Spring clean
On Saturday the new owner of the building next door phoned to ask if he could come round the following Thursday to do an official inspection of the party wall. No big deal for most people, but we are not most people, and our house is a squirrel house. Nothing is ever thrown away, just in case it comes in useful. We have two entire rooms (it’s a big house) full of nothing but boxes filled with plastic bags, boxes full of clothes and shoes that don’t fit anybody but have years of life left in them, lampshades that don’t fit any of the lamps, notes, files, schoolbooks, prehistoric computers, toys, baby books. You name it, we have a box full of it.
We reckoned that we only had to clean half the house, the half with the party wall in it. The children dealt with the top floor, tidying up two of the bedrooms and the cats’ playroom, and piling all their lumber into the unfinished bathroom and locking the door.
I got the kitchen and the pantry ship shape. My room was already tidy (nobody had been allowed in it for a week), and everybody pitched in to make the main room downstairs look normal. It isn’t dirt, I hasten to add, it’s the rather eclectic assortment of objects that decorate it that most people find off-putting. We put the decorative bicycle outside, took down the painting of the Sacred Heart, hid the dog’s toy box, removed the dried holly from the sofa (the only way to stop Trixie peeing on it), put the pinecone collection in the fireplace, and some of the stacks of books back in the bookcase.
That left the first floor. Our bedroom was full of boxes, pictures, books and piles of clothes that we couldn’t decide if they were on their way to or from a charity shop. The landing looked like a junk shop in the process of moving premises. On Thursday morning husband said he’d deal with it. He finished mending the guttering on the shed, and filling in Finbar’s potholes in the path, and I locked myself in my room and left him to it. He had three hours left.
What sounded like removal men heaving things about on the first floor went on for a couple of hours, then the sound of the shower. I went up to see. Not a box in sight. It was fantastic! I just wanted to lie down on the bed and gaze at the emptiness. First though, we had the visit, which was very perfunctory in the end and a bit of an anticlimax after all the work it had involved.
When the owner and the legal person left, I brought in the washing (there’s always washing to be brought in) and took an armful of sheets upstairs. I was about to open the door to the ‘box’ room, which also houses the linen cupboard, and husband put his hand on my arm.
H: Don’t open the door.
Me: Why not?
H: It could be…dangerous.
He opened the door a crack and I peered inside.
We are going to have to spend some time today putting our rubbish back, otherwise we will never see the linen cupboard again.
