Last Christmas, I felt really down in the dumps about our house.
We were smack bang in the middle of renovating the kitchen. There was a hole in the back of the building. It wasn’t really what you’d call secure, and it was bloody freezing!
On top of that, because the building work wasn’t yet complete, all of the kitchen units and appliances were in the lounge. Fully assembled, just waiting to be fitted. Our kitchen utentils, pots, pans and the 3 plates we owned, were in boxes up the staircase. If I told you that the house was a mess, this couldn’t be more of an understatement.
I think if you take this into account, you can sort of see why I couldn’t find room for a Christmas tree. *cue violins*
In fact, because of this shambolic way of living, I was unable to decorate for Christmas at all.
Sure, it’s no big deal when you put things into perspective. We’ve got an incredible (if I do say so myself) new kitchen diner now (not seen it yet? Check it out here) but I’m one of those annoying people who count down to Christmas as soon as the autumnal leaves start to get their beautiful colour. (And yes I already have presents bought and wrapped!)
My birthday is in October, and you’d think I’d wait until after then to get excited. NOPE. I’d much rather be filling a room with twinkly lights, re-stocking our cookie jars with cinnamon biscuits and looking forward to the moment when Joe puts Darth Vader as our tree-topper. Yet. Again!
I love it. And not having that last year really got me down.
To cheer myself up I tried to keep busy.
Our house was left with only one or two items when we moved in (as well as a mountain of pensioner magazine subscriptions and a family of spiders – *shudder*).
One of these items was a table. It was really lovely actually and could have easily been sold on. It was solid wood, and had some great detailing on the legs. But I had other plans. I wanted to chop it in half and make it into a hallway table – something like these.
I know, I know. Some people will be horrified that I wanted to chop it up. But like I said, I was feeling a bit down in the dumps and quite frankly, I just wanted to destroy something haha.
So, Christmas came, and this is what me and Joe were doing. We sawed the table in half.
We soon after positioned it in the hallway to see if it would do the trick. I thought it would look amazing painted in matte black. But I’ll never know…
You see, one day, not all that long ago, I realised it wasn’t in the house.
I suppose this is what happens when you have so much going on. Each room is piled high with furniture to make room for work somewhere else, and if something goes missing you’re really not very likely to notice straight away. That’s what happened with this poor thing. It got forgotten in the rain. It must have been placed outside temporarily to be out of the way, and sadly went a little mouldy and ended up as firewood. (Yup, Joe must have assumed that this was the other half of the table which wasn’t intended to be used anywhere).
So this little makeover idea just went up in smoke. Literally.
Our hallway is plastered now (update coming when I can find my camera…) so maybe I’ll concentrate on what colour we’ll do the walls first, before embarking on another hunt for this room’s furniture.
But you know what, I suppose we didn’t lose anything. We would have normally laid in pyjamas, ate a tin of Quality Street and had a Baileys with breakfast. We had no lounge to retire to, so keeping busy was a bit of light hearted relief for both of us.
You can’t win them all, hey? On the bright side, I didn’t cut my hands off, I learned how to use an electric saw of some kind, but sadly, not it’s official name it seems (my knowledge of tool terminology remains poor) and I still got to rock out my Christmas pants and jumper.
RIP table. I’ll go completely bananas on Christmas this year in your honour.
