16 Sept 2020

Have you ever spent time doing a completely useless activity? Looks good in the short term but ultimately not going to achieve anything??

I spent the morning rearranging bits of the house. I had two goals, and the outdoor area where I like to lounge around drinking coffee when the weather is lovely was the first target.

The weather hasn’t been lovely for a while, and in the meantime it’s become the dumping ground for unridden bikes, woodworking stuff, broken bits and pieces that were deemed not necessary enough to put in the shed but not broken enough for the bin, and a lot of dust, sawdust and spider webs.

I now sit on my outdoor couch admiring the once again lovely sunny sitting area. There are no bikes visible (for at least 5 hours), the dust and sawdust have been blown to one side of the garden awaiting the next strong wind to blow it back, and I’m enjoying the warm gentle (non sawdust blowing strength) breeze and a cup of coffee.

Bliss.

My second target for the day was our lounge/sitting/living/eating/television watching room. It’s quite small, and houses three couches, two recliner rockers, two fish tanks, a massive coffee table, a television, a China cabinet, an antique chest of drawers, and a large toy collection for my grandson to play with.

There’s nothing that can be removed from that room because it’s all required stuff (also there is nowhere else in the house it can be placed), but every now and then I get a bee on my bonnet and decide to rearrange things.

The impetus this time was the padding level on the couch seat that I tend to use the most, is getting deflated, possibly due to the large butt that sits on it on a regular basis. Given that there are two other couches in this room, it was time to have a bit of a shift so I could continue to watch tv from the same angle and from a padded surface.

Also, because I refuse to take the full blame for the lounge room apocalypse, there was also the issue of the people who use the recliner rockers on a regular basis moving them back and forwards, buckling up the large matt that they rested partly on. I got sick of having to flatten out the matt, and I usually roll up the matt for summer anyway.

So I juggled, I lugged, I cleaned underneath, I rearranged, I put things back into slightly different places, and two hours later I have a room that is still overfilled with furniture, but in a slightly different arrangement.

I really feel I’ve achieved quite a bit this morning. When the (paid) workers arrive home from their labours, they will notice that I’ve been busy (they won’t see the hour and a half sitting on the couch in the courtyard). The dog is a little confused because I have moved her couch of choice, and the grandson, when he gets here in a day or so, will have to look for a couple more seconds to find the stash of his toys.

But that’s it. Like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, it’s not going to stay that way. Dust and spider webs will reconvene in the courtyard. Bits of duplo and sultanas will still find their way under the couches. Large butts will flatten out the padding in the old couches.

And in a few months I’m going to want to rearrange stuff again. Maybe with a bit of input from an architect I could work out how to shove a bit more furniture in that room 🙂