarse unless they were sure about it, right?

That’s why, Little Wankywank Wankerson, I was particularly livid when, about six minutes after you left our house, the dishwasher stopped mid-cycle, repeating it’s performance of the last four days. I was thrilled.

The filter is now clean and surprise, the dishwasher still does not work. Let’s hope tomorrow’s visit is more productive, shall we?

From

Stupid Housewife

P.S. I will be ready, the dishwasher is now so shiny you can not look at it directly.

P.P.S. I forgot to thank you for you phone call this afternoon. I loved that you were able to question what I meant by “the dishwasher is not working”. You can’t make it untrue just by refusing to believe me. I have not sabotaged your work, wilfully clogging up the filter just so I could see you again. Trust me, you were just wrong.

I’m not sure what keeps happening to me at the moment. I mean to blog but I end up not being able to find the time. Last night I just lay down for a brief nap when I put Grub to bed and when I woke up it was after midnight. I had a cup of tea and went back to sleep. Pitiful. Although I am not going to poopoo actually being able to sleep with ease. I am in one of my rare insomnia-free phases and I must try to make the most of it.

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Thanks to all who reassured me that my social ineptitude was not as dire as I may have believed. I will take heart and hope that the next playgroup is less stressful.

Speaking of stress, organising this move is beginning to leave me a bit frazzled around the edges. I have successfully pushed my obsessive organising and planning to the back of mind, soothing myself and muttering that I will be allowed to think about that next week, it won’t help to plan it all in minute detail now.

I fear we have come to the end of that phase of my obsessive planning. Now comes the laying awake at night, rehearsing how we will organise it all until I have a minute by minute plan for every person involved.

I am not inflexable, I will happily revise my plan as need arises but it makes me feel oh so virtuous and infinitely more calm if I have lists and lists of lists and a set of jobs for everyone and perhaps a colour coded wall chart. Who knows. I have thought of writing a flow chart so that Beefcake and the children and our one or two helpers will know where they must be and when. Just to streamline things. I can’t rule it out.

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I haven’t written about my Mother’s Day. Mostly because I wouldn’t want any of you to think badly of my mean and ungrateful husband and children. Let me just briefly say that I was underwhelmed by the love that was shown to me. In the end, I did recieve a cookbook, which was purchased by my family at lunchtime on Mother’s Day while I was in the bookshop. Although I was a touch displeased about their lack of appreciation the recipe book is rather nice. This past weekend I made a brownie recipe from the book. I had never made brownies before. They are extremely rich and I would like to curl up in bed with a whole pan of them all to myself. In an attempt to avoid this, I cut the brownies into individual serves and froze them so that we could get them out one at a time and zap them in the microwave. This was a mistake. It may have prevented an initial binge on the weekend but it has not prevented me from returning to the freezer at least once each day so that could have a brownie. I am going to be brave and try to go brownie free tomorrow. Writing it here is meant to harden my resolve. I shall let you know.

Well we were waiting on the house valuation for the bank on order to get our final loan approval. We got word yesterday that the house valuation was “in line with the purchase price”, which I assume means we weren’t stupidly paying too much. Yay! Woohoo!……………

……”Oh, um, hang on there. The valuer did say that he recommends a structural inspection before we can proceed. If you have one can you send it to us”.

We have owned a few houses. We have owned older houses in need of major renovations. We know what’s what. Beefcake went around to the house during cooling off and spent a couple of hours going over it himself. He had a long list of things to check and he was pretty thorough. This is useless for the bank, of course. They require a proper paid-for stuructural inspection. I could punch the house valuer in the throat. We know that the structural inspection will come back fine but it is $400 we didn’t want to spend. It is probably just because the house was built in 1895. Frustrating.

Anyway, it takes place tomorrow morning  and so we are once again waiting and hoping that all will be well. I had a nightmare last night that the vendor decided to put it back on the market and not sell to us because we were “stuffing them around”. This is not possible but it is obviously fucking with my mind. I will be relieved when we can get the report to the bank and receive our final approval. Until then I will just go about grumbling and muttering to myself about stabbing the house valuer in the ear*.

I am still totally foul and grumpy, for all of the reasons I have previously mentioned. I will not whine about it again. I may however take a couple of days off from the blogging. I am sure there are many funny and entertaining things that I could write about but I have no inclination. It feels like a chore at the moment, instead of the joy that it usually is.

I’m sure I’ll be all better next week.

*All of these references to throat punching and ear stabbing make me sound a violent and volatile creature. I am not, I am a delicate petal and I am all about the nonviolence. Really. I just use those words to channel my frustration. In real life I am playing the harp and tending my pots of delicate indoor plants as I float serenely around my house, dressed in  a perfect, neat, clean, floaty white dress. I am not crouched in the corner, clutching my laptop, wearing a cruddy, stained tracksuit, rocking back and forth and  muttering to myself.

See???

You like??

If you are in a reader then you will just have to click through (or use your imagination). It’s pretty and has things and it’s nightimey and there are trees. Wow, I should be a writer or something because the way I conjure up an image with my words is something quite special.

I have a very short attention span. It is a miracle that the previous theme lasted as long as it did. I love this one now. It is my new special, precious favourite, for the next couple of months at least. I am a fickle, fickle creature.

It will have another sidebar at some point and I am moving things about and changing things but I think it’s real purdy.

I am on pelvis rest (because, you know, I am able to be so active normally and rest to spare my pelvis is so unusual) and I am bored and thus we have new blog theme.

I wish I were more exciting.

We met with the bank this morning and they told us that they couldn’t tell us if we would get approval but what did we think? We said that we thought we probably would and they said that although they were not allowed to say so they thought that we were right. I think it was nice of them to give us the secret “not really telling you because I don’t want to get into trouble” reassurance. If they are wrong I fully intend to sue or something.

We feel very much better. We will be moving into our new house on the 29th or 30th of May. I will have to wait to post pictures because I want to take them myself rather than refer people to the real estate site, which gives the full address of the house. You know, because naturally there are all sorts of people out there who would be interested in stalking myself and my family in little old Adelaide. You can never be too paranoid, I say.

Well, I have certainly stretched a post that essentially existed just to say “Look, I have a new theme” to it’s absolute limits so I shall be off. I must try and plan how we will afford to put a new  kitchen in the new house asap. It is possible I will be crotcheting all the cupboards or something, which would be fine if I crotched but could prove quite difficult since I do not.