Ineptitude

It should have been so simple. The carpet for the lounge was fitted today and furniture is arriving Thursday and Friday. So last night we decided to watch TV and  just before bed to take the old 3 piece suite out to the garage to store it, because Best Quilting Buddy has kindly agreed to assist by getting a van and is coming in a few weeks to take it off my hands. All we had to do was take the furniture through wide double doors into the front end of the hall, through the porch and into the garage next to the porch. The exact route the furniture came in by.

Only, to do the turn between lounge and porch it is actually necessary to take the sofa backwards into the hall  straighten it up then come out straight into the porch because the angle between lounge and porch is too acute a turn. No problem. Big double doors make that a breeze. Or it would have been had we not earlier temporarily placed a bookcase full of heavy tomes about Churchillian history and Aboriginal woven baskets right where we now needed the sofa to go. So, we set to and removed all the books to the nearest resting place, which was the stairs, hefted the book case backwards,  and swung the sofa into the hall. Now its a straight run out of the door.

Only, will it go it that way? Will it heckers like. ( The TV, which by this time was a good 30 minutes earlier, was the Pete Postethwaite film  Brassed Off ,so excuse me if I come over all Yorkshire in this post). After about thirty minutes of huffing and puffing and 'up your end ,no up your end -ing' we concede defeat. The *****  thing is wedged in the porch door frame.

OK. Lets not be Bears of Little Brain. It came in, it will go out. I stand and think. I measure. I mentally tilt it and rotate it. I kick it and tell it to move. Nope.  Fine. So the removers are clever little people and we are sadly inept idiots. No problem. There are large patio doors to the rear of the living rooms and a wide side access. We'll just go the long way around. So we  push and huff and puff some more and get it unwedged and carry it into the lounge and through the dining room to the patio doors in the sun lounge (Note to BQB: undamaged. Do not worry).

We go outside in the pitch black, because we are waiting for the electrician to fit the oustide light in the side access area and find that  we cannot open one of the double gates because the cotton brained previous owner thought  it would be a good idea to build a brick base for the rain water butt right in front of one of them.  Dennis votes for going to bed and asking the carpet fitters to help. Oh no. I am not going to be defeated now. I am Woman.

I get the wind up torch, two kitchen bowls and start to drain the butt through the tap at the base of the butt into one bowl and scoop from the  top wth the other, letting the water run free momentarily free inbetween moving the bowl from under the tap and putting it back, having sloshed it's contents down the drain because Cottton Brain did not build the tap over the drain, did he? Twenty five minutes later and a lot of sloshing of cold rain water later, the butt can  be moved.

Now all I have to do is demolish the brick base. For once I am glad about the prevous owner's shoddy workmanship becuase it is easily pulled apart and the gate is opened. Now, we have to carry the furniture all the way around. Only we will need to rest because its now way past midnight and we have weak and tired muscles. But we can't set the furniture down in the said access because its all wet from the sloshing and BQB will not thank me for wet  furniture. So I go to get towels to give us little rest points. Only the towels are upstairs and the stairs are now completely covered with books. So we then have to move the bookcase back refill it  to get the towels.

 We heft and puff some more and - look. All stored. It only took an hour and a half.

And I still can't work out how they got it through the front door. Or indeed in and out of the same sized door at our previous house. As I say. Inept.