Morning Coffee | The One With the Fruit Juice

Don’t worry, folks: I’m not actually DRINKING fruit juice as I write this week’s ‘Morning Coffee’ catchup – I mean, I don’t even get out of bed in the morning without at least two cups of coffee. (Well, OK, I DO. But only so I can go and make at least two cups of coffee…)

No, the the title of today’s post doesn’t refer to what I’m drinking: it refers to what I’m SPILLING. All over the bedroom wall, actually. D’OH.

It happened last Saturday night. I headed upstairs to get ready for bed, and as soon as I opened the bedroom door, I almost fainted from the heat. Yes, I’d somehow managed to go out and leave both of the radiators in the room going full-blast, and it was now far too hot to sleep, so I headed over to the window, thinking I’d let in some fresh air, and cool the place down a little.

The glass of fruit juice was sitting on the window ledge. It was blackcurrant flavour (Well, it WOULD be, wouldn’t it? It couldn’t be just plain water, or something else that wouldn’t stain: heaven forbid!), and I’d drunk most of it earlier in the day, so there was maybe an inch of liquid left in the glass, if that.

I should have moved it off the window ledge before I opened the widow. I know that now. Actually, I knew that THEN. But I was lazy. Also: stupid. So, instead, I opened the window veeerrry carefully… only for the wind to snatch it out of my hand, and send it flying into the glass, with a strange sense of inevitability.

The glass flew off the window ledge in slow motion. I stood there watching helplessly, as time stood still, and the dark red liquid came flowing from the glass, all the way down my perfect cream wall. Ouch. But the glass wasn’t done yet. It landed on the storage basket under the window, where it tipped forward, sending the rest of the liquid (HOW COULD THERE BE ANY MORE LIQUID? SERIOUSLY, HOW?!) spilling across the floor, all the way from the window where it started its journey, right to the door of the room and into the hall beyond. The hall which has a cream carpet, obviously . OF COURSE IT DOES.

“Who would have thought the old glass would have had so much juice in it!” I cried, Lady MacBeth-style, as I watched the river of blackcurrant juice wind its way through my house. Seriously, if you’re out walking somewhere this week and you come across a mysterious river of what appears to be blood, don’t worry: it’s just my blackcurrant juice. (And if you haven’t seen it, don’t feel left it: I’m sure it’ll reach you eventually…)

The glass itself was, miraculously, fine. So was the hall carpet, which only picked up a couple of spots of juice. The wood floor in the bedroom, meanwhile, was an easy – if time-consuming – fix. (I’m not joking when I say that stuff got everywhere: I was still finding drops of it the next morning. It’s actually quite amazing just how far a tiny amount of liquid can spread…) The wall, on the other hand, was wrecked. In fact, it looked much like the kind of blood spatter they’d send  Dexter to analyse. “The victim died instantly, falling from this window,” Dexter would say. “The murderer is likely to be around 5’4″, and very, very stupid…”

That’s how, in addition to continuing the work on the bathroom and kitchen, Terry also ended up repainting the bedroom wall this week. (I’d have done it myself, but the truth is, he doesn’t trust me. I WONDER WHY?) Luckily we’re planning to repaint that room anyway, and he was able to get away with a two-minute patch-up job. Still, I can’t help but feel that as soon as one room is done, we just move onto messing up another one. Not that any one room in the house is DONE at this point, you understand. Oh, hell no. In fact, we’re STILL not done with either the powder room or kitchen. At this point, I don’t think we’ll EVER be done with them. In fact, according to my blog, I posted this photo on October 9th: I think we were about a week into the Hall Hell at that point, so that means we’ve been basically living in a building site for around a month and a half now. Of course, at least two weeks of that was taken up with the work on the hall, which was unavoidable, but … the rest was just us. And it’s honestly getting to the “unbearable” point now.

WHY is it taking so long to tile a (small) bathroom and do some small updates to a kitchen? Er, pass. I honestly don’t really know. Mostly because the sheer MESS obscures a lot of the progress, so to my untrained eye, it looks much the same from one day to another. I do know that quite a bit of the time has been spent waiting on deliveries of some kind: we had multiple orders go missing, or arrive with the wrong stuff in them, and that kind of thing has stalled the projects more than once, adding a whole bunch of time. All I know now is that it should be done by Christmas. I hope. And that, as I said last week, I now really regret ever mentioning it here, because, well, we could probably have re-built the house in this amount of time, couldn’t we?

How was your week?