Moving house is a funny business. Paul and I (well, okay, mostly Paul) have spent the past two weeks scrubbing our house and tidying it to within an inch of our lives, as well as redistributing a good chunk of our belongings amongst kind people’s spare bedrooms and garages across the county.
This is the dining end of our kitchen. Doesn’t it look lovely? Apart from the grainy photo, it’s almost Pinterest-ready, I’d say! Sadly, when I look at this, after “ooh, those flowers smell lovely”, all I can think is “where am I supposed to dry the laundry now?”. Usually this area is full of clothes airers, and the chairs normally live in different rooms. The cushions were pinched from the sofa, when I suddenly realised that the red-and-gold upholstered chairs matched the kitchen before Paul decorated it. And please note the beautiful pale duck-egg blue on the wall… that we nearly didn’t have, because Paul thought it might be “too bright”. Suffice it to say that we do not have the same taste in colours, not even slightly!
The tablecloth (twice the size of this table) has been carefully ironed and folded to hide the old red wine stain that won’t wash out. Those are Emma Bridgewater egg cups, but they’ve never been used because I don’t much like boiled eggs, and I’m not very good at cooking them anyway. The lovely blue glass jug was my Mum’s – a wedding gift that now neither of us have ever used!
Even the artwork isn’t ours. Paul bought the frames at some point around Christmas, but we couldn’t be bothered to move the laundry out of the way to put them on the wall. They even came with these prints included – sufficiently abstract that it doesn’t even matter which way up you hang them. We’ll probably replace them with our own photographs at some point… but we’ve got so many to choose from that it could take us years to decide which ones!
The house will go on the market early next week, so hopefully all this cleaning and clearing and staging will make itself worthwhile. I’m just not certain how we’re supposed to live in such a tidy house until we move out! I’m such an untidy person that all these empty rooms are making me very uncomfortable indeed. Thankfully the Shed is still a complete mess… I suppose I’d better tackle that next!