Destroy It Yourself? Not yet, at least

Hello there.


Back in the office on yet another Monday. I'm feeling good though and this is not just due to the several cups of coffee I've had.


My wife and I went to our 25-week midwife appointment this morning at a local surgery. It was all very normal stuff, a few more forms to fill in etc, but came with the customary listening to the heartbeat piece.


Now, my wife made a fantastic investment recently and purchased a decent doppler to allow us to listen into the baby's heartbeat ourselves whenever we want. This has resulted in a lot of fun, essentially with our little girl intentionally (or so we believe) playing a game of hide and seek whenever she detects the machine near her!


Eventually, inevitably, we do find her though and sit there with smiles on our faces listening to the little train-like heartbeat go for it, and we're quite content to do that for 5-10 minutes at a time. Even if it means covering my wife's belly with a cold, strange, gooey, ecto-plasamy gel-like substance. So although listening again in the surgery this morning was not exactly a new experience, it has lost none of its originality or ability to create magical grins on our faces when we hear it.


The fact we're going to be parents soon still scares the crud out of me, but it's getting more and more exciting and I'm catching myself thinking about meeting my little girl for the first time more and more, and getting more and more excited by it. I'm like a kid at Christmas who is convinced that this year he is going to not only see Santa Claus but trap the slippery rotund fellow, adopt Rudolph as a cool pet and have all the presents in the sack to himself.


Update on the house Destroy It Yourself - 

• Spare room now almost empty (apart from a box holding 'stuff' for the baby - little toys, colourful pics to put on the walls etc)
• Little 4-ton skip hired, deployed smack-bang on the driveway. Operation "Fill-It-Up-With-Our-Stuff-Before-The-Neighbours-Sneakily-Use-It-Too" was successfully accomplished by late Saturday afternoon. Weasels. (+10 man points)
• Tidy up garage after recent spring-clean to actually be able to use the space a bit more effectively - done. (+5 man points)
• Tackle the fabled "Storage Cupboard Under The Stairs". This was not a mission to be taken lightly - even opening the door rendered you at risk of being crushed by approximately ten tons of "other stuff", most of which we had not used/wanted/worn/glimpsed for years. Seriously, it is like a black hole in there - I emptied it out and I would have put a whole year's wages on the fact that had I just come along and seen all this crap everywhere, I would be convinced that there was more chance of finding my cat riding a Harley than getting it all to fit into this little space.
• Three separate trips to local DIY store - complete.
• First - To purchase chipboard, shelves for new cupboard space, three tier storage trolley and to spot some bathroom tiles we wanted for our new bathroom (purchased a YEAR previously...) but not knowing how many we needed
• Second - to purchase said tiles post returning home and measuring up (utilising my maths skills and hoping that this tiling experience is not going to match the previous "Tiling Incident" from a few years back). The amount I bought actually buckled the front wheel of the trolley I used... grrrrr (+5 man points)
• Third - to purchase drill-bits in order to be able to set up shelves purchased in the first trip for the storage cupboard... and to get a new power drill. Cos I could. And it was red (+100 man points). Couldn't find a suitable holster though so I could pretend I was a cowboy when my wife isn't looking (-95 man points).
• Complete conversion of "Storage Cupboard Under The Stairs" to "New Walk-In Larder" via trolley and putting up aforementioned shelves. The rest of the larder is a little bit grotty and only lit by a couple of LED wall lights, but it's space that can now be used as my wife intended, and she happily went to and fro from the kitchen and loaded up the shelves with all sorts of things. This felt good.

So basically, what I have so far accomplished is some quite big stuff - but nothing that is immediately visible to someone just coming into the place! The house is still a bit of a tip from all the moving about and shifting of "stuff" we've been doing, but at least now the final sort of tidy-up should be easy and have a longer-lasting effect.

Then we just have to arrange for the new carpet in the nursery and finally, at last, I can then unleash my wife with her debit card onto the internet and into the near-by baby shops to start kitting it out and generally blinging it up :)

I'm looking forward to that, should be fun :)

In summary then, so far my major achievement is the shelves I put up - which as of writing this have not fallen down yet. This is a new DIY experience, but one I am not yet 100% comfortable in believing... if they're still up after a week then I will admit I might have done OK.

Then again, there's still possibility for disaster - I've just remembered that I have two shoe racks to build for my wife tonight.

Flat-packed shoe racks are, as I'm sure you appreciate, lethal in the wrong hands and there is every chance that I could still end civilised life as we know it with my DIY skills.

We'll see, eh?