The big clean-up

Phase One..................................complete.

And I even have time to post this blog before my guest arrives...yay me! I have a clean and tidy house...it's amazing what the threat of having someone to stay can do! It is also amazing that I haven't died from dust inhalation in the process!

So, it is now spick and span :o) I didn't actually know what that phrase meant, so I looked it up in my Dictionary of Idioms (don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me? Doncha?). It goes like this:

"It was only in the mid nineteenth century that spick and span came to mean 'tidy, clean and orderly'. Formerly the phrase was spick and span-new, equivalent to brand new.

The phrase has its origins in an Icelandic word spannyr, itself compounded from span (a chip of wood) and nyr (new). The sense was 'as new as a shaving freshly cut from the block'. Middle English had the expression span-new. Chaucer uses the phrase in Troylus and Cryseyde: 'This take was aie span-newe to begin.'

Spick (spike or nail) was added to form the extended expression in the sixteenth century.

See also: in apple-pie order, brand new."

Ok...I know you really cared to read that, but this is MY space here! Tee hee. Blummin' annoying lots of italics though. I certainly have never heard the phrase 'in apple pie [why the hyphen?] order'...must be American I reckon.

Phase Two, when I can be arsed (don't hold your breath!) is to 'Life Laundry' the junk room I have now created in my front bedroom...I really don't need all this stuff! Most of it's been sitting in boxes since I moved in over 2 years ago, so it's hardly in frequent usage!

Until Phase Two is complete, do not...I repeat DO NOT...open the bedroom cupboard! There is serious risk of death from avalanche! It's actually not that bad, courtesy of the aforementioned junk room.

But my house, even with these failings, has never been cleaner or tidier...well, certainly not since I've lived in it anyway! I just hope I can maintain it...or at least not let it get as bad as it was! I have even invited people over for the first time in I really can't remember how long!

Now that Phase One is complete it may actually be possible to start getting some work done on the house itself (which, as you may recall from my previous bloggings, is something of a tumbledown shack in need of its fair share of renovations...damn you Kirstie Allsopp and your wily ways...when I saw this house I saw potential...I just didn't realise that I didn't have any!). Where to start on that is a whole other question! But the prospect of actually being able to live in my house, rather than merely kind of squat, is a pleasing one.

Phase Three? Taking over the world! Mwahahahaha!