Carpet Day.

Yesterday I thought I would make the effort to back up my photo files. That was a marathon task. I'm positive I backed them up not so long ago but I could only find files up to July on my external hard drive. By 1.00 I had copied and pasted 149 files. Things tend to happen when I've tried to do them in groups so I had to do each one individually. Thankfully the whole of my documents, music and videos  went across in single moves. By that time my back, neck and wrist were all suffering and I was still awake at 2.30. 

I was up early in the morning to take the last few small things including my pc, out of the sitting room. At 9.30 3 men turned up in a van and a car to shift furniture and lay the underlay. I did have to ask one to stop sweeping the floor with his brush as clouds of concrete dust were filling the room. My poor curtains, walls and books. I expect they often work in newly built property when the dust doesn't matter so much. Instead I hoovered up the room while they had a fag break outside. Then a second van turned up with the carpet and 4 of them marched the 5 m wide roll down the drive and into the sitting room through the conservatory. I stayed in the kitchen while they worked and very chatty they were too. I spent my time looking through my photo albums which I took out of the big cupboard to lighten it before they carried it out into the conservatory. When the 2 extra men left they kindly carried the round garden table up to the shelter by the scree garden for me. Peter can't carry such weights so the only alternatives would be to roll it up like a giant wheel but the gravel damages the wood, or wait until one of the boys comes to see us.

Quite a few hours later the sitting room was done but there was a problem. The 'waste' carpet wasn't enough to do the stairs, hall and top landing even though I had been assured by the man who came to measure up that it would be. He had said there would have to be a join in the downstairs hall but he didn't draw any plans for the fitters. As it is I've thrown out the hall and stair carpets which weren't in a bad condition as we laid them only a few years ago. The fitters said they would talk to the man in the showroom and he would have to sort it out. The sitting room alone could have been done with a 4 m wide roll and one join and would have cost a lot less but I was happy to pay more and have the hall and stairs looking good too. Although the fitters were very pleasant they were in a rush to get to their next job so they forgot to put the tv back from the hearth where they had put it out of the way. 2 of them had picked up the tv, cupboard and all the boxes with it in one go but  working on my own I had to disconnect everything. Then very carefully I placed the heavy tv on the coffee table before moving the unit off the stones and back into place. There's a complete rats' nest of cables behind the unit to run all the stuff but I put some tape on the wires I pulled out of the tv and I was able to get it back up and running. Then came the long slog of bringing back all the loose items from the kitchen. How can 2 shelves hold so much stuff ? I'm determined to get rid of things this holidays because everything looks so much better without all the clutter.

The new pc arrived today so once I've copied everything I need Peter will get it going. This evening he supervised my reconnecting of my old pc so that I could communicate with the world again.