jobs around the house

Monday is normally me and Emmms’s full day at the studio, getting on with our sewing, fabric searching and general looking at buttons and buckles and dreaming up new projects. However, as I have the week off work I decided what better time than to get stuck into some of the jobs that have been building up around the house!

My job for Monday was ‘clearing out the basement’, not something that I was looking forward too and something I have been putting off for ages. I was fearful that I would not know where to start or that I would come across some crazy creature (my love assured me that there would not be an anaconda down there!), or that the job would be so big that I would get halfway through and end up with a bigger mess than I began with, so I knew I needed a whole day at least to complete!!

It turns out that I was right about the time but wrong about the crazy creature, as I found nothing!

I began at 8am by binning every piece of rubbish I found, nine bin bags later I could start on the boxes that had piled up. Every time we buy anything new, the box it comes in gets thrown, and I mean I stand at the top of the stairs and throw the empty box down there!! So as you can imagine after a year and a half there were a lot of boxes.

Once the boxes were sorted I piled up the items needing to go to the charity shop and placed the items we were going to keep in plastic containers (not cardboard boxes which, as I found out last year, do not protect anything against a burst drain pipe and flood).

Now on to getting it all in the car. This was the part I completely underestimated; it took four trips in the end to get all of the rubbish to the tip.

Once I arrived at the tip, I was very impressed. My image of a tip was a great big landfill in which you dump all of your rubbish in a big pile on top of everyone else’s rubbish and leave it for the twenty/forty odd years it took to either be taken, eaten or absorbed by the ground and everyone else’s rubbish. This is certainly no longer the case.

Once I got there I was asked for identification that I lived in the area, they then looked through my rubbish and I was directed where to put individual items. One big skip for paper and card, one for plastic, one for metal, another for small electrical items, one for computer related items and then the usual household waste!! Wow, a lot of work was put into this! I did feel a lot better about throwing away so much as they make a huge effort to recycle and re-use as much as possible, a great Loumms ethic that I thought I may be going against by this whole project!

So, four car trips later I was rid of my rubbish! Now onto Sainsbury’s clothes bin and the charity shop.

By 5 o’clock, I was well ready for a drink, so beer in hand I went to finish the final touches to the tidying. It turns out that I missed an entire car full of tip junk so will be going back there later on in the week but for now the basement is looking a lot better. I can now see the floor!

I still have a double bed down there from when we moved into the house, but I now have the landlord’s permission to get rid of it. It will probably not be re-useable as I believe that is where the anaconda is living!!