Hi Honeys
How was your weekend? Mine has definitely been a mixed bag. At work on Saturday evening I was hit with the worst case of the chills. To begin with I just felt as if it was getting colder. Just the usual evening temperature drop since it was after 6 pm, very dark and the store I work in has a metal roof so all of the heat mostly goes up and out.
A couple of hours later I felt as if my bones were literally made of ice. Such a chill honeys and I couldn't stop shivering. By the time home time rolled around though I was actually burning up, even though I still had that awful, frozen, chill in my bones. When I got home I had my shower, got all bundled up in my warmest nightie etc and hugged the hot water bottle Hubby made for me (thank you sweetheart x) I settled on the sofa under a huge sherpa throw.
During Saturday night and through Sunday I just felt so completely drained of energy honeys but at least the chilled feeling, and temperature, had gone by mid Sunday. Yesterday I started to feel a little more like my self which was such a relief.
There are so many bugs, viruses, flus and what-nots going around right now and having been ill for over four months with the last chest infection (which turned into bronchitis and led to my having a CT scan) I just really don't want to catch any of them.
Late yesterday afternoon, annoyed at myself that I didn't get anything done, not even catching up with laundry, over the weekend, I put on a load of laundry and set out to find something to do 😊
There was a project I'd asked Hubby to do for me that he hadn't gotten around to yet. We'd even bought a Variera shelf insert (the larger of the two sizes available) for this little project on our last trip to Ikea.
"Why not try doing it yourself?" I thought. Why not indeed. This is what happened honeys...
Why Rosie And Electricity Don't Mix...
Now this will sound silly to you I'm sure but back in the days when I was still stable on my feet and arthritis wasn't trying to turn me into a human pretzel, I was actually quite a whizz at wallpapering and I'd even been known to paint the odd wall back then too 😊
Electrical things though are where, for many years, I've drawn a very large, broad line which I then stand well away from. In my mid teens I'd been asked to make tea and while plugging in the electric kettle, one of the very old ones that don't (thankfully) seem to exist anymore where you had to push the cable into a socket in the back of the kettle? Well (unknown to anyone in our household until I was pretty much thrown across the kitchen) a crack in the plastic of the piece you had to push into the kettle had appeared.
I was very lucky because even though being zapped and thrown a small distance weren't fun (really not fun honeys!) it could have killed me. You can understand how I've been reluctant ever since to have anything whatsoever to do with cables, wires or any other twisty, dangly, potentially zappy items.
Yesterday though I felt (a little) brave 😊
Rosie & The Re-Organisation Of The Electric Thingies...
In our master bedroom, near (my) bedside cabinet is a small table. On this sits a small TV and a digital receiver box. We also have a dvd player upstairs too but there wasn't room for it on the little table, meaning the dvd player lived on my bedside cabinet. I was determined to change this, make room for the essential little dvd player and thereby free up my night stand real estate. I don't sleep honeys.. practically at all and often watch TV in the wee, small hours
Off I went to find the Variera shelf insert, a microfibre cloth to dust with and a screwdriver...
It took me a few minutes to realise honeys that the teeny tiny screws supplied in order to assemble the white metal Variera shelf insert weren't actually staying in place because I had an unrecognised-till-that-point natural skill with a screwdriver.
Nope, the real reason I wasn't crawling around the carpet trying to retrieve them was because the screwdriver I'd fetched from among Hubby's tools was magnetic! Now how clever is that?
Having managed to secure the two "legs" to the shelf insert using all eight screws supplied I took it, and the microfibre cloth upstairs, closely followed by my assistant, our furbaby Jade 😊 It's possible to secure the legs of the insert together with only four screws but I wanted to make sure the tiny unit was as strong as it could be.
To Work...
Once upstairs, and after unplugging everything from the power supply of course, I set about dismantling the dizzying (to me anyway) number of wires and cables which surrounded the little TV.
That done, I removed everything from the little table and took the opportunity to dust everything thoroughly, including all of the cables. I then placed the Variera shelf insert in place and put our TV onto it, checking to see if it was strong enough to hold the weight of the TV.
The TV is, in today's world of replacing things so often, quite an old one really. We bought it easily maybe 7 or 8 years ago? I just can't talk myself into replacing it though because it still works fine so replacing it before we have to, thereby disposing of a perfectly good TV, seems very wasteful.
The TV is also quite lightweight. I then added the digital receiver box at the side of the TV and placed the DVD player under the TV on the (thanks to the shelf insert) newly found spare space on the table 😊
The End Is In Sight...
With that all done the (almost) end result looked like this...
The only thing left for me to do was to re-attach all of the myriad cables and wires in order to get all of the items communicating again. Eeek! To me this was terrifying. Not only was there the potential "zap" element to consider (checks again everything is still unplugged from the wall sockets) but I just do not have the kind of brain that can make sense of a million (OK I'm exaggerating just a teeny bit 😊) bits of cable going back and forth between different appliances.
Once I'd calmed the anxiety attack I'd started working on - hate those! It sometimes helps if I tell myself that it's just a lack of confidence running away with itself is all. A good strong self talk along the lines of "you can do this" usually helps.
I broke it down into stages honeys. First the scart cable extension (which allows more than one scart cable to be connected to the TV) is plugged into the back of the TV and so on. Setting everything up took me around ten minutes, which I'm sure is ages longer than it should have but in my defence I hadn't done it before (Hubby does these things usually but he was at work) and I was figuring it out as I went along 😊
What do you think honeys? I know it's a silly thing to be proud of but it made my day that I'd been able to do it on my own 😊 It also feels fabulous to have a clear bedside cabinet too. Space for my books without sitting them on top of a DVD player 😊
Any thoughts honeys? We've used these wonderful little shelf inserts all over our home. In our tiny bathroom to store toiletries (before Hubby fitted picture rails to do the same job) on my desk in the living room, or in the kitchen cabinets among many other places. This is just another useful way they're helping to organise our home and make space where it's needed.
Till next time dear ones, stay warm and safe. The snow returned during last night and it's so cold outside. My countdown to Spring continues though and as of this coming Saturday night/2am Sunday morning it will be exactly 6 weeks until the clocks change and go running into spring and even better, towards summer 😊 Heaps of hugs always honeys xx
Very nice post. Thank you for sharing..
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