Carpet

Well, what felt like the busiest three weeks of my life are now over, and I can catch up with this blog.

I've just had a couple of weeks away in Palmerston North going to a motorcycle race meeting and attending an old (we split up 30 years ago) boyfriend's wedding. Ian (the groom) was not having a best man because he has so many friends that he couldn't choose one without hurting the feelings of several others. It therefore fell to me, as a person who has known him a very long time, and also knows all of his various groups of friends, to organise his stag night (1st April) and the logisitics for carpeting his house the day before the wedding.

Ian's friend Malcolm, from Rotorua, has a floor covering business and wanted to carpet Ian's house as a surprise wedding present. He needed the carpet picked up and stored for a couple of weeks, a bunch of guys to empty the furniture from the house so he and his worker could do the carpeting, and he also needed to get Ian out of the house while all this was going on - and this was happening on Good Friday!

I arranged for Ian to have to go and erect marquees for the wedding, got our friend Baz to pick up and store the carpet as well as deliver it on the morning of the carpeting, and coerced a couple of other friends into turning up early on Good Friday to shift furniture and rip up old carpet. Unfortunately the plans for secrecy all went awry when Malcolm couldn't get in touch with Baz and had to ring Ian up and tell him what the plan was so he could get the phone number of where I was staying.

MEN! I'd been trying to get the various parties together the weekend before so they all knew what each other was expected to do, but they all just said "she'll be right, you're too organised, don't worry so much". Huh.

Anyway, we got it done. Here's the paddock behind the house, with about half the furniture:



This is Zot, Kim, AJ, and AJ's son Angus inspecting the moth-eaten (literally) old carpet in the master bedroom before shifting the furniture out of it:


Rob, Malcolm's worker, ripping up the old carpet in the living room:


Malcolm measuring the floor in the hallway beside the kitchen:

Meanwhile, I was baking the hot-cross buns I'd had proofing overnight and washing skirting boards. Baz was late getting there with the carpet so there was a bit of nail-biting going on, but eventually it came (he'd had to go and borrow a fork-lift) and we left Malcolm and Rob to it.

We got back at 2pm to find this:


That monster plant in the corner of the bedroom couldn't be shifted, so Malc had carpeted around it. He did a wonderful job. And what a wedding present! Now they just need to get the place painted.

I bashed my hand quite badly shifting the furniture back, I got it stuck between a sofa and the door jamb. It swelled hugely so Sandie (the bride-to-be) wrapped my hand up in ice. Next day it was turning a beautiful shade of purple, and it's still painful now, ten days later.