Today I move rooms. My current
bedroom at the front of the house is where I’ll begin painting. It’s the
biggest room, has the poorest walls—rippled paper, saggy plaster, holes,
cracks, lumps. I make space in other rooms, carry every piece of furniture out
of the front room.
I clear the hall. From the ‘third
bedroom’ next to the kitchen I clear the huge dining table, turn it on its
side, wrestle it out the door, up the hall, into the empty front room. The ‘third
bedroom’—it’s not been a bedroom in the twelve years I’ve owned this house—now becomes
my bedroom.
I cover the floor of the front
room with a huge drop sheet, place an old mattress protector on the table,
cover it with a smaller drop sheet, haul all the painting gear from the shed to
the front room, array it on the table.
If I can ‘fix’ this room, I can
fix anything in this house. This is where I begin. As I move from room to room
over coming weeks I must categorise
stuff. Some things will be offered when I hold a garage sale, things like the
brand new motorbike helmet I never wore, furniture I won’t need at Carnegie—the
loft bed, a red chair, a desk stool.
In the cupboards are clothes I will
bag and drop at the op shop. I will box those books I don’t use for reference
for my work, stow them in the revamped front room.
A couple of bigger tasks need
doing—replacing the bathroom vanity, a missing quadrant of carpet in the
lounge, a piece of door frame cut off to accommodate a built-in bookshelf.
The good thing is that I’m
happiest at home doing exactly these things. I can’t spend enough time in the
garden, or shuffling furniture, or up a ladder. What I won’t do is rush.
Today I spend all day quietly, patiently,
methodically moving things. It all works with a bit of thought: this thing
first, from here to here, then this, and this.
Tonight I sleep in a new
bedroom. Tomorrow I prepare to paint.
Rock on.
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