It's a little tight in here

Myself and the local Rector are not quite people you might say are in need of a good feed. So it is a little uncomfortable at the moment showing him the latest updates to the parish website with the computer table shoved into a tight corner. My knees are jammed at a kind of 45 degree angle to the desk so my back isn't crunked against the dining room table behind me. He has to sit on a chair a little off to one side craning his neck and peering over the top of the printer. But we manage. Just.

The reason for the hardship is, of course, the imminent arrival of workmen to install our new heating system. We have ear-marked certain walls for radiators and so have cleared some space to let the workmen work. So the junk we usually spread out a bit is now piled in corners or on any surface on which it might be put until the men are gone.

My first work desk was in the box room of my parents' house and consisted, quite adequately, of a piece of offcut plywood assembled to two other pieces of plywood in a kind of orange-crate imitation. My father so wanted to make something -- anything, in fact -- from that offcut of plywood. But no. I had seen it first in the pile of random things he had brought home from somewhere. He asked me and asked me for it until I finally painted it a kind of off white colour. Then he didn't ask me any more.

The box room is the room in a two-storey house where a space has been cut out of the floor to allow the stairs to come up. The ceiling of the floor below slants up into the room (usually the smallest room in the house, perhaps bar the one with the facilities) and is boxed off with plasterboard. The result is sometimes a room with about one quarter of wasted space. This was the one I had. A bed (made by me out of more offcut timbers, this time, I think, from an old drop-leaf table), was jammed in crossways behind me. I actually had a decent amount of leg room, once I clambered over stuff and got sitting at the desk.

The first writing tool I bought was a manual typewriter. It had a carrying case and handle, which meant that although it weighed about 8 pounds it was actually portable. I was working as a nightwatchman and the typewriter would clack away for an hour or two in the dead of night in the Portacabin on the site where I guarded the construction machinery and kept the pumps going and tried not to look too scared and lonely. When the job finished, the typewriter clacked and cursed away back home, much to the discomfiture of my parents who had to listen to it whacking away through the wooden desk and the wooden floor beneath.

I changed to an electric model when one or two pieces sold and made a bit of money. Where the manual clacked, this one kind of thumped. It also introduced me to the idea of consumables. Where the manual had a good old-fashioned ribbon, that worked until you could see through it, this yoke tended to run out of print at inopportune times necessitating a walk to Tallaght Village for a replacement.

I had books around me and LPs and a stereo system with big padded 80s headphones. A big print calendar marked the days when a manuscript would go away in the post and when one came back. I even acquired a filing cabinet and filled the one remaining corner. My father complains the cabinet's still there. He's blind to his own junk, of course. But "that cabinet" is still there. So is the old off-white home made desk.

I've been thinking that I need some work space again and have been looking at the empty place Herself's old dressing table took up in our bedroom. I think I'll go the flat-packed self-assembly route this time, though. I don't hink she'd put up with a makey-up one somehow.

Bank Holiday Monday

"Arrgh! I've lost the television channel!" Herself shouts from the other room.
I have pulled up the chair to the computer table and am about to surf my handful of regularly-frequented sites on the Interweb.
"What?" I say, turning down Europe, playing "The Final Countdown", in glorious 80s rock-god stylee on the PC's disk drive.
"Hurry up! I've lost the channel and yer woman is about to take away Jason's baby on Corrie!"
"What does it say on screen?"
"AV something!"
"Press the button below the green button."
"That's on the other remote! I'm using the video remote!"
Herself prefers the volume controls on the video remote. Grand until you press the wrong button. I give up on heading for Venus and go in and grab a couple of remote controls to find UTV.
I've just spent my Bank Holiday Monday with my head in a larder cabinet. I started it on Easter Saturday, which God proceeded to punish me for by making absolutely everything that could go wrong... well.... go wrong. Dowels miraculously became unattached. Cabinet sides flopped apart and fixings pulled themselves and large sections of chipboard asunder. I cursed like Job in the worst of his scabbiness. Finally, I gave up in the hope of having a better head for the work another day. It didn't happen that way. Instead, though I fixed the problems that arose on Friday, the new iron mongery of the gizzard of the larder itself -- imported especially from England and delivered at 9.00 am on Saturday morning by two burly, good humoured bald men, one of whom declared that I was not the WillieW he had one time worked with -- proved a hazard to my mental health. If a bracket could go on upside down, I put it on upside down. If a runner could be inside out, it was inside out. And if a screw could avoid the head of a screwdriver and fall into the guts of the galvanised machine works it did. But I persevered. The work should take two hours, not two days, but it's done. Tomorrow I shall add doors (also ordered from England), go on the bus for door handles, then leave the kitchen project for a while until our money reserves are built up a bit to buy more parts.
I have to say it's starting to look like a modern kitchen now, and not just a haphazard DIY project.
Interestingly, the CD is now playing "Bed of Nails" by Alice Cooper. I ain't that far gone just yet, thanks.

Checklist for building a kitchen cupboard

Go to work. Check.
Go to meeting. Check.
Leave work at 12.30pm. Check.
Visit Veterinary Surgery before 1.00pm. Check.
Wait for bus. Check.
Listen to Thump! as arse hits ground having actually frozen off. Check.
Get home late because of bloody buses. Check.
Visit blogs on PC. Check.
Make tea. Check.
Drink tea and eat slice rhubarb pie. Check.
Chase ginger cat out of garden with broom. Check.
Spend 15 minutes in bathroom. Check.
Say Hello to cat in bedroom. Check.
Change out of work clothes. Check.
Bang head on staircase looking for boots. Check.
Open flatpack and follow instructions. Check.

Easy.

My first text message sent from inside a cupboard

Isn't that anti-perspirant a total model for having an Irish origin? I mean "Sure it won't let you down" is such a local motto... Anyway, Christy Moore is a high desert Andean mummy in comparison to me when I start doing any kind of physical labour, and so it was in the kind of frame of mind where my clothing had become so uncomfortable that nudity was about to take place that, two hours into adding another flat-packed kitchen cabinet in our never-ending project, last Monday, I received my first text message while standing on a chair inside a cupboard.

"How's it going?" Herself asks.

Well, I'm about to startle the neighbours and lose little pozidrive screws in the folds of my bare, fat, sodden flesh, I wanted to reply, but instead I waxed slightly lyrical about the quality of the box I was putting around our fridge and how much she would like it when she came home. My own opinion of it is not so settled. It is a little off square. B&Q have a device for curing this by adding two steel braces to the rear, but they (unnecessarily) point out that one should be careful not to obstruct the actual fridge by installing them. So I have one brace above the level of the fridge and one out of sight in another room entirely, doing nothing but, I suppose, gathering dust.

I have also acquired the habit of slamming the cupboard door. I may later add those clever little hinge things which connect the door of the fridge to the door of the cupbaord, but for now one opens one wooden door then opens the fridge. On removal of two (count them, it is getitng late after all) tins of lager, one closes the fridge firmly then applies the same amount of pressure -- in this case unnecessary -- to the cupboard door. The resulting BANG! noise has made me almost swallow my own tongue standing in the darkened kitchen over the past few evenings.

My excuse for not doing the other side of the kitchen is now removed. I shall have to learn the arts of not being flooded and not being electrocuted. Love it.