SPRING CLEANING 31

Two weeks of Winter season remain, but the frogs are croaking and assuming spring is here as temps have upped 4-5 degrees. I regard the tasks lying ahead of me, which hopefully shall be attended to by the close of spring 2015. The main task is completing the upper hallway. I firstly need to shift the laundry tubs, china cabinet, and other items away from the area. Secondly, I need to attend to some rather large cracks...

 

Once these have been sanded, polyfilled, and re-sanded, I can empty my pot of cookie-dough paint onto the last patches of ceiling and wall. Then, I am stuck until my friend drives me to B&Q to collect another tin of Tibetan Gold paint, as I have run very close to the end of the second tub; it will not be enough to complete the trim, toilet door, loft cover, and blanket box on its own.

Other tasks I need to attend to this spring include digging over the yard, making a compost hole so as to allow the compost tub compost to rot down prior to use, hedge trimming, sanding, polyfilling, re-sanding and painting the toilet, selling and dumping stuff so I can finally paint the spare room, and polyfilling and ceiling painting the coffee hide.

Obviously not all these tasks will get attended to - as they all rely on either the weather or other people, rather than just myself - so, I am sure to have plenty of time to enjoy turning out my pantry and fidgeting about with decor in the lower hallway!

One task I am not looking forward to is buying another new vacuum. Floor-runners, or cylinders as they call them in this country it appears, do not last very long in England. The one I had over in NSW, Australia lasted me over 5 years and was still functioning when I left. Over here in Sussex, England, I ended up my father's upright - thankfully as I dislike uprights -, bought and stopped using a Dirt Devil (its main nozzle broke down on me after 2 years and you cannot buy replacement filters)...

I currently use a Hoover Telios - which is wearing out. It will not allow me to use maximum suction - only going to half the possible level before blowing the fuse. I would definitely NOT recommend this model to anyone buying a new vacuum. It has lasted me around 14-16 months and is already ready to be dumped and replaced. I need full suction in this house!

WINTER WONDERS 26

Incense was the next minor tidy-up chore on my agenda. I had bought three or four 6-packs and decided to spread them out into the boxes rather than leave them in their own collectives. This way, I can take a box of assorted incense downstairs for use over the kitchen sink at some point.

My next task was a small one. It was both simple and quick - or should have been. During the second week of February, I planned to re-stick the blue plastic wall-hook that hangs the shower curtain across the bath. There is one each end of the bath, and both were begining to peel away at the top.

It might appear to be an easy task to fix the hooks - JUST a drop of strong glue behind the top of each hook, press and wait a minute and job done...

...but something happened to make it last a bit longer. I had purchased a tube super-glue at Sainsburys earlier in the week and unscrewing the cap positioned the nozzle ready to apply one squirt on the first of the two hooks.

Nothing happened. After fiddling about with the nozzle and cap for a few minutes, I tried again - again, again, and again. Eventually, glue came out - rather rapidly - with the result of covering my thumb and the wall as well as the hook-wall gap.

Luckily, my thumb was not glued TO anything in the incident, but it took a long time to get it clean of the glue. I had to use my grandmother's glasses to read the teeny tiny print on the tube to see what to do for glue on skin mishaps - and quickly applied the soapy hot water it told me to. I assume many people have glue-on-skin problems as they did mention it on the pack. I had to scrape and soap and scrape away for several minutes to get the gunky glue off, though. I then - with success - attempted the second hook.

WINTER WONDERS 25

It was time to stop messing about in my pantry and get some serious work done. I began by sanding down the airing cupboard and bathroom doors, ready to paint in Tibetan Gold. They stayed that way for around a week, before I finally gave them their first coat of the bright golden yellow paint. 

It was 2 days later that I top-coated them and had 'done' the western end of the upper hallway - leaving the eastern side untouched. This will not be as bad, as my son lives in the western side - so when I polyfill, sand, paint, etc, I will not be as likely to disturb his daytime sleeping. This also means that there is no reason why I cannot go right ahead and DO the last chunk of hallway except for laziness - oh!, yes, AND the fact I need to buy another tin of Tibetan Gold gloss! I have a toilet door, blanket box, windowsill, and loft-lid to paint with only a tiny amount of paint left in the tin.

February arrived and I noted that the window cleaner had not visited in January. He skipped one month in 2014, also. The weather has not been behaving itself and he had indoor decorating jobs on last time; I have yet to discover why he failed to appear in January.

Along with the fact that in Australia one tends to only clean the windows once or maybe twice a year, it makes me wonder why the English custom is to have ones windows done monthly. Maybe it is not the case all over the country - but my father had his windows done since being too elderly to safely climb a ladder, and the neighbors all get theirs done monthly, too.

Maybe the fact that in Aussie many properties are single-story, not just the 'bungalows' - or perhaps the fact that one has less emphasis on the exterior and more on the interior in Australia. Either way, personally, my main reason for retaining the family window cleaner once dad died is that it is hard to take good photos with bird poop all over the place.