Should've stayed in bed

The subject of this post is true both of yesterday and today.

Considering I played cricket at the Oval yesterday, it tells you something when the highlight of my day was seeing GG's brother's new house and thinking about all the potential for exercising my DIY skills on his behalf!!!

The day started badly. I woke at 6.30am to the painful reminder of why I hate being a girl, together with the ongoing sore throat, male-voice-choir-bass issue, and at that point apparently I was a very white shade of pale with a slightly waxy look! I got up and made tea, took some ibuprofen and went back to sleep thinking my day was over before it began. I woke up again 45 minutes later feeling much better, so I dragged GG out of bed to get going. I called the coach and said I wasn't 100%, and I was going to be late but I still wanted to be involved in the day. I was supposed to be in London at 9.30am - we left Brighton at 9am! Arrived at the ground at 10.30ish, no warm up, to be told I was playing, and we were fielding.

I won't go into details about the game. My bowling was pants, I fielded ok but didn't really have much of an impact. And my batting was even worse. Not quite as bad as the first ball duck last year, but still a duck. And we lost by 2 runs.

So, thoroughly pissed off with the cricket, we trundled round to J's newly acquired house in Kennington. The first thing to hit me was what a bargain our three bedroom house in Brighton was at £172k 2 years ago. J paid £330k for his "compact" 2 bedroom house "in need of modernisation" to use the agent speak! The "I love Jesus" sticker in the window was the first sign that things might be a bit weird. The orange paint and wrinkled fake wood laminate flooring peeling at the edges was the 2nd clue. The rather worse-for-wear kitchen and bathroom were the 3rd, and the smell was the 4th. I think J is quite fortunate that he doesn't actually have to live there yet! You have to wonder about the people who have just moved out....apparently they'd lived there for 18 years...did they just not notice things falling apart??!!

The kitchen and bathroom both need entirely redoing, which could be fun. GG offered my tiling and kitchen design services, and flooring and painting too! Shame I don't know anything about plumbing really (and that it's so far away). The rest of the house will probably be alright with some elbow grease and paint, and new carpets upstairs will help. GG also offered my carpet laying skills!

Looking round reminded me how much fun it is to have projects like that. We still have lots of things we could do in our house if we had slightly more time/available cash. Which reminds me, I must update my house jobs list....I'm sure some of my target timescales have passed already....

19.5.08 11:13