yay, furniture re-arranging!

[kareina]

baronsnorri has decided that he doesn't concentrate properly when there are any distractions and he's got uni assignments to be done. Therefore he decided yesterday to move his computer into his bedroom, where he will be able to work undisturbed this semester. He has never been very happy with the height of the old kid's desk that we had available for his use, so rather than bringing that into his room along with the computer, he purchased a table which is at a height that he finds more pleasing. Therefore he moved the desk back into the guest room from whence it came in the first place.

Anyone who has ever lived with me knows that I love to re-arrange furniture. It may sound odd, but I gain much pleasure in thinking about the space available, the sizes and shapes of the objects to be arranged, and devising a plan which is the best possible arrangement of the items. Well, perhaps that part doesn't sound odd to most of you, but perhaps when I confess that it brings me even more joy to do the physical movement of the furniture, and taking the opportunity to do a detailed cleaning of each item, and of the space which had previously be covered by said item. It was my week to vacuum anyway, so I spent more than two happy hours first thing this morning. first in the guest room, where I scrubbed the desk, vacuumed, and discovered,to my horror, that one of the housemates, out of the kindness of his heart, put a spare small stereo in the guest room so that when visitors stay over they can have music. The kindness of this action pleased me immensely. However, the state of the stereo was... shocking. It was completely coated in black ick/filth! It took me quite a while to clean it back to its original, white, condition. I have no idea how long it has been on the headboard in there, but I hope that it made its appearance after the last guest slept there--I would hate to think that they thought that *I* approved something that gross being placed so near where they would rest their head!

Once I'd finished in the guest room I completely cleaned and re-arranged the central half of the living room. (This is a very old house, which originally had small rooms on either side of a wide hallway, as was common in Australia between the 1840's and 1940's. Somewhere along the line (probably in the 1970's judging by the style of the work) someone added an extension for a kitchen (followed later by other extensions for a laundry room and master bedroom and bathroom), and knocked out part of the wall between the room with the fire-place (which is no longer usable and has been boarded up and a bookshelf sitting on the flagstones) and the room with a wood-heater in the corner. The result is a living room in two parts. With the changes to the room it will now be possible to actually use that wood-heater in the corner (if we first hire a chimney sweep, as per the instructions in our lease) as we no longer have a couch blocking the door, or bags of project supplies (for other people's projects!) piled against it.


The room looks *much* better, and I am very happy with the result!

After the busy morning one would expect that I would have immediately dived into my uni work for the day, but I was still too hyper from the joys of re-arranging the furniture, so I set out for an with baronsnorri. Off we went, first to the quarry on the end of Chimney Pot Road, and then up the hill on a small trail, past any number of trees which had been fire-damaged many years ago yet managed to survive, sometimes only with tiny (compared to the dead parts) living branches sprouting out of the side of the trunks where there was still some living bark, instead of the pale white of the long-since sun-bleached main body. Many of them were quite interesting and photogenic, causing baronsnorri to comment that perhaps it is time to learn to use the cameras that he'd been given a year or so ago. Once we reached the access road to the peak (you can see it in the linked map above) we looped around to the main road, then cut down the hill a bit to pick up a dirt track which comes out on the Pipeline track at McDermott's farm (that old homestead was in a brilliant location in terms of view! They are just far enough from Mt. Wellington to have a great view of it, and they also have nice water-views. Not surprising that the city took over the land for park use when the last of the family died) and then back home. Total time elapsed for the walk: 1 hour, 50 minutes. Perhaps a bit more than I'd intended when we left the house. Last spring/summer that was a typical length of time for a walk, but I got much less uni work done then.

After today's house-cleaning and hiking adventures (and lunch, and a short nap!) I did eventually settle into uni work, and managed another 558 words and one figure. The saga continues...