Week 171- bear hugs, separation anxiety and Carol Vorderman’s Better Homes...

It’s amazing how quickly you can adapt to your surroundings.

We moved into our new house four days ago.

When the last van full of belongings had been unloaded I looked round and thought, right, I am going to nail this. I’m going to make this house look immense. 

How hard can it be to give a place a lick of paint, pull up the carpets and sand the floorboards?

Surely it’s just a matter of replacing the old-woman-style chandeliers with posh Habitat lampshades?

I was a runner on Carol Vorderman’s Better Homes about ten years ago.

We transformed two next-door-neighbours’ houses in a week. We knocked down walls, wallpapered, landscaped the garden. The works. When the women saw their new homes they ugly-cried for absolutely ages. Marion, the 72-year-old who'd fostered over 40 children, had Carol Vorderman in such a tight bear hug that it took two producers to loosen her grip.

So I have the experience. You could say I'm a house-transforming-veteran.

The two major differences this time are:

1. I am not trying to make a lasting impression on a humourless producer in the hope that I might get a job in telly instead of the actual reality of lugging round wheelbarrows full of rubble for a week for zero pay.

2. I have a baby stuck to me 24/7 who is suffering from a major case of separation anxiety.

Every time I put my son down he cries himself purple.

Or pulls himself up on my trousers and clings on whilst sobbing.

There is very little you can get done in a house full of boxes when you've got a nine-month-old permanently attached to your hip.

No one else can placate him.

On one hand, it's amazing to be that loved by a little person that they'd prefer to be dangled upside down in a sling while I hoover than be cuddled up with anyone else.

At the same time it can be so massively claustrophobic that I would trade anything for an hour alone in a dark room.  

In fact it doesn't have to be dark.

Or even a room.

I have, in four days, managed to unpack the grand total of half a box of t-shirts and as a consequence have been wearing the same clothes for several days now.

So I've had to have a rethink on the house front for the foreseeable future.

I realise now that the painting and sanding might have been a tad ambitious.

I'm now going for a kind of industrial inspired theme mainly consisting of half filled cardboard boxes everywhere.

It looks more ‘packing area in Lidl’ than ‘Grand Designs.’

But it might catch on.

Don’t miss the next You Can Take Her Home Now post: 

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