A Change of Plans Part III

Those of you who have been following my story of our family emergency in the last week will know that this resulted in my fiancee's daughter and her husband, six month old baby and two dogs moving into our small home, which we only moved into four months ago, and which we are still working on. If you would like to read the full story, and I hope you will, as it provides the background to this continuation, you can find the first part here, and the follow up here.

The follow up to our change of plans left us Saturday evening, with the loft floor laid, the boxes and other contents of the spare bedroom mostly moved up to the loft, and all of us exhausted from the effort. My knees were hurting a lot every time that I knelt down, and I had to do a lot of kneeling in the loft, and my back was stiff from all the crouching too, but surprisingly the next morning and since, my knees have not hurt. More often than not when I have been kneeling for long spells, I have trouble walking. This is not something new, I have had it since I was about 12 years old, but maybe as I am getting older it's getting better. That would be a good thing!

Having got the spare bedroom cleared so that our visitors had somewhere other than the living room floor to sleep on, my next task was to work on the bathroom. Our house, like most older houses in England, only has one bathroom. This one is downstairs in the hallway close to the front door, which is not the best of locations, and it's barely big enough to fit a bathtub, toilet and washbasin into, plus a radiator. It's so narrow in fact, that when sitting on the toilet (and I won't get too graphic), your right leg is touching the side of the bath, and your left the radiator. When the radiator is hot you have to be really careful not to burn yourself.

The problem with the bathroom, other than the size, is that there is no towel rail, and insufficient space to put toiletries etc. We had been hanging our towels on hooks on the back of the door, but they did not dry well there. We had also been hanging one over the radiator, but it didn't stay on very well, didn't dry well, and also stopped the heat from getting out into the room, and like most people, we don't like to shower in a cold bathroom - let alone use the toilet! There is not even a toilet roll holder in there.

Like the bedroom and the loft, we had decided to put off fixing these up until after the wedding, but with our new situation decided to bring the date forward, since we now have four adults and a baby using the bathroom. It was with this in mind that we decided to go to Ikea on Sunday morning, having previously seen a towel rail that we liked in there, but it had been out of stock.

If you are familiar with the Swedish furniture store Ikea, you either love it or hate it. They have them in many countries in Europe including the UK, and also now in the USA. The stores are huge, and ours is no exception, with three floors full of just about every furniture item and fixing you can imagine, and then some. The stores are laid out so that you are led on a path around each floor, rather like a theme park, and if you stop and look at everything you could easily be there three or four hours. But I digress...

The store opened at 10:30am with it being Sunday, and we got in there just before 11am. The car park was already queuing up to the main road, and as we approached the ticket barrier, the right of the two lanes looked like it had been coned off, and everyone was using the left hand one. Yes you have to pay to park at a lot of shops in the UK, disgusting isn't it, but if you spend more than £20 at Ikea, you at least get free parking. The driver of the car in front of us pressed the button to dispense the ticket, then promptly dropped the ticket, as you sometimes do. It took him a minute to pick it up, but the barrier wouldn't open, and he had to press a button for assistance. The attendant soon arrived, and started fiddling with the machine, by which time some bright spark had found that the right lane wasn't actually coned off, and decided to use that. Everyone else behind us promptly did the same, leaving us trapped behind the stuck car while several dozen other cars passed us by. If you know me at all, you will know that this sort of situation does not impress me at all, however I remained calm, and a few minutes later managed to reverse up, and someone kindly allowed me to pull in to the queue for the right ticket machine. At the same time, the attendant managed to raise the barrier for the trapped car, which now drove on, while I still had to wait for several more cars to use my machine. Grrrhhh.... How many of you have had similar situations I wonder when parking, or at the checkout in the grocery store...

We managed to find a parking spot, and then took the escalator up to the store entrance. This is a very strangely designed store, with the exit on the first floor and the entrance on the fourth. You can either take the escalator up the levels or the elevator, but most people take the escalator. By the time we got inside the store it was heaving. It wasn't quite as bad as a grocery store on Christmas Eve, but it didn't fall far short of it. Fortunately we knew what we wanted and headed off to the Bathroom section. There were other towel rails aside from the one that we had originally liked, and we opted for a different design based on the fact that there was a matching glass shelf and toilet roll holder. I had measured up the wall to the left of the washbasin to see if I could make some shelves, but these were the perfect size.

Having decided what we wanted, we headed down to the checkouts, paid, and then took the escalator back up to where we parked. My fiancee wasn't concentrating, and so she ended up continuing past the second floor where we parked, and up the next escalator, before she realized that we had gone too far. Drat! OK, we needed to go back down one floor, but the escalators only go up, there were no stairs to be seen, so we had to take the elevators. There are three of these, but despite the down buttons lighting up, all of the elevators just passed us by. Eventually, and this must be a good four or five minutes later, one stopped, and immediately whisked us back up to the fourth floor, then back down to the second where we had parked.

The excitement over, we exited the store and I drive us home, relieved that this part of the day was at least over.

Having got home, it was of course time to start fitting the new items in the bathroom. My fiancee gets a little fed up when I keep asking her advice, but when it comes to deciding where fixtures ought to go, I have some good ideas, she does as well, and when we put our heads together we come up with the best solution. Locating a simple thing like a toilet roll holder is not exactly rocket science, but it is in my opinion important to be able to reach the paper without either falling forward because you have to reach so far, or putting your back out because you have to turn so sharply to reach behind you. Some hotels would be well advised in my opinion to consult me in these matters. But I digress...

We decided on the best location for the toilet roll holder and the towel rail, which has four bars that rotate out, and is above the radiator so that the heat can warm up the bathroom as well as rise up and dry the towels. Again, it didn't want to be too high so that you couldn't reach the towels, but it didn't want to be too low so that you were in danger of poking your eye out while standing next to it drying yourself either. The shelves were the perfect size, and so I set to, marking holes, drilling and fixing everything in place.

The shelves were the trickiest part, since the fittings were two feet apart, and I don't have a long spirit level. just below the fittings are some tiles, and so I trusted that these were level and marked my holes accordingly. The mountings consist of a bracket that you screw to the wall, over which you fit a round cover, which has a round tube coming up vertically out of it for three inches. This is supposed to align with a hole in the end of the shelf, and knowing my luck I thought that either these would not fit properly, or the shelves would not be level. For once, the mountings fitted perfectly, and although the shelves are slightly off level, it doesn't show. They look rather nice too. I was really pleased, but had pretty much had enough for the day by then.

I enjoy doing jobs in the house, but in my experience over the years that I have been doing it, something usually goes wrong. There is no reason for this, and it's not something that I have done, it's just that I hit a snag that I find it hard to resolve. It's like putting shelves up in an alcove only to find that the alcove is not straight, or that something does not fit properly. Years ago I put some speaker brackets up in an alcove in my first house, which was built in 1910, and some parts were not straight. The speakers were rather heavy, and required good brackets to hold them up, but I hadn't expected the plaster at one side of the alcove to be one inch deep and the other side to be almost four inches deep! I had trouble finding screws that were long enough to fit through the plaster into the brick behind.

By this time lunch was ready, a late Sunday lunch, and it was really good. We had Roast Beef, Roast Potatoes, Roasted Sweet Potatoes, Carrots, Brussel Sprouts, Swede (Rutabaga), and Yorkshire Pudding. Lots of good thick gravy of course. Yumm....

I spent the rest of the day trying to catch up on reading articles here on Associated Content, and felt at least that as a result of our family emergency, at least some of the household jobs that we had planned for later in the year had now been done.

My fiancee had meanwhile been talking with her daughter's husband, since both of them are out of work, and asked if he would like to help by doing some gardening. I got home from work last night to find a lot of the flower beds had been dug over and the weeds taken out, which was nice. I am thinking that this weekend I might do some repairs to the fences at the back, and he was going to try and fix the front wall today, so soon the house ought to look and feel a lot better. It used to belong to our landlord's mother, but when she died they rented it out, and as usual when tenants have been in a property, it needed a lot of TLC. It's certainly a lot nicer now than when we moved in four months ago, and a good price compared to other properties in the area.

Well that concludes our "change of plans" story for now, or at least brings you up to date. Depending on what happens tonight, I may bring you another episode in our ongoing saga. If you know my writing well enough, you will know that "might bring you" more than likely means "stay tuned for tomorrow's exciting episode".

I hope you enjoyed this story, and if you didn't yet read the previous two parts, the links to them can be found at the top.