Tag: home improvements

Building Up To Our Departure

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon, Walt Disney World

Life can be feast or famine at times. There can be long periods of time when stuff just rumbles along, the routine is just that and there’s nothing of note going on. I look forward to when that happens for us!!

I’m not sure how we manage it but we always seem to conspire against ourselves to make things as busy and at times, as stressful as possible. Here we sit twenty odd days from a trip that has been so long in coming that I can hear you all sigh that we haven’t gone already and I’m still banging on about it. Between now and when we do go, we have somehow managed to cram in what is, for me at least, one of the most stressful things on the planet…..having the builders in, and for multiple separate projects. With that, work and other real life struggles I have enough balls in the air for now thanks….

Stressed Juggler
More balls than a Chippendale’s dressing room…..

We have had these home improvement plans for ages and despite it all being literally months in the planning, by chance, it all happens in the next three weeks. I HATE having work done to the house. The mess, disruption and angst is not something I enjoy. Having had the pain of the kitchen being renovated just over a year ago, we are now going for the other room in the house which causes the most pain when it is out of action, the bathroom. We are also having a new boiler and the back of the house redone to give us more parking space.

To add a touch of spice and extra stress to the day tomorrow, Louise gets her new car too, admin, paperwork and sorting the insurance permitting. Rest assured we have not won the lottery. It just so happens that a lot of things a long time in the making have all happened at once, as always seems to be the case with us.

I am not filled with joy at the prospect of this work to the house I have to say. Living next door to my Mum & Dad comes into its own here of course as it means we can wander in to have showers etc when we are without a bathroom, but I am still sticking to my sulking guns. I just want it to be over, especially as when it is, we’ll be heading for the airport. At least our house and pet sitters, Rebecca and Tom will have a shiny new bathroom, boiler and a choice of parking spots when they are here.

They have the dubious honour of looking after all of the pets. We have too many of course. Oli, I approve of, he’s my mate and a fully fledged member of the family. Bean, well, she’s almost there I suppose. She seems fairly settled and content anyway…

We’ve had our two cats, Pumpkin and Daisy, a lot longer than Bean, and everyone in our house apart from me, would tell you that they definitely are family members, but I’ve never bought into that. I am not a cat fan. They are all effort and no reward. Still, they need feeding and so that falls to Rebecca and Tom.

On that note, it is now hitting home to everyone that Rebecca won’t be with us on this trip. We all understand why. They have just got their own place and that among other things needs to be their priority right now, but it doesn’t stop them, us and me especially stamping my feet like a two-year old at the unfairness of it all. Real life has no right getting in the way of trips to Florida.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, after re-sharing the video of our 2008 trip, I have almost kept my word and the work on the next video has started. 2006 happened to be the tape in the camera when it came out of the case so the import process is underway and hopefully time for editing can be found, more likely by Emily than me. Having watched he raw footage there seems to be about seven hours of the girls playing in the pool for some reason. Clearly we’ll edit that down, but of course, for us, if for nobody else, there’s some lovely stuff there too.

Rebecca can be heard talking with her pre-tonsil removal voice that bears no resemblance to her current one. I won’t promise it being complete by a certain time as who knows, but best endeavours are promised.

So today is filled full of prepping the house and ourselves for what looks to be a messy and busy time. We’ve also got to pop round to Louise’s Mum to do some DIY there and I have a football match to cram in somewhere…well specifically at 4pm, oh and walk the dogs should it ever stop raining, and iron some clothes for next week and find the spare key for the car we’re trading in tomorrow and look, the shopping delivery has just pulled up!!

AAAGGGHH….first world problems abound.

Till the next time…..

Plastering and Pining

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon, Walt Disney World

Events have conspired to make this past week a toughy.

We are, as I have mentioned before, undergoing some home improvements. This week has seen us getting plastered. Of course, that’s a messy thing and my oft mentioned dislike for disruption and mess has been in full effect. This work is also a blatant reminder of where a lot of our cash has been going recently, when it really should have been going on practical, sensible things like getting us across the Atlantic to Florida.

When we made these plans earlier this year, involving getting some stuff done to the house this summer and planning a trip early next year seemed OK, even manageable and it certainly demonstrated much more common sense than we have in the past decade or more.

Now, however, with my social media feeds full of people on holiday, the weather resembling November and my house like a building site, the irresponsible child in me is screaming that I should be on some roller coaster somewhere with pancakes in my belly.

Work has been extremely busy too, but to add to my longing for our usual American adventure, that’s because a member of my team is currently away, yes, on holiday. He isn’t in the US, but it is Canada which is close enough for me to put that into the same bucket of stuff that I shall keep to remind me never to be so bloody sensible ever again.

April seems a long way away.

Pining for Siesta Key…..

Our dose of US sun normally girds our loins sufficiently to get us through the grim, dark, cold and miserable UK winter. We shall have to take it on this year without that in our tanks and I fear for us. I also fear for you lot as you’ll see this manifest itself in a series of whinging, bleak and self pitying blogs. What do you mean you’re used to it?

On the subject of social media feeds and them being filled with Orlando stuff, of course that’s my own fault. Your social media content is of your own doing (mostly) and mine of course are made up of folks with similar obsessive interests in Florida. I joined a few of those Facebook Orlando groups some time ago, but never really contribute to be honest. They feel too big and impersonal and just a a diluted version of all that was good about the Disney forums most of us used back in their heyday. Plus, there’s some right crap on there too 🙂

From questions that make my toes curl, to people who make me want to scream “Stop doing Orlando wrong!!” at my phone, to what seems to have become a stream of “blogs” or “trip reports”, I feel that these groups aren’t for me, other than to keep my eye on any news /updates I need to be aware of. Call me old fashioned, but jotting down a couple of paragraphs around a few photos from your phone isn’t a trip report. It’s fine to do that of course, it’s nothing to do with me after all, and it will still be nice to look back on of course, but for us old school Orlando folk a trip report involves a lot more effort than that. Endless notes, extensive photographs, details of everything, some of which nobody wants to know about and more words than anybody in their right mind would ever want to wade through (and no singing!!). THAT’s a trip report. These Facebook things are just status updates, valid all the same, and each to their own, but let’s not use the wrong term for them eh? There’s another example of my up and down relationship with Facebook!

Hmm, not sure where that rant/trip report snobbery/Disney forum nostalgia came from….perhaps I need a holiday? Maybe that or a new Disney forum we can all use that somehow is protected from cock wombles and trouble makers? I’m not volunteering by the way, but if you find one let me know?

Till the next time…..

Ain’t That The Tooth?

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon

Years ago, when the girls were at school and we still did things like put them to bed, I remember many an evening sat on the foot of one of their beds listening to them fret about some upcoming event at school that they were not looking forward to. At the time it wasn’t appropriate for me to then spend an hour telling them about all the stuff I had coming up that I didn’t fancy either and instead I would do my best to reassure them that everything would be OK. I would tell them that worrying about this stuff would do no good and once whatever they were dreading had happened they would no doubt realise that it wasn’t actually as bad as they imagined and they would wonder why they worried so much in the first place.

These days of course my advice is seldom asked for, yet I still cast it, like bread onto a pond without ducks whilst they feign interest and resist the urge to roll their eyes and shrug their shoulders.

Last week’s blog was filled with me whining about my impending dental treatment and I have to admit that I spent a good deal of time with it on my mind. It was casting an ugly shadow over what was already looking like a crap week as we were having the house taken apart to improve it. I did not, it probably won’t surprise you, follow the golden advice outlined above that I used to impart to the girls.

As they always do, Tuesday rolled around and I made my way to the dentist feeling less than enthusiastic. Once in the waiting room I was having to do breathing exercises to prevent some sort of cardiac mishap before I was called into THE CHAIR. I assumed the position, put on the protective orange Roy Orbison glasses and paper bib and girded my loins for an abundance of pain.

“I’ll just take a quick X-Ray to see what we’re dealing with” said my dentist before leaving the room to expose me to dangerous amounts of gamma rays just like David Banner.

“Don’t make me petrified, you wouldn’t like me when I’m petrified!” I replied.

She retired to somewhere behind me to look at said X-Ray and after a couple of tuts and a sigh asked me to join her there. I stumbled across the room, confused by the out of focus orange blur everything had become to look at an image of what I assumed were my teeth.

To cut a long story short, she wasn’t happy to proceed with what she had planned as I had a shorter than expected root. Insult to injury sprang to mind, but sensing the chance to leave the place minus any pain or financial exploitation I did. The plan is to “wait and see” and review it all again in six months. I have several options at that point it seems, none of which cost less than a grand unless I have things extracted. I pray then to God of dentistry that whatever glue she used to stick my implant back in is like that Ultra No Nails stuff they sell in B&Q.

If not, well, faced with those potential costs, I think this is a good look…

You may wonder, as have I since, why she did not take that X-Ray when I went to have my implant stuck back in and she told me what the longer term solution was. My short root was, after all, of her doing when I endured the horrors of root canal work “under” her. Had she X-Rayed me back then it would have saved me many hours of fretful nonsense and it would have removed the need for you poor souls to listen to me whine about it.

Anyway, not only have I avoided something I was dreading,  but I have proved once for all that I know best, my advice is gold dust and I should be heeded and obeyed at all times….girls……are you listening?  Girls?! Oh never mind.

As Ying to that Yang however, the pain of the disruption to the house has been very real. Every evening has been spent moving all our furniture from one room to another, stripping wallpaper and generally not being able to relax. We’re not 100% finished but things are almost back to normal and I am telling myself the worst is over. That’s a lie of course as now we have to re-decorate the living and dining rooms. My lack of interest in such a task is only matched by my lack of prowess to do it well.

So having learned a great lesson this week about how worrying doesn’t help, things are rarely as bad as you imagine them and I am a big nancy when it comes to a dental visit, the only thing left for me to do is to create some inspirational message about all of this, add it to some suitably inspiring stock photograph and launch it at Facebook for everyone to like, share, comment on and then do exactly the opposite when they have shit to deal with.

fretting meme

Till the next time…..