Spring Cleaning - Nursery Required

Let me share with you exactly what happens when you suddenly discover that you need a nursery (in a house you have been occupying for some time)...it's actually quite simple - either you pack up and move to a house with one more room in it (and with the economic climate as it is, very few people are selling houses at the moment - unless they can't help it), or *years* of treasured possessions have to go either into the loft or into the bin...and if your loft is already fairly full, you find yourself just having to be brutal...and I thought I had been pretty aggressive at de-cluttering when we moved into the house - nah-uh... :(

I'm still coughing and sneezing from the amount of dust we have managed to kick up (and it feels like the process has only just begun), which does indicate that perhaps *some* of those treasured possessions had been a little neglected (meaning I wouldn't miss them too much)...but it's still painful to dump quite so many things that at one stage or another I certainly intended to keep forever (I never imagined the black bin liner hovering inevitably in their distant future, but it was obviously there all along)...

...and now that bin bag has arrived...well, bags actually...heaps and heaps of books (enough to fill three Oxfam shops), jewel cases enough to build a new Crystal Palace...trinkets and gadgets enough to populate a museum of the history of cool technology - once loved plush toys, their cute eyes appealing (to the very end) for their sentences to be repealed (only to be cruelly denied) - this is a material cull...

Other slightly less amusing parts of this process (if that were possible), have included dismantling (in the nursery to be) and then spending two and a half hours trying to reassemble the (might as well be) cast iron futon in the old office (to become a spare room/den for me) with much sweating, swearing, pinching of fingers in pliers/mechanisms, getting trapped between metal and wall (or metal and floor) and muscle straining hefting of stupidly heavy futon mattress...and there is so much more to come (hopefully some of which will actually be enjoyable, like) repairing, putting shelves up into, then sanding down and painting one of Flyingpops old wardrobes to become storage for baby clothes (and other related goods)...

Oh and of course (how could I forget), we have all the upheaval to look forward to of having pretty much the whole of the upstairs redecorated (i.e. stripped back to the plasterboard redecorated, not just a lick of paint)...still, at least this time a) I don't have to do it all (we are going to pay), and b) all the window frames are plastic rather than crumbling wood (saving a lot of time, effort and gloss paint)...