Thursday, May 19, 2011

The Purple Palace

So the house we bought is a doer-upper. It is a hodgepodge of 70s' style. It comes with outer walls painted lilac, veneer doors throughout, textured glass feature windows, stained carpets (some with paisley designs), wallpaper that to a certain extent you have to take your hat off to, aluminium sliding doors and conservatory, tile ceilings, nasty curtains, astro-turf balcony …. well I could go on but you get my drift. (I shall post some wallpaper shots in due course - its worth it for a giggle.)

Boy o boy - we may have bitten off more than we can chew on this one. Whilst I'm keen to tinker and learn about DIY, my other half would rather chew his arm off. And given the scale of this, we can see weekends for the rest of our lives taken up with painting. Was this a prudent purchase? Only time will tell.

The parts which are nice are (i) the kitchen, (ii) the warmth (insulation is something we have sorely missed of late), (iii) the bath, and (iv) portions of the garden.
Hopefully the kitchen may encourage me to get back into doing some cooking. At this point I am painting the pantry shelves (which were a tad icky and freaked me out) so we still have bags of groceries all over the floor, but hopefully should do a final coat tonight and can put it all away in weekend. Then the cooking can begin.

In the garden, whilst there is a hell of a lot of weeding to do - and lets face it, gardening is a mystery to us - there is an adventure course out there. I spent a few hours in the weekend weeding the vege patches. We have some lovely raised garden beds for veges with really nice soil. - Oh God, is this a new moment in my life.? Am I actually commenting on having nice dirt? (I did get freaked out by a portion that had white stones and a tile laid out in the garden - and so I opted to leave that section in case I weeded up some dear loved family pet from the previous owner.) Anyway, I planted some lettuces and spinach that we'd been given as a house warming gift. Will be totally excited if we actually get a lettuce out of it. Grow lettuce, grow!

I'm back - with (flexible) goals

Well, its been a busy wee while. Clearly its been a long time since I posted anything. This is due firstly to spending the majority of my time organising our house purchase and move, and then more recently to the fact we cannot get a working internet connection at the new 'residence' (makes it sound grand right?).

However, I have set myself a goal. One post a week and one new product a week. Perhaps optimistic given all that is going on but I feel like I haven't sat down with the sewing machine for a very long time.


I was up at a conference last week where we did a session on goal setting. Whilst others set goals about work or leaving work on time, I set goals about Threadbird and getting things back on track. I was comforted by the part of the session that recognised that people who set goals "relapse", that setting goals will not always mean that you never falter from that course, and that faltering is normal. So, I can falter in this goal but I may as well aim for it.

To that end - this is my post. No new product yet.