10:24am Thursday 18th March 2010
I WAS so excited last week. In fact, I still am. When you find out why, you may think that I am a particularly sad person, and you could be right. But some of you may understand. Some of you may even have experienced the same, heady thrill.
I finally got round to clearing out my linen cupboard.
I wish I could show you pictures, of before and after. Then those of you who are wondering if I should be carted away to a secure place would be nodding your heads in silent agreement and thinking: “Ahhhh.
Now I see what she means.”
It’s a walk-in (as long as you dip your head) linen cupboard, created out of a long, low shelved space under a roof extension at the back of the house and we have chucked all sorts in there over the 14 years we have been there.
As well as the usual sheets, towels, duvet covers and pillow cases, it houses everything from tents and sleeping bags to sports gear and school uniforms, rolls of wallpaper and carpet cut-offs.
As the clutter has gathered, the linen cupboard seems to have taken on a life of its own. It has turned into a bit of a monster. Some things have gone in there, never to come out. We have even lost the cat in its dark, silent recesses a few times but, thankfully, never the children.
When the boys did go in to find things, they would pull piles of clothing and bedding apart and throw them around, scratching and scrabbling about like chickens until they found what they wanted.
Every so often I would pick up the heaps of material that covered the floor and reassemble things into some sort of order. And then I would get out of there as fast as I could, because it was such a huge problem I didn’t know where to start. At least I could close the door on it and forget about it.
And no one outside our family would ever have known, if our central heating system hadn’t packed in.
The plumbers, who had to go in to access all the pipes, dropped the bombshell: “You’re going to have to clear everything out of there so that we can get right in under the floorboards and behind the shelves tomorrow.”
It took me hours dragging everything out. And there didn’t seem to be much point putting it all back, especially when most of it had not been used in years. We didn’t need about 50 towels. I haven’t used cot blankets since Albert was a baby. It was just the incentive I needed.
Over the next few days, I filled nine large bin bags with sheets, towels and duvet covers for the charity shops.
Another eight went to the rubbish tip.
Down the dark and cobwebby far end, I even uncovered a drum-kit and an old bed frame we didn’t need.
I cleaned and vacuumed it all out.
Then I got to the good part. Having pared everything down, I started organising stacks of freshly-laundered linen into neat, orderly piles.
And I got to grips with something that has always irritated me – how difficult it is to tell fitted single, double and king-size sheets apart (why don’t manufacturers label them clearly?) without taking them out and stretching them wide open.
Having checked them all out, I put them in order and labelled the shelves: single sheets, double sheets and king-size sheets. I did the same for the duvet covers. Then I started labelling the boys’ uniforms. Suddenly, I could understand why the neat and tidy control freak Monica, in the American sitcom Friends, got so excited about owning her own labelling machine.
My white, sticky labels looked so good I decided to label everything, even though this wasn’t strictly necessary.
Although you could easily tell the difference between the huge bath towels and the little hand towels, I labelled these too. I produced one for hot water bottle covers and for pillow cases. Even the facecloths got their own label.
Suddenly, the linen cupboard started to look good. It was so neat and orderly, fresh and clean, with stacks of folded whites alongside colourful, patterned fabrics, like something out of a Country Living magazine photoshoot.
Our heating system may have packed in, I thought, the national debt may be running at £848bn and we are still at war in Afghanistan but I at least, in the midst of all this chaos, can take some small pleasure from the fact that my linen cupboard is tidy.
Any friends who called by were instantly ushered upstairs to look at it.
A few even said it inspired them to go home and do the same. One of my teenage sons actually brought a girlfriend up to have a look. “You should have seen it before,” he grunted.
But not everyone shared my enthusiasm.
When I picked the younger boys up from primary school last Friday, the day my newlook linen cupboard was completed, I couldn’t resist announcing that there was a “big surprise waiting for them at home”.
I should have realised they would be imagining all sorts of treats.
I overheard 11-year-old Roscoe telling a friend about it later. “Albert and me were really excited. We thought Mum had got us a present and that there would be a big parcel in the linen cupboard when she told us look in there. But it was just all tidy.”
Some day, perhaps they’ll understand...
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/trade_directory/