Changing Rooms

Whilst Nathalie is away in the Italian Alps Janis and I are decorating her bedroom, it's the first big makeover since she got to that age where she knows what she does and doesn't want. It involves repainting the walls, getting rid of the existing carpet, laying a new floor, dumping old book cases and her desk and bringing in a new desk, new bookshelves, curtains, bedspread the lot.

It also means that this week's holiday will be a little different from the usual week off. The preparation has taken two weekends, it began with me going up into the loft and deciding what stuff I'd been hoarding for years I really wanted to keep. Books, LP's, Birthday Cards they all got the push, I even found a pile of love letters Janis sent to me over twenty years ago and I've kept them. The idea was to make room so that we could put a couple of 'keepsake' boxes in the loft with things Nathalie had when she was a baby or in the pre-teenage years of her life.

The next stage is then to get Nathalie's stuff out of her room and into the loft before beginning the actual painting and decorating - this obviously had to wait until she had gone on her weeks skiing trip.

We've given ourselves three days to get the whole thing done so we can at least have Thursday to Sunday morning together as some sort of holiday, I can't help thinking that most of that time will be spent asleep though.