It's still January...

What is it about the first month of each year? While time usually races by, more rapidly each year as I get older, January seems to last forever. The humorous poet Brian Bilston captured it perfectly. Well, perhaps it's not quite 6184 days, but I'm sure it's a lot more than five weeks since Christmas. I took the decorations down on Saturday 4th January so I could clean properly - they had been up for nearly a month - but I didn't do a whole lot else. 

I had such good plans for my time. Not 'resolutions' - I don't really see the point of them. Just a realistic way of trying to ensure I made the best use of my days, without over-scheduling or stress. I more-or-less followed that in the first full week of January.  On the Monday, I did some work on my recipe blog. I added a new recipe, edited some older ones, and added in some photos. I played around with the theme, too. It's not ideal, but I think probably better than the previous one. 

On the Wednesday I walked to my favourite haberdashery shop, and bought some new yarn for knitting baby hats, and then went to the thrift store, where I found a couple of DVDs that looked good. On the Thursday, I spent a couple of hours working on photos. I did some writing in the afternoons, too, though not as much as I had hoped. 

On the Friday, we didn't need to do any extra grocery shopping, but had decided that we would upgrade the rather rickety bookshelving in our guest flat living room, replacing with an Ikea Billy bookcase with glass doors. We were also thinking about a dedicated TV unit. So we drove (in the van) to Nicosia, and found not just the bookcase we needed, but a kitchen unit thing in pine which, we knew, would make a good TV unit. 

On Friday afternoon, Richard put the bookcase together...

After I had removed all the books from the old shelving: 

The TV was still on its old shelving along with a lot of other books which had become quite dusty over the years. And we agreed that we would need a second bookcase to match the first one, since we had too many books to fit in just the one. 

We didn't want to go back to Ikea, and we knew what we wanted, so we ordered online. We quickly realised that it was better to make two orders, each one less than 35kg, rather than all in one, from the postage point of view. The site said delivery would be 3 working days to Larnaka... 

.. although when the order was sent, it said that delivery would be 'within 6 working days'. Our first guest flat visitor of the year was due to arrive on Monday 20th, and we had hoped to get everything ready and tidied before then. Still, we hoped it might arrive on Friday or Saturday...

On the Monday morning, January 13th, was the first writers' group meeting of the year. And on the Wednesday I had planned to do a thorough clean of the guest flat, hoping to get it ready.  Our last guests were friends who left towards the end of October. Since then, the flat has been used by Richard to work on his PA system, and, in early January, for items from his boat, which was out of the water for a couple of weeks, for its biannual 'dry dock'. And it still had tools for building Ikea furniture, and wood varnish for the unit which Richard put together: 

I was becoming a bit concerned about getting everything ready for our visitor (who is staying for about eight weeks). So it was something of a relief to hear, on Wednesday, that there had been a delay, and he wasn't arriving until Wednesday 29th. 

Still, I did clean the main bedroom on Wednesday 13th, and made up the bed.  On Thursday morning I did more in the flat: washing cushion covers, and the sofa throw, and cleaning the bathroom. I also sorted the books better, calculating how many would fill up the two billy bookcases. I wanted to remove the books which had been taking up space in the bedroom, too, and the ones occupying space, rather precariously, on a spice rack in the kitchen. 

And... shock, horror! - I decided that we should probably get rid of about fifty or sixty books which we were never going to read, and which, we're pretty sure, none of our guests has ever looked at. We gave our local friends first refusal (and they took a fair selection) and I chose about fifteen of the remainder that were in the best condition for the church book sale. The rest, to our relief, were eventually taken by the Larnaka thrift store. 

But that's leaping forwards. On Friday 17th we went to Superhome store, then on to the nut shop (for five or six weeks' worth of nuts, seeds and dried fruit) and then Metro (for dried cat food and one or two other items). Richard had a phone call from Ikea while we were out, letting us know that the new bookcase would be delivered on Sunday. When he was hoping to be out sailing, and I had planned to go to the church service. But they didn't give any other options.

As it turned out, we were both at home. On Friday evening, Richard didn't want any food, and said he felt queasy. He slept most of the evening. In the morning I got up to walk with Sheila but after a short distance I knew I wasn't feeling well, so we turned around and I came in. 

I won't mention the details; suffice it to say that we both had a very miserable 24 hours with what we assume was an attack of norovirus. Richard felt a little better by Saturday afternoon, and got up. Sheila had brought us a loaf of bread, as I'd mentioned in passing that we'd run out and I was going to make some but wasn't sure I would cope with the smell of baking bread. We were very, very thankful for her thoughtfulness as the only thing either of us wanted to eat at first was toast with Marmite. I don't usually eat Marmite as it can be a migraine trigger; thankfully it wasn't on Monday, which is the first time I wanted to eat anything at all. 

The new bookcase arrived on Sunday and Richard was able to let the men in. He had cancelled sailing, and there was no way I could get to church; even if I'd been feeling up to it, I wouldn't have wanted to pass on such a nasty bug to anyone else. By Monday 20th, he felt a bit stronger, and put the bookcase together. And since I didn't want to remain in bed (and my worst symptoms had stopped, although I was still very tired) I did organise and sort the books. 

We were very pleased with how it all looked when we had finished. 

We were also extremely grateful that our visitor was not arriving that day!

On Wednesday some friends from Limassol were coming to dinner. We were past the infectious stage by then, though being extra careful with hand-washing still. I had started eating again, but was still incredibly tired, so it took me most of the day to organise the food for the evening. I had to keep sitting down every ten minutes or so. 

Then on Thursday I basically collapsed in a heap (after walking about half our usual route first thing with Sheila) and vegged out. On Friday we took the remaining books to the thrift store, and on Saturday I finally managed to clean the kitchen, and even sort and tidy the area over the washing machine which somehow accumulates a lot of random stuff. It still looks a bit cluttered: 

But I filled an entire bag with almost-empty long-expired bottles of suntan lotion, and hair spray, and body wash, and so on, to get rid of.  It's probably three years since we last did a proper spring clean of the flat, so it was good to do. 

And on Monday morning, this week, I took our carpet shampooer downstairs and thoroughly cleaned the rug in the living room, which had been looking very tired. 

That's the difference after I had cleaned the two stripes nearest the bookcases.  

Our visitor is now here, and the flat is going to be occupied almost continually for the next five months, with a variety of different people. We're very thankful to have it, and love being able to make it available to family, friends, church workers and friends of friends. 

It feels like we've done a lot this month, and there's still another day of January remaining. Today, Thursday, I worked on photos for an hour or so, for the second time this month, and this afternoon am updating this blog. Maybe in February, when it eventually gets here, I'll be back to the supposedly regular schedule...

Buying Billies

 Before I ramble about on our recent experience, I should explain that when I talk about 'Billies' I'm not referring to:

• The lightweight pots (billycans) used for outdoor cooking, popularised in one of the versions of an Australian song, featuring a swagman who 'waited 'til his billy boiled'. 
• A male goat, as, for example in the fairytale 'The three billygoats gruff'.
• A stick or club - known as a truncheon in the UK - which, I learned when checking for meanings of the word, may also be known as a 'billy' or 'billystick'. 
• A group of adults called Billy (or Billie), which is usually an abbreviation of the name 'William' or (possibly) 'Wilhelmina' 

Instead, I'm referring to a brand of bookcases that can be bought in the Swedish furniture chain Ikea. It's one of the few brands that we are able to pronounce. 

Our first introduction to Billy bookcases happened in the summer of 2006 just before we moved out of our rental house in Cyprus, into the one we bought. Some colleagues were leaving Cyprus around the same time, and offered to sell us some dark wood bookcases. 

At the time it was rather difficult to find bookcases locally. Sixteen years ago, there was no Ikea in Cyprus. The thrift store had some bookcases, but they were a bit flimsy. We had been able to buy two large ones second-hand from the organisation Richard was seconded to, some years earlier, and we had some rattan bookcases we had brought out from the UK. 

But they were starting to overflow. And we had shipped another five hundred or so books out when we sold our UK house. So the offer from our friends was timely, and since they were asking a very reasonable price, we had little hesitation in buying the two bookcases. They told us they were 'Billies' and we probably looked blank. They had been brought to Cyprus by another family who had moved from France but returned a few years earlier. Billies, we were told, were quite popular in countries where there was an Ikea. But we were not familiar with them. 

It's possible that we had the first two Billy bookcases in Cyprus. We rapidly filled them. 

(As an aside: the same folk were also selling four ceiling fans. They were exactly what we needed for four places in our new house. We didn't know that they were available until we went to see the bookcases, and our friends didn't know that we were looking for something to replace the fancy chandeliers that the previous owners of the house had taken away. It felt like a divine appointment; those four ceiling fans still work well, and are a tremendous blessing in the warmer months). 

We had visited an Ikea in the UK a couple of times, and hadn't found much that appealed. But we very much liked these bookcases, with their adjustable shelving, and the little metal knobs that fit into holes in the sides. They hold a lot of books, too. 

A year later, in September 2007, Ikea launched in Cyprus, just outside Nicosia. We visited a few months later, and acquired two more Billies: a tall black one for our DVD collection, and a smaller black one, which ended up taking our recipe books... for a while.  I wrote about the experience in this post. That's when we discovered that the 'new' system Billies were not only a darker colour, but ten centimetres narrower. However, that was ideal for our DVDs, and had plenty of room for more. 

Another year later, in September 2008, we visited Ikea again. This time we bought three shorter Billy bookcases for our dining room. The rattan cases were not only running out of space, they were being progressively destroyed by our cats, who thought they were convenient scratching posts. I wrote about that experience in this post. 

Nearly three years later, we were contemplating adding to our Billy collection due to books, once again, overflowing their shelves. Perhaps they were breeding when we weren't looking. And then we had another divine appointment: friends were getting rid of three bookcases, one of which was a Billy. It wasn't a dark wood one, but that didn't worry us. We did some major re-sorting of books and DVDs, as explained in detail in this post so that the light wood Billy took our DVDs, and the resulting arrangement looked like this:

There was still plenty of space for more books and DVDs, and we also acquired two non-Billy bookcases that we used elsewhere. 

Time passed, as it usually does. 

At some point we bought another tall black Billy, so we could move the light coloured one upstairs to a bedroom, and use one of the original - wider - Billies to house our growing DVD collection. 

We had a slightly annoying gap for a while, due to lack of planning on my behalf, which remained for some years. 

Although the books were mostly under control - the rate of acquiring new ones slowed, and I even managed to give a few away to the local church book sale - our DVD collection didn't stop. It's not that we watch all that many, but we aim to see one film per week, and an episode or two from a classic sitcom or a more modern tenser or heavier television show (most recently Father Brown; we're about to embark on the 13th Doctor Who series). And Richard has a growing collection of DVDs which are thrillers or political dramas that don't interest me at all, but which he sometimes sees on his own if I'm away, or if he is up late. 

So, in 2019, we looked at the Ikea catalogue again. To our joy, they were selling a narrow (20cm wide) Billy, the same height as our bookcases, but with a lot more shelves, intended for CDs or DVDs. We did ponder buying two, but were pretty sure that just one would last us a good long time. 

And in the process of re-organising the DVDs, we decided to move the second older Billy to the kitchen to house the recipe books (and also some of my children's fiction) meaning that the three matching black ones could sit in a row, without any annoying gap.  

We were pleased with the result.

In the corner was a gap of just over 20cm, where we were pretty sure that, one day, we would need a second narrow Billy. But not just yet...

And, indeed, four years later the DVDs were still fitting in the available space. Well, mostly. I had moved all the younger children's DVDs to the bottom shelf of the nearest bookcase. We also had a drawer under the television crammed full with our Christmas DVDs and the ones we haven't yet watched, and the series we are currently watching...

Then, a few weeks ago, we received a couple of Christmas parcels from one of our sons and his family, containing, among other things, a new and rather large DVD series. So that sat on a shelf under our television for a while, and we began to think seriously about a new narrow Billy. 

The decision was cemented when a friend, moving from one flat to another, decided to get rid of her DVD collection since she mostly watches online now. She gave us the first refusal, and since she had a lot of older classics which we hadn't seen, we selected a few. And a few more... and ended up adding another 25 DVDs to our household.

But where could we put them...?  The drawer was choc-a-bloc, the shelf also crammed with DVDs. It was starting to look rather untidy and we're pretty sure we'll acquire more DVDs in future.

So I went online and searched the Ikea site. I read that Billy bookcases had been discontinued for a while, but were back, better than ever. 

But there were no 20cm ones. The narrowest was 40cm, and that was clearly meant to be a bookcase rather than a DVD case, as it didn't have extra shelves. DVD shelving seems to have gone out of fashion, possibly because more and more people are using streaming services rather than physical DVDs. 

Then, due to an inner prompting - you can call it intuition, or the voice of God - I looked on Facebook marketplace. It's not somewhere I normally look, but I thought someone might have some kind of DVD storage that they were getting rid of.

I found someone just outside Nicosia who was selling TWO 20cm black Billy CD/DVD cases. They weren't advertised as Billy, but I was certain they were. Richard made contact, and a couple of days later we took his van and drove to collect them. I wasn't at all sure that we needed two, but since they might be the last two available narrow Billies in Cyprus, we bought them both. One of them is fitted where we planned, the other behind the TV where it's housing Richard's thrillers and other series that I have no wish to see. 

We moved the rest of the TV series DVD sets and the Christmas ones to the side cases, and there's now, once again, plenty of room for more.  

That corner looks much better without the gap:

As well as the two narrow Billies, the folk in Nicosia were also selling 18 children's DVDs, very inexpensively, some of them modern classics that we didn't have... 

...so we acquired another fourteen. So I'm now a tad concerned that we have almost filled up the shelf of children's DVDs. 

But that's a problem for another day.

A few more additions to our house...

In this, the tenth anniversary of our selling our UK house and buying one in Cyprus, we have done a LOT of renovations and repairs. Some of them should really have been done years ago, including repairing some of our rotting windowsills and frames, but we're not very good at making decisions or at getting around to this kind of thing.

So we started by employing a teenage friend to some painting, and he did such a good job that he's done a great deal of sanding, repairing and more painting, and even some plastering.

In the middle of that, we had a damp-proof course installed. While it's still early days, and hard to tell now that the weather's warmer, we do think our guest flat seems to smell less damp and the kitchen and bathroom cupboards are a lot less musty.

Then we did the most major work of all, having our bathroom renovated. I'm still glad I was out of the country while that was going on, and am very much appreciating the new bathroom. It was basically complete about a month ago, but since then we've done a few extra bits and pieces - I bought a wooden toilet-roll holder in the UK, and Richard put that in.

We replaced the bathroom bin and loo-brush holder, both of which were ancient, and even bought some new scales when Lidl had some on special offer.

We spent a lot of time looking for towels, either in cream or peach, but couldn't find any at all despite searching in several shops locally.  The towels we had been using were ten years old and getting rather scruffy as well as having lost any hint of fluffiness. They were cheap ones and served us well, but having spent a significant amount on the new bathroom, we thought it deserved new towels.

We also realised that there was a bit of a gap in the corner next to the toilet, and that we needed somewhere to store toilet rolls. So after much pondering, we decided to buy another Ikea unit, in the same range as our sink cabinet and mirror.

The shelf in the middle clearly needed a plant, so we spent ages looking for one that would survive in partial shade and would not need too much attention, and are happy to report that, four weeks later, it's not just alive but has some new leaves:

Any time we go to Ikea - which is just outside Nicosia - we seem to find several other things we weren't expecting to buy... and in this particular trip, we found some rather nice brown towels, both large bath sheets and some hand towels that would fit perfectly on our towel rail...

... and even a matching bathmat.

Bathroom complete, we didn't want to do anything else major, but we realised we had a new problem. For the last few years we have used an upright fan in our bedroom overnight, from about May through to October.  In the hottest weather, when the humidity is high, we use our air conditioning too, but right now the heat is dry, and a fan is all we need.

The trouble with the fan was that in order for it to be effective, it had to be in a place where Richard tripped over it or bumped into it almost every night. So he thought about affixing a wall fan in a corner, out of the way. I don't think wall fans look particularly nice and didn't know if it would work well enough, so for a few days recently we put the upright fan on top of the chest-of-drawers, and angled it with a couple of books underneath... far from ideal.

The obvious solution is one we had thought about ten years ago... a ceiling fan. We even bought one at Kleima, but it had the wrong kind of fitting so ended up in our guest flat. We had thought that nice ceiling fans, such as we have in our living areas (bought second-hand just before we moved in, from friends leaving the island) would be very expensive new.

But Leroy Merlin, a big hardware/DIY store in Nicosia (not far from Ikea) sells ceiling fans at very reasonable prices. So we went there yesterday, and bought ourselves a ceiling fan, of very similar style to our others. It's perhaps twice the price of an upright fan, but the ones we have elsewhere have lasted well over ten years, whereas upright ones tend to stop working after three or four.

Richard and Tim, between them, put the ceiling fan up yesterday afternoon....

I think it looks good - and more importantly, it was absolutely wonderful overnight. I felt pleasantly cool, Richard even complained of being cold this morning.

As I write this, the ceiling fan in my study is on, providing a pleasant breeze; they are wonderful inventions, and I am so thankful we now have one upstairs too. 

Ikea again. Bookcases and chairs...

I know many people look down their noses a bit at Ikea furniture. Certainly some of it is rather flimsy, and much of it is clearly flatpack and inexpensive. Not that this is necessarily a problem, and with rather a lack of reasonably priced furniture shops in Cyprus, we were delighted when an Ikea superstore was opened in Nicosia six years ago.

We don't go there often; it's about a 35 minute drive from our home, so although that's not a huge distance, it's not somewhere we pop to regularly.  But perhaps a couple of times each year: sometimes more often still.

Our most recent trip was on Thursday last week. The reason - as so often - was that we were in need of more bookcases.

Or rather, Tim was in need of bookcases.  When he moved back to Cyprus a few months ago, he brought out most of his library, a somewhat eclectic mixture comprising - among other things - a large number of theology books:

We spent some time brainstorming possible ways of rearranging Tim's room to fit in another bookcase, but it's not a large room - and one of the bookcases he has already is in a rather awkward place, meaning he can't access one of his closets.

So Richard proposed having a bookcase or two in the little bit of corridor outside Tim's room. There's not much space there - certainly not enough for the Billy bookcases that we usually buy - but we had discovered another range, called Besta, which have much shallower shelves. We weren't sure if they would fit, but Richard measured the gap carefully...

... And sure enough, when we found the Besta bookcases at Ikea last week, they were exactly the right width for the gap.  Not really tall enough, but we realised that one of the smaller ones would fit exactly on top of one of the larger ones, and the two together only cost about the same as one tall Billy. Moreover, they came with fittings so that they could be joined together.

So over the next couple of days, Richard spent some time - assisted by Tim - putting these shelves together. They do indeed fit perfectly in the available space:

So far there is only one book that has made its way onto the shelves, but we hope they will be filled soon, thus easing the overflow of books in Tim's room.

However...

It's almost impossible to go to Ikea and just emerge with nothing extra. Prepared for this eventuality we had picked up a store bag on our way in, and had found some sticky replacement roller things for getting cat hairs out of furniture, and a few other random small items. 

But then we came to the office chairs. Tim had been hoping Ikea might still stock the chair he had bought in the UK, which he liked very much indeed, but they didn't.  He really wanted a comfortable desk chair since he sits at his desk so much, and tried out several before discovering one that he said was wonderfully comfortable. It wasn't even horrendously expensive.  

I commented that I had never found real office chairs comfortable. I have tried many, but for many years have found nothing suited me as much as a rather garish orange kitchen chair - here it is, in front of my desk, way back in our old house in 2005 (note the old computer and screen!) 

We paid a couple of pounds for that chair nearly sixteen years ago, so it's done me very well, but it was starting to look extremely tatty.

I sat in an identical chair to the one Tim liked, and was astounded at how comfortable it was. Richard took this not-very-flattering photo:

We sat there quite a while while Tim debated whether or not he wanted it, and eventually decided he would. And I was somehow persuaded to have one too. If I didn't like it, I reasoned, Richard could have it.. he has an adequate desk chair, but it's not particularly strong and won't last forever.

We got everything home and unpacked. And then discovered a significant problem, in that my desk (also very old - the same one from the photo above, which has also lasted me 16 years and probably cost us not much more than the orange chair...) has an opening that's too narrow for this new office chair.

I tried all kinds of ways of sitting on it before opting for a semi-diagonal method, which seems to work. The chair really is very comfortable when I'm sitting back in it; it has a slight rock, and a fabric covering, and Sophia has given it her decided nod of approval:

So I'll probably keep it. I do like it, very much. But Richard and Tim think I should probably now have a new desk...