Time To Be Wonder Woman (Again)

 OK, I have just looked around me and seen the following state of slovenly mess.

Be quietly appalled:

Look, more activity-avoidance blogging. And ice cream eating.

And generally living like a pig.

Rough pile of paperwork on the left is the Important Stuff I Should Get Done.

Such as, get school uniform sorted, cancel a magazine subscription, get the unused Tesco tokens exchanged for a day out AT A WELL KNOWN CHOCOLATE FACTORY, book the 12 year old in for the filling the dentist told us a fortnight ago he needed, plus various nonsense to do with utility people, pension schemes, etc....

(I'd be lying if I was ever to put on my CV that I'm good at prioritising)

The pile on the right is a diagram to work out, in my mathmatically-dyslexic way, how many floor tiles I need for the dining room/kitchen, a map of Brighton (the boyfriend was trying to show me the Wrong Way To His Hotel he once took when Very, Very Drunk), a fan letter from Domino's Pizza addressed to  "Valued Customer" (aka Slutty And Undomesticated), more random bits of paper loosely relating to the first pile, and a load of floor tiles.

To the right of the laptop is some random carrier bag that seems to always be in my handbag - apart from today - and a London A-Z. Oh, and the EXTRA SUNBLOCK I had to buy last week when I forgot to put it on everyone one day. This stuff's brill - Solait, factor 50, it rolls on green and smells like melon. Can't get better than that...

The wooden cd box at the back of the table is from an idea I had while watching Cars 2 yesterday - I'm going to put it on the wall and put my tacky 60s Blackpool metal ashtrays and some vintage seaside postcards in it. I tend to get idle ideas like that while watching colourful films... you know how the mind just drifts.

These are my excuses for The Mess:

 I've made a start on the flooring - it will be slate-effect vinyl all the way through the dining room into the kitchen. You can see the ancient, chipped, mish-mash of the 2 floorings I'm replacing. More upheaval, and more things in the wrong place for a while.

The printer is dumped on the table as I was copying stuff for the school bus pass malarkey. The ink was too low to do more than 2 sheets. So,off  to the old-school photocopying shop I went. And then came back with ink and another fan for this humid-beyond-living-memory weather.... assembled the fan, decided we all needed late afternoon ice cream... browsed some blogs, and realised that I was going to have to get a move on to get us down to Kent to see my dad tomorrow. No packing done yet! A bit of Wonder Woman magic needed here....

New Kitchen Catch-Up

Earlier this year I started working out a new layout for the titchy, vintage-adorned but utterly impractical kitchen, in its original state above. More here:
http://trashsparkle.blogspot.com/2011/04/before-mayhem-descends.html

As I hadn't got round to putting up the finished pictures, this post is a bit photo-heavy so as to give a visual recap to the lovely followers I've gained since the makeover started... its been quite a while ;)

This is how it was going to be, minus the horrible, indented, grime-catching 1990's doors:

It had to be another shoestring-project - existing cupboards, new doors and worktop c/o B&Q sale, sink and tap from ebay, a bit of assistance from a plumber and a kitchen fitter..... This is just after it was fitted:

Since this stage, I've sanded and painted the walls, put up shelves and worked some of the vintage stuff back in:

 Keef hasn't been hung back up on the wall yet... can't decide where to put him.

 Picked up the old soda siphon at the carboot last weekend. It's from W.E. Coombs, Northampton.

Some of the Hornsea has made it back onto the shelves; there's still some in storage.

 I love a good display of bashed-up frying pans...

The newspaper-collaged-paint-tin is the compost bin. 

Just waiting for a sample of floor tile from ebay, then the floor will become slate-effect vinyl.

So, that's the tour of the kitchen ;)

Where We Went On School's Out Thursday

Despite not having to set the alarm clock this morning we were up early, to make the most of the Extra Day-Off today, and even managed to be back by teatime. We were so busy having a lovely time that I only remembered to take one photo. I'm really Quite Proud Of Myself for getting a move on and managing an impulse day at the seaside...

********

Nah, course we didn't! The 12 year old enjoyed a long lie-in til gone 10, and it was a pj morning for both of us, but we went for an afternoon up the train track to Civilisation, exploring vintage shops, quaint buildings, finding A New Favourite Cafe - houmous and roasted vegetable ciabattas and king prawn salad sandwiches. Would love to show a photo, but still trying to pluck up courage to take food pics; they might think I'm from Environmental Health!

We* were so impressed at getting long-handled spoons with the coleslaw that afterwards we went to this lovely little shop to find some of our own, for ice cream sundaes aka anything from the freezer I sling into tall glasses and slather in chocolate sauce:

A treasure trove of Very Expensive Loveliness - personally I'd cry for days if I dropped an Orla Kiely teapot that cost £54.99 - but we found the spoons. Apparently they are latte spoons. There were several types of cutlery which, frankly, I'd never heard of and I felt as uncouth as someone encountering a place setting with so much silver that you have no idea whether to start from the outside or the inside. Grapefruit spoons? How very sensible - I thought that's what teaspoons are for. ;)

And finally, we had to put on body armour, took a load of rescue remedy.... and hit Primark. Yes, this was the Day When It Was Discovered That None Of The 12 Year Old's Jeans Fit Him Anymore - apart from the one pair that were in the wash. Predictably it was rammed, groups of School's Out teenagers (mostly well-behaved) and a slightly higher than usual amount of unmanned toddlers. But puzzlingly, there were also hoardes of people NOT entertaining school-age children - older people, people with babies... School's Out Thursday coinciding with payday? Brilliant! Oh, and I also got this t-shirt ;)

* Actually just me - the 12 year old is still being polite enough to pretend to feign interest

I've Painted Me Happy

Seeing all the lovely nail polish on blogs is rubbing off on me - last night I sat here and did a nail every time I clicked on a new post. This is proving indestructible and has so far withstood shopping, coins, zips, moving furniture, fiddling with the digital camera, opening packs of jam tarts... what more could a girl ask for?  Electric Punk, maxiflex collection 2000. 

On Thursday evening I was watching a programme about Spitalfields and the 1970s rescue squad who started moving into derelict Georgian houses there - Dan Cruickshank et al. Suddenly I was overcome with the urge to start painting this sideboard:

I never saw the end of the programme, and have been applying coats of paint ever since. It was brown, and I've umm'd and ahh'd for 2 years about painting it, so it was hardly spur-of-the-moment. Wonder why Dan Cruickshank had that effect? I'm going to sand the feet to rough them up a bit, and the top is going to get the sticky-back-plastic treatment.

The kitchen is starting to come together now - I've worked out I'm going for the less is more look (the less decorating I do, the more it remains unfinished) and so only a handful of the vintage bits are going back into it. Blue and white mostly. Like this car boot find:

Not Much Going On

Oh the folly of last week's blitz on the kitchen. It was meant to lead to grand things, such as skirting boards being finished off in the dining room, anti-winter insulation devices being, well, devised for this cold victorian house... I have just got round to pouring a cement mix into the corner that the dishwasher usually occupies, so am technically still doing the kitchen. And its very boring.... and now The World Of Work has decided to have a staff meeting this week (I know! And I'm officially on holiday and all) and some training has to be done next week. Frankly m'dear, I couldn't give a damn...

The other thing I told myself I would be doing with all this free time is ebay selling. There was another free-to-list weekend - which turned me completely off the idea, as I cannot ever seem to do anything when it is supposed to be done. Ah well, will just have to pay those extra pennies if I ever get round to listing all that stuff languishing in the loft. A buyer has just paid by e-cheque, which has knocked 44p off the amount I got from them, the cheek of it. So I'll have to find out how to not accept those next time. Bah....

I'm off now - to burn the dinner, or embark on some similar catastrophic domestic failure.

Sand(paper), Bucket And Trowel

I'm being super-duper focussed at the moment (can't exactly say this week in case I jinx myself) spending some hard-core time fixing up the house. The house that is perpetually unfinished. Well, the annual long summer holiday has now started and I have 2 AND A HALF MONTHS OFF WORK!! Am I in the right job or what! Obviously the pay for only working 9.5 months a year is a bit of a drawback, but I prefer the time over the cash... Have been working my way round the kitchen since yesterday - tacking an extension lead along one wall (for the dishwasher; having paid an electrician 2 years ago to put in sockets, only to decide to change the layout el cheapo-style), putting up a rail for the tea-towel & oven gloves, and this morning I've sanded the long wall above the sideboard and cooker so I can finally finish painting that wall. Dull stuff, but its high-time it got done. Then all the vintagey bits will come out of storage and go back on the shelves to get greasy and dusty  to look magnificent again ;)

Ah well, tea-break in the garden over - better fix another shelf, wipe the dust off myself and go buy the paint. Far too messy in there to cook tonight - it'll be 2-for-1 pizza delivery!

Mojo Malaise

I've had nowt to write about all week and am feeling a bit dulled. Today there's the usual pile of impossible domestic stuff needing to be done - dirty saucepans, marvellous meals, a hefty dose of outdoorsy exercise, cracking the algebra that the 12 year old's teacher is too useless to teach.... Despite waking up at 6.45 feeling wide awake I opted to snooze instead. Its either time to start drinking or to get a dog... Which way does va va voom lie?

2 cups of tea later Debbie Harry was on desert island discs. I'm no good with radios - short of nail-varnishing marks on the dial next to stations I could no more find radio 4 than I could comprehend latin. So it was weird having the programme through the tv - a bit like the olden days when families sat reverentially around the cumbersome wireless set. See, even there I have nothing to write about, other than it was just cool to listen to her voice.

Grasping for a positive spin to put on the week:
- I've put up a shelf in the kitchen, and its actually straight, unlike last time when a big lump of white tak had to be employed to level it up at one end. For the first time since the kitchen refit  I won't be moving all the saucepans first before being able to use the cooker.
- I sanded and painted the hideous wall under the kitchen window.
- I did a tesco online order, and got all the right things, with none of the usual surprises like 12 packets of tomatoes.
- We finally got the lump of plastic known as the Wii working - the one posted to the boys by their dad, hitherto regarded as Not Working and reeking of fags. The Wii that is, though an apt description of him too.

And what a pile of child-scaring cobblers all that rapture stuff was. Its a bit like a Dr Who episode - they sort of know its made-up but like to be a bit scared at the same time. A friend just summed it up with "oh well, I'll have to do the washing up after all". But there again, the prediction was for 5 months of fire and that big volcano in Iceland's just gone up again...

I'm Going To Walk In The Sun, And.....

..... Buy Me A New Camera! Yes, today. I know it would be wise to do some interweb-ordering, and I may yet find a crafty way to combine online-nicer-price-ness with the gratification that comes with getting my mitts on that camera straightaway....

The faff that comes with borrowing the 13 year old's camera, then waving a magic wand to splutter some life into my camera while I download the photos is too boringly luddite, even for me. Yesterday my I-don't-lurve-it-anymore gadget refused to recognise its own memory card, and proudly downloaded instead some manky photos of a clematis I'd taken 3 years ago from the built-in memory thingie. Enough.... I wanted to post glorious orange poppies that abound in the garden, the selection of old postcards that I had a merry evening rediscovering in all corners of the house for the stairway-to-the-loft moodboard project. And I would be able to do those very things, in instant(ish) pictorial form If I Only Had That Camera.

So off t'shops we shall go. Then the blog can have some colour, and we shall have us some sunbeams and vitamin D, and of course buy something snackalicious for tomorrow's visit from Trashsparkle's mum. It will be her first sight of the new kitchen, and I haven't exactly busted a gut sanding and painting those walls yet. So there will be conversations starting with "you need to..." which I shall wave away with the usual lack of concern I have for the finer details of holes in the wall and bad evidence of previous wall colours*. Then in about 3 days time the bug will kick in and I'll get on with it.



* I shall, instead, redirect her attention to the wonderful way in which I have recently colour-ordered the 12 year old's extensive t-shirt collection. Damn those £1.50 Primark bargains.

Crazy Horses

Ho hum. Got the people Who Really Do Have The Friday Appointment here tomorrow. Ran the idea of them being very insistent on doing the visit past a friend at The World Of Work, who reckoned its now gone to some sort of statutory status. And what impression will these folks get of Mother of Teenage Recluse? That I am a kleptomaniac on the waiting list for DIY SOS probably, seeing as the dining room is full of bits of wood from last week's taking down of shelves and the walls are practically dust.

Swanned around TKMaxx for a while on my way home, hoping to find something to signal The Right Look to kickstart me putting the kitchen back together. Maybe a white piece of ovenware? I honed in on a gigantic lime green swirly vase, some fabric covered birdhouses (???), a navy and silver painted union jack canvas that was way bigger than any wall in the house, a set of scarily expensive red saucepans, a lovely shiny red metal horse... then pulled myself together and left empty-handed. I have a love-hate relationship with that place, it brings out the schizo-kleptomaniac aspect. With each thing you see you mentally dissect every room in your house trying to judge whether something would "go", and end up with half a dozen parts of your brain competing for attention. I'm banning myself - for my own good. Though that red metal horse was awesome.

More Excuses Why Dinner Is Late

After the Colin-Firth-In-That-Catsuit moment I think the time is nigh to revisit the triumph of Russell Kane as Beyonce that was a few weeks ago. Now he doesn't actually look that hot (to me, anyway) as himself , but in drag he's quite hypnotic, ne c'est pas? Maybe my youth was misspent. Should have hung around Madame JoJo's...

Must stop or I'll be digging out less delicious versions of Men In Make-Up. Like this:

                                        

ps No further kitchen photos so far, as showing a new cutlery drawer or different location of kettle would be overstretching your patience with this blog. Needless to say, domestically I am still adrift and I have not yet got anything in the right place. Sort of going for the organic approach of getting the feel for what should go where as I use it. Until then, if I had a pedometer I'd be off the richter scale of mileage in terms of looking for the salt, colanders, plates... and it takes even longer to make dinner.

A Kitchen And A Catsuit

Thursday

• Found unfilled hole in wall after men had gone, where dishwasher pipe had been taken out. Big enough for assorted minibeasts, and possibly a blackbird or two, to enter the house, so out with a bucket of mix-it-yerself external filler.
• Hoovered a bit.
• To make the walls look less like Al Capone* had been round, filled all holes left by removal of cupboards and shelves so from a distance they look better.
• Cooked pizzas - but blaming relocation of oven, rather than not keeping an eye on the time, for the fact they got ever-so-slightly burnt.
• *Do we like the Al Capone-esque bullet points?

Friday

• Felt that it was impossible to go to work as I was aching all over, from pre-refurb moving of EVERYTHING and from the generally unrelaxing hovering I had been doing during Thursday. Note, that is all-day HOVERING, not hoovering... my plan to retreat to the front room to watch sneaky and copious amounts of 60 Minute Makeover et al was scuppered by The Men putting 3 massive toolboxes in there, preventing access to sofas as the room Is That Small and from the constant leaving open of the front door. And it was too cold to sit outside in the garden away from it all. Instead I alternated between hovering with the laptop in a corner of the dining room, and blitzing the 12 year old's room.
• Pulled myself together and went to work, as I was being a bit of a wimp and really had no excuse for trying to slack off.
• Loitered around the market on the way home, resisting anything I'd have to find house-room for in my newly-discovered Less Is More mode, and bought necklaces instead.
• And bought a new drainer rack for the sink - the boyfriend says the sink is a caravan one. T'is not, so there. It's just spacially economical.
• Set to cleaning underneath of the 2 existing wall cupboards with white vinegar. Easy.
• Put all the mugs into a cupboard. A whole cupboard. This is worrying.
• Moved the kettle. To nearer the sink. This is an improvement on previous foot mileage.
• Put the clock back up.

Saturday

• Went off by train to a large swanky shopping centre - ok, it was Westfield, as the teenage recluse was up for going out, following the Amazing Success of the mid-week new school visit and voluntary haircut experience.
• Had calming expectations of snapping up some nice ovenware, to progress the new kitchen.
• Impressed by the poshness and design of the toilets. Better than yer average encounter.
• Swooned in Schuh, luvverly shop with fabulous, gorgeous, ridiculous erm... shoes. And excellent sales staff. Window shopping for me, as we were buying converse for the teenager.
• Sales staff experience reversed altogether in New Look. Very Couldn't Be Bothered ethos. Not good. Hoodie and t-shirt purchased, for 12 and 13 year old respectively.
• Which meant bags. Argument about who was carrying them. Not me.
• Shopping fatigue kicking in, further arguments about where to have lunch.
• Re-discovering the stereo effect that is walking in between 2 children and both of them talking to me at once.
• Lunch then ice creams. Neither of them would hold my ice cream, so no popping into charity shops. In truth, I was scared to, in the Less Is More frame of mind, as Where Would I Put anything I might have found?
• Finally, I bought something - a mini-tube of handcream. £1.10. I am cheap to take out.
• Wasted by the time we got back so flopped down with the papers, then cooked dinner whilst re-siting the cutlery drawer. So many useless, forgotten things in there - many, many beer bottle-openers and random vegetable peelers. Will have a cull. Another day.
• And then watched Mama Mia. Which was worth seeing, if only for Colin Firth in a tight blue spangly catsuit at the end. Why had I never known about that?

update:- following The Great Blogger Outtage of May 2011, I noticed the colin-in-a-catsuit photo I could have sworn I'd originally posted had gone. I had to search high and low to get this pic; I am starting to suspect that Mr Firth's People may have issued some sort of retrospective super-injunction to suppress said images of Their Man. Were Mr Firth's People and the blogger outtage mysteriously linked while the former scoured blogs for any incriminating evidence???

Hello New Kitchen!

Here's the new snazzy kitchen! Yep, so far it feels like I've created a cool, contemporary batchelorette-kitchen-in-a-loft arrangement, what with my shiny surfaces and brick wall. Sleek, modern, shiny, minimalist.....Styling aided and abetted by the 12 year old; see the dalek mug? (But what's that wire hanging down for???*)



How the camera doth deceive.... because this is the rest of the room:

Next step is getting the walls sorted. And the floor! My temporary extension lead* for the dishwasher is marvellous something to get sorted pronto.

And, finally, the grim, in-between shots:

A delightful display of plumbing accessories, and a puddle.



Morning After The Night Before

Do you get any odd recurring dreams? I get ones where I'm taking my A'levels but have dropped a subject without anyone knowing, so won't pass them and that I've only got a limited time before having to find a job. Then I remember that it is now 30 years down the line and that I do have a job..... Another one is about the people I worked for after leaving uni. For various reasons, including a lack of direction in myself, not being entirely dazzling at the many job interviews I went to, plus it being a time of businesses folding, redundancies, etc, I stayed there for 10 years. Which I'm quite cross about. Its a bloody long time! Anyway, these people pop up nocturnally from time to time, and in these dreams I'm trapped there, doing impossible things and desperately trying to impress them. Despite being happier now than I've ever been, my little subconscious must be whirring away feeling all out of control during the night.

Why can't I just dream about teeth falling out if I've got to have anxiety dreams??? Have woken up a bit "blaaaaahhh" this morning - an important appointment with the 13 year old and his possible new school later this morning. So far so good, he is actually getting himself ready and I'm keeping it all as low-key as possible. Afterwards I'll have a last push to clear the kitchen out - t'is already all bare and unadorned, and without the distraction of the colourful junk the cupboard doors look sickeningly yellow. To the skip with them, come tomorrow!  I will be heaving out the sideboards and discovering Nasty Things Lurking on the floor, which will be dealt with before the workmen come to do their magic tomorrow morning.

To get myself back on track I've been doing Important Money Stuff - just made a phone call to cancel a contract for boiler cover as I've arranged something cheaper. 9 minutes of pointless spiel from a woman who sounded like Jeanette Krankie; I love it when they try to woo you back - sorry love, I decided to go elsewhere when you hiked up my payments, so don't try telling me your company look after your exisiting customers, Mrs-She-Who-Sounds-Like-A-Short-Woman-Dressed-Up-As-A-Schoolboy.

Before The Mayhem Descends...

ok, this is how The Midget Kitchen From Hell looks right now.... I think you should get a pretty good idea of how space-challenged it is. I don't want to unleash 2 men (aka the 13 and 12 year old) on the world claiming they never learnt to cook because there just wasn't any room in the kitchen.... so its going to be something like this:

I hate these doors! I've lived with them for 10 years, and now I'm getting rid of them!!!!

So, there's quite a bit of stuff to pack away ready for the makeover. A few shelves to take down. The ones with the scales and mugs on are possibly attached to the side of the cupboard with no-nails, if I remember rightly.

On the left-hand wall by the window, I've filled an empty space with some old shoe-trees (stretchers) that came from a house clearance and a red ice-cream scoop. Above the turquoise vase at the end of the window sill the tile on the wall came from a pile of rubble in a front garden. Alas, all the others were broken! Note how the end of the worktop is propped up on the dishwasher with a block of wood... to fit the dishwasher into the kitchen I took out a small end cupboard, yanked the worktop away from the wall and slid it and the sink cupboard along. I managed to do all that while being careful not to dislodge the plumbing!




The 'orrible rising damp (brick-built shed on the other side of that wall). Bleach should be enough for that, for now.

Keef is, of course, going to be re-instated above the cooker after the makeover! You can see where I've scribbled on the walls to make sure things will fit into their new places.




Manky tap circa 1990's and totally manky back-of-sink area. Not looking forward to what we're going to find when we move the sink unit away from that wall. In the jam jar there's a piece of green lego - don't ask!

The silver teapot is a Festival of Britain one, the spotty one came from Poundland.

A long time ago I found a kitchen ad in the local paper and stuck it on the shelf:

"Getting the kitchen just right makes a big difference to your peace of mind". Too right...

Top: Madeira and Cadiz coffee pots, Taunton Vale storage jars.
Middle: Scales from car boots £1 each, Arthur Wood piggy banks, Charlie & Lola mug "I Am Too Extremely Busy To Do Stopping", Tala measure.
Lower: Gorgeous cherry-red metallic tea caddy, eBay, some dice that I like to display with odd numbers, Staffordshire cup (one of 3, car boot). Plus black and white mugs which I am addicted to buying.

It will be this easy ;) !!!!

One More Thing I'm Pretending To Do

I have found more things that need to be done Pre-Kitchen Makeover. Namely, the cheapskates that created the atrocity that is currently The Midget Kitchen From Hell put ceramic tiles down which finish halfway under the base units. Now, this compromises the ability to relocate the washing machine, as half of it will be resting on a different floor-level to the other half. Being even more of a cheapskate myself, this is going to be corrected by me whacking down some self-levelling exterior filler as I am not throwing enough ££ at the project to redo the whole floor (yet). Not the right way to do these things obviously, and at some point this weekend I will be lying on my front on the floor attempting to apply said filler under the gap where the baseboard/kickplate wotsit used to be. Why? Why? Why am I so bl**dy stubborn and back to front at doing these things!!!

Well, I should be doing the latter today, as long as the usual distractions of garden-fiddling, magazines, blog-reading, eating et al don't get to me first ;)

Kitchen Progress: Part One

No packing done yesterday in the end. Instead spent the whole afternoon trying to make a decision about what sink to get. Had to be cheap, so that narrowed it down to stainless steel or white acrylic; then got distracted by the post-modernity of black acrylic* but then remembered the horrible tidemarks that coloured sinks get. No lovely china butlers sinks - we'd probably drop a saucepan on it and smash it within a week. Needed to be here within days so trawled the "buy it now" permutations. The does-it-come-with-plumbing-bits-or-not had to be factored in, then I realised what I was looking for was nice parallel lines on the draining board. Not swanky, fiddly, sunburst designs or over-elaborate curved bits; don't exactly want to spend my whole life cleaning the damned thing any more than necessary. Then, for a few quids more, I could get the luxuriousness of a-sink-and-a-half. It wouldn't matter if the kids suddenly had to run the cold tap for a glass of water just as you've filled up the washing up bowl. Ooooh, the poshness, the life-enhancing possibilities... Only one met the parallel lines criteria. Then, for the umpteenth time, I put the tape measure across the wall, which is only 5-and-a-half-feet, and realised by going for a compact, single bowl number I'd magically gain 15cm of worktop. Done! £42..... fabulous. I don't think it comes with plumbing, and the model has a K before the T in its name; the plumber had better not suck air through his teeth and start muttering about incompatibility of pipe diameters when he sees it.

*that its been done before, and was naff, but suddenly looks "new" again.

Kitchen Update Is Go!

A couple of posts ago, I wittered on about some things getting done, some things never getting done, and some things getting done eventually. A lot more posts even further ago, I wrote about my impending new kitchen layout, and the purchase of worktop, taps and cupboard doors at bargaintastic new year sale prices. And then nothing happened...

My 2 tricky tradespeople finally, finally, yay!!!!!, now have a day when they can both be in the same place at the same time - ie my house. Got a phonecall yesterday, almost out of the blue after all this time, to say its going to be Kitchen Makeover Day next Thursday!!! Funny how I was just clearing out the under-sink cupboard, stripping it back to essentials only, just before the call. Will now have to shift a truckload of Midwinter to a safe corner of the house, and empty all the cupboards ready for The Day Of Mayhem.

Will post a before pic of the whole room, instead of just the "pretty bits", before it all gets annihilated by workmen. Then, in several months time I will do a big reveal of the new look on here. Joking, its all getting done in A DAY - yes, the kitchen IS that small. I'm not good at house-moving, things involving packing and tend to leave these things til lastminute.com panic is setting in. Well, not this time.... I am armed, with bubblewrap and plastic crates. Just one more cup of tea first...

Oh lordy, just realised I'm listening to someone murdering re-interpreting Wuthering Heights mashed with Kate Nash. Interesting....

Trashsparkle's Perfume Reviewette

Yep, that's right. Reviewette. I may very well have just made that word up. For the purpose of not making this post look like I got any further with the Fragrance Forays. No Viv W - the Boots in this town is not grand enough, so I tried Jimmy Choo instead. Light, giddy and not unlike the swanky, pungent talc that was in abundance in the 70s. I have not yet found the One. Idly wondering what a perfume by Spend Spend Spend Viv Nicholson would have been like; stale babycham, players no.6, crimpelene, with a heady note of peroxide and a dash of disappointment?

The bouncy sunny afternoon is very apt for playing the new Adele album. Full-bodied production qualities.

Tomorrow is an Official Day Off. And what a stupid day to arrange to have the boiler mot'd. It means I'll have to clean the bathroom and hoik all the stuff out of the airing cupboard at some point tonight. I don't mind doing that kind of thing, but only when I feel like it, not because a man who will try to flog me a carbon monoxide detector is coming round.

And the kitchen will be happening soon - the man who is doing the plumbing did not suck air thru his teeth, and is sending a chap round later this week to look at my not-to-scale scribblings; the only proof  that everything will fit is the big pencilled arrows I have drawn on the walls. There will be room to swing large feline creatures, and more vitally, room to get to the sink without long-jumping over the open dishwasher door or risking a hot pan attaching itself to your sleeve.

A Random Supermarket Haul

Today I was all a little weary-of-life and abstractly bereft, and also with vague intentions of making a lasagne tonight. So, into the supermarket. For an idle browse/buy session, rather than full-on trolley dash. I love multi-purpose shops - you can go in, pretending you're going to get some cheese, and come out with a fistful of new jewellery and a couple of bags of cushions. Failing that, there's always the Aisle of Interesting Things to peruse, should you fancy a stripey picnic rug, some uber-bright garden candles, or even some snazzy packaging on the boxes of tissues. Visuals, dahling, visuals. Sometimes I rein myself in, and time-and-money-manage myself quite well, with a list. Other times, well, only a random splurge will do.

So, today, me and the empty trolley are loitering around the bargaintastic-plastic-jewellery display. Except there's some daft moo intent on restocking the display. Rather than appear rude, I go off for a bit to see if there's any point considering the black jeans. Only for wearing under dresses, in which case own-brand may be acceptable. Then the school ring, something about forms and the educational psychologist visit next week. Multi-task instinct kicking-in as soon as a phone hits my ear, I find 2 pairs, £8 each. Roaming back to the silly moo still cluttering up my view of the bargaintastic-plastic, I quickly extract a dinky little necklace, multi-coloured and totally tootie frootie in texture. Conscious of the deirdre barlow effect setting in between my chin and my collarbone, I am getting up minutes earlier these days in order to ensure that I wear some sort of necklace arrangement to the World of Work.

And, rolling the trolley s-l-o-w-l-y past the candles, and past the cushions, I hesitate fatally at the kitchen gadgetty bit. NO!!!!! to new things for the kitchen, wait until after the refit... but its 3-for-2, and the 11 year old must be encouraged in his newly-developing foodie interest.... some big fat tongs, brushed aluminium, excellent to have hanging up, even better for heaving slices of cake off plates, a zester just-because-I've-never-had-one and I saw some zest-requiring-recipe the other day, and a y-shaped peeler. Because I want to see if the peel is alphabetty-shaped.

Right then, lasagne. Cheese. Milk? No, enough at home, don't need it, fingers crossed. Extra penne, because I have decided to make my trolley haul look sophisticated, plus lasagne sheets. And oh dear. Then I find all these nice, shiny little rectangular silver tins of spices... and coriander in a jar.... surely having some of these will make me want to cook more? And think how lovely a few of these will look on the shelf...  I get 2, not wanting to be too rash.

And some UK-grown pink-and-white-striped tulips. And, as it turns out, the own-brand jeans don't make my bum look big in this. Although the 11 year-old turned his nose up at the idea of me serving up homemade lasagne...

Kitchen

Taking advantage of a lovely sunny morning for a spot of snapping, here are a couple more corners at Trashsparkle Towers... The kitchen is black and white, with hits of red and turquoise and bright blue, so that's where the red reindeer ended up! The mugs feed my love for mismatched black and white patterns, 2 of my 1960s melamine chopping boards (I have more stored away!), and the fridge "mood board thing" is full of random bits that catch my eye. I could never be a minimalist.... ;)