Busy week for PCB

Well it’s been an exhausting week. Regular readers on my blog will know I live with a disabled lesbian. She has fibromyalgia and lupus as well as two separate back injuries. When she moved into the flat we’re living in now with her emotionally fragile and batshit crazy sister, she took the smaller bedroom, allowing Crazy to have the big room. Moving into the flat, by the by, was what caused back injury numero uno, leaving her bedridden for a year.

So, when the crazy sister moved out, I moved into her bedroom. Taking into account, the second back injury and her battle with the insane lupus flare up, the disabled lesbian has been bedridden for the best part of four years. As she’s now feeling a lot better and is slowly getting back out in the world and no longer has to kowtow to her insane bitch of a sister, she made noises about maybe swapping bedrooms. The noises coincided with my parents coming back to the UK for a month to do a house swap with my aunt who is passive aggressively keeping all my stuff up in her loft. So the first weekend my parents were here, they bought all my stuff to me. So I now had a whole crap load of books, DVDs and CDs and nowhere to put them as my big bedroom was, at that point, furniture-less.

So we agreed to swap rooms, after she made the very good point that emotionally she would benefit from not being in the bedroom where she’d spent so long being ill and in pain. I don’t really care what room I’m in as long as I have a bed and my stuff, you know? However, I absolutely hate hate hate living amongst unpacked boxes. So on Friday, my friend Ruth and I went to Ikea to buy me some furniture.

Before we could do this though, the room swap had to take place. Due to having tickets to see The Drowsy Chaperone in London on Thursday night (more on that later), this had to take place on Wednesday. So I spent the best part of Wednesday evening dismantling both beds and putting them back together in their opposite rooms. I was dreading moving my superking size bed into what looked like a much smaller room. After getting her bed out though, it transpired her room only looked so much smaller because it was packed to the gills with the most spectacular amount of crap. I am still reeling with how much unnecessary madness she managed to shoehorn in. So, bed flip completed and measurements for furniture taken, Ruth and I set out for Ikea.

Measurements for furniture is one thing. Measurements for the flat pack boxes and the back of Ruth’s car is quite another. I bought a gorgeous bookcase but after 15 fruitless minutes trying in as many different positions as possible, we had to admit defeat and take the bookcase back to the returns dept. There were 25 people in front of me. We had time to eat dinner, come up with a plan b for my room, go back and actually BUY the new bookcase and re-park the car, all before my number was called in the returns queue. Ikea is about an hour’s drive from my flat. We left at 5:45pm and we got back a little before midnight. Fun.
So anyway, on Saturday I planned to spend the day being a DIY madman and sorting out my room. On the Wednesday night, as well as flipping the beds, I only took the vital necessities out of each room to last a couple of days. So I had to move out all the mountains of crap from what was now my room before I could start putting together my bookcases. Luckily, I woke up at some ungodly early hour and so I started Operation Bedroom at 7am. I figured I’d be finished by the afternoon, could then take a shower and a nap before heading to work for my four hour overtime shift 8pm-midnight.

Throughout the day, it did not cease to both amaze and amuse me how solidly the bookcase and DVD unit were made and how many screws and bolts it took to hold them all together. Why am I so amused? My bedframe, my superking size metal bedframe from Ikea is held together with four small screws. Anyway, I toiled all day long, moving all the crap out of my room (which took a looooong time! I kept finding stuff in little nooks and crannies. It was truly unbelievable), putting all the furniture together, and then taking all my books and DVDs out of what used to be my room and unpacking them all. Unpacking was, I have to say, highly therapeutic. This whole operation did take longer than anticipated and by the time I had my room looking how I wanted it, it was after 6pm and I was still not showered. If I was going to make it to work for 8pm, I would really have to get a wriggle on.

One last thing remained to do in my room and that was change the bedding. I had bought some new sheets in Ikea and wanted to put them on the bed. As my bed is so big and I am in a smaller room and I appear to be terminally single, I have the bed up against the wall under the window. So in order to change the bedding, I had to move my bed away from the wall. I did this, changed all the bedding and then moved the bed back. At which point, it broke. When I bought the bed, it needed a lot of extra securing of the midbeam to the frame as the Ikea idea of a sturdy bed is very different to the rest of the world’s. Moving it to another room was the final straw I think. The slats would no longer stay on the midbeam on one side. I attempted to fix it a couple of times, the slats refused to stay put. I came to the sad realisation that in order to actually have somewhere to sleep, the bed had to go. So I had to take it apart and take the frame down and store it in the garage. Needless to say, I didn’t make it to work. I was absolutely freaking exhausted by this point, after 13 and a half hours of this madness.

Luckily, the crippled lesbian decided to rejoice in her new found bedroom largesse by investing in a superking size bedframe herself. Copycat. She went to the website where she purchased her old bed from and they were having a completely insane sale. She got herself a wrought iron work of beauty for £200. Reduced from £1200. We then found a bed frame for me for £100. Reduced from £800. I refuse to believe it will be any less sturdy than the Ikea bed. Hell, if it were made with paper mache and held together with paper clips, it would be sturdier than my Ikea bed.