Day 16: The BIG Mess

Yesterday was a bit of a mad rush to start. Going to Hope City church has been great for the later starts but its not the sort of place you scrape back your hair and throw your scrubby clothes on... I've done that a few weeks in a row now and felt quite out of place... Hope City is an evening heels kind of place. I'm not an evening heels sort of girl at the best of times - even on evening heels occasions but I like the idea that people make an effort to go - sunday best n'all. So from there it was a quick get home, pick up a few things and off to our friends Robin and Anna' s for their housewarming BBQ. We had a great afternoon there sitting in the sunshine, eating food and chatting till the evening...all the time our children were entertained by other people or were sitting quite happily playing with toys ... its amazing how engaging other people's toys can be. We came home, put them to bed and fell asleep ourselves. Because of not feeling great, being out a lot, having a few mad rushes to get out our house is suffereing the big mess syndrome. We were having a discussion yesterday about what constitutes a grown up house. Rob and Annas house has that grown up feel ... partly because it has features like big vintage solid wood doors between rooms that have been collected from places like old solicitors, the bathroom has a free standing bath and one of those old school toilets with the cistern high up on the wall and the oven in the kitchen is huge. Its amazing. Another big reason is maybe that its tidy. I always find it amazing when people have furniture with surface space which isnt used. How amazing would that be?! Some other friends of our have a big dresser which table space wise has probably the same surface area as our dining table and everytime I've been over its been totally clear. We have a dresser which is always stacked almost to the ceiling with box models, letters to deal with, things that need a spot of superglue or sewing back together, giving back to people, or just things that dont fit in anywhere else. We are supposed to clear it once a week but it takes 5 minutes to get back to default. Our whole house is like that... I suppose the downside to being resurceful is that its hard to throw anything out incase it could be mended and used again, and creative people, particularly as Joel and I both do so much work from home, accumulate a lot of stuff. My dream would be to have an office, a workshop for Joel and a studio for me... so all my odd bits of fabric and sketchbooks, projects on the go would all have a space they looked at home in... and I can enjoy that in my active imagination... but the reality is this bomb site to be sorted the best it can be. So todays money making project... or money recaiming project is Ebay. In the longrun it will help he house... it should be a clear out even if the immediate next few week is the chaos of loft stuff everywhere. I have crates and crates in the loft that I get down, clean and then end up tidying back into the loft as I need a tidy house for something. I need to get some down today and see it through...there could be hundreds of 99ps sitting there! Anyway its free listing this week so it makes sense to do a lot now and we can, if we can get round to it, get rid of a lot of baby things now... the double buggy is ready to go... it has been for a while but a few months ago they were just not selling ... I'm not having 99p for that! ... but more recently theres been bidding wars on them again which means it could be a good time. £50 would be great. Though I don't like the bit of ebay selling where people have to come to your house I won't put it off any longer... its project overdraft time now ... so its serious.