Living with It.

Since Chloe started Kindergarten a few weeks ago, I have been blessed with a rather abundant amount of "me time".  Now I'm not telling you to make you jealous (although I would have been if I read that sentence a year ago!), nor any other reason.  I've embraced me time, and have avoided doing anything remotely close to housework as much as I can.  Except for laundry.  There's just no avoiding that.  Especially when there's six loads of it piled high in your living room......

I said to a friend last week "the silence is deafening".  Right now, all I can hear is the rumbling of our most attractive brown in-wall air conditioner.  That's it.  This morning, whilst wandering aimlessly around the grocery store, I started to think of all the things here at home that we are just "living with".  You know, things that you really should do something about, but you really just can't be arsed?  Yeh, them.  Here's just a few.....

Look familiar?  These are gorgeous ready made curtains from Spotlight.  But the stooooopid curtain rods have a join in them where you can extend them - and there lies the problem.  The curtain hooks get caught on the join, and they end up looking like this.  In three separate bedrooms......

When we were moving house, and renovating, we had many a discussion over where children would be sleeping and where I would be sewing.  I very gracefully begrudgingly gave up the 5th bedroom so the kids would all have their own rooms, which meant I have the shoebox (which is actually named storeroom on the plans).  I suggested at the time that I could use the upstairs living room, but Andrew said NO he would like my sewing room to be closed off when it needed to be.  Well........this is the entry to my sewing room.  It is one of the downstairs living rooms.  Fail.

When we built the new deck, we asked the builder for a quote on a gate so the dogs couldn't get up.  If my memory serves me correctly, his quote was over $1000.  For a gate.  So since June last year, we have tried a number of tactics to keep the dogs off.  This being the latest.  You may note the top left hand corner of the timber is broken?  Yeh - one of the dogs chews through it when there's a thunder storm.  Really need to get that gate built......really need not to be charged a fortune for it.

And the most hilarious thing we live with?  This.  The entire staircase was the colour of those stairs, and we decided we would paint them white and then carpet them.  Back in June, when the carpet was laid, the carpet layers made a mistake thinking we wanted it on the stairs, but after I explained that we needed to paint the staircase first, he told me he'd already put the spiky wooden strips down.  "Not a worry" I say.  "We'll paint it soon" I say.  June............March.  Eight months of avoiding spikes in your feet, warning small children, and hearing yelps from unwilling victims.

In our defence, we planned to get the painting done over the Christmas holidays.  But three people decided to get chicken pox, which meant my planned trip to the beach with them so Andrew could paint, got shelved.

Sooooooo, what are you living with that really does need to be done?