Doing things that make me happy

For ages I have been promising myself to get back into a blogging routine, as I have been very neglectful lately. No promises about being less sporadic, but I will try, because blogging makes me happy.

I had a holiday in Western Australia last month. It was wonderful, and I have come back energised, ready to keep crossing things off my To Do List.

The big one is to get the outside of the house painted.

However, like all renovation/maintenance jobs there were things that needed to be done before the painting could happen.

I wanted to change my gas appliances ~ cooking, heating, hot water ~ over to electricity and there was no point in attaching air conditioners and hot water systems to freshly painted weatherboards. I found a company that was able to organise everything. The tradies all came in on one day and changed all the appliances ~ and cleaned up after themselves! It was a great service.

Then I needed to get rubbish removed. Some of it was cluttering up the side of the house. Much of it was a pile of metal down the back of the garden that Terry has carefully collected over the years. “This will come in handy one day,” he would say, adding another piece of stainless steel to the pile. There are some things of Terry’s I haven’t been able to part with, but not the pile of metal down the back. It’s gone and I feel so much lighter!

Now the house can be painted, and my next dilemma is deciding colours. That’s good dilemma!

There are still more things on the To Do List, but I am proud of myself for chipping away at it.

Then there are the things that aren’t on the List but all of a sudden I am ready to add it to the List and cross it off in one swoop. Like the blind in the lounge room.

It’s a cheap bamboo one that we put up quite a few years ago. It worked okay for a little while, until, as it was cheap, the cord frayed and it wouldn’t go up nor down. It also stuck on an angle.

And that’s the way it stayed while life swept us along. Once I tried to take it down, but the ladder wasn’t long enough to reach and the blind seemed to be very securely attached at the top.

The inspiration came in the shower, as all good ideas do. “Why don’t I cut it?” So I did!

The outlook isn’t good, as you can see from the photo. The fence, and then the neighbour’s house. Another dose of inspiration was to sew shapes to hang from the blind. I cut the shapes from old watercolour papers, from a time when I was playing with colour charts. (Like Terry and his metal, I knew they would come in handy some time!)

It’s probably a temporary fix (which may well end up as a permanent one!) and it makes me happy. And that’s where I am at at the moment….doing things that make me happy…..as well as crossing things off my List.