A Rachel Morning, come clean my house with me? Or at least help with my patio design?

 I feel that my blog narrative might support a theory that I am always complaining about the state of my house and also always cleaning my house.  I think the actual fact is that often when I get a chance to blog it's also when I've allotted time to clean, and therefore it seems like I'm always cleaning and rarely blogging.  This may not be your impression though.

Today started with a 6:30am swim at the Pontypridd Lido - a restored victorian outdoor swimming pool.  Most pools in Cardiff area are indoor because weather is awful, so it's nice to actually swim in fresh air.  The morning was hazy due to wildfires (a totally not-Welsh experience but we've had so much sun and so little rain it is currently a Welsh experience, sadly):

I came home, helped get Andy and the kids out the door to visit his family, and then started work on the house.  It was a tip

Two hours later the downstairs was not a tip!

I really do miss having a cleaner, but I cannot bear the thought of trying to find a good cleaner.  I did realize that if we didn't want to pay for a cleaner we could instead pay for 3 hours of weekend childcare sometime and clean the house ourselves.  The price is probably the same, although the extrapolated argument is that if we are paying for 3 hours of childcare we should do something fun that is not cleaning the house.

I had originally hoped to sort bedrooms as well but I was done after 2 hours and ready to move onto other more fun things.  Also, doing life admin in a clean house is way nicer than doing life admin in a chaos house (at least for me).

Oh and while I am sharing gross pictures of my hosue, we own a single nice chair.  It is the one you can see in the lounge covered by the throw blanket.  There are rules about this chair which is that kids are not supposed to climb on it or really be on it at all.  Today I removed the throw blanket and found the following:

Girl Next Door recently did a podcast called "This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things" and I guess... it's true.  I'm hoping it's water (we don't drink anything but water, and we're not supposed to have water in the lounge... but also I don't have enough eyes to watch all the kids all the time).  I'm also hoping it's washable, and at least the cushion is double sided so maybe in like 3 years we can flip that side down and then we can have a nice chair again with a grotty face down cushion.  Waah.

Then I had lunch and updated photo albums and the kids albums are now updated through June! Only one month behind!  Family Album is still back in January (it starts in January... so basically it's not started) but I think I will be caught up with kids by the end of the month which is a gold star for me.

I am not very good with before and after photos but we got another to-do off the list this week - a new light fixture in the dining room!

The old light fixture was from when our neighbours put this fixture out for recycling:

Andy installed the new one today - light fixtures are hard but I think I like it.  It gives off a lot of light which will be good in the dark dark winter.

But of course once we fix one problem I move onto the next one, which is our outdoor space.  At the beginning of summer we ate outdoors a lot and kind of awkwardly squeezed into this table

The table is a bit worse for wear from being outside all summer, and it's somehow not easy to sit at because it's tucked into a corner.  But our patio is mostly for toys (as you can see) so we can't really center it which is where it would need to be so we could eat at it.  

I know the answer is that we should have bought a smaller table really... but right now it's the worst of most worlds.  We don't sit at it because it's awkward and somehow just not appealing to eat at, and we can't move it further out because we need the space (and also because of the steps back there which we really regret having built).  I would love to have my coffee outside it the morning but I look at the table each day and think "not today" which is silly because I also want to get a tiny bistro table to have my coffee at.  There has to be a way to make this table coffee-ready.  Outdoor table cloth?

AI gave me the following ideas:

So, basically, I can't make it more nice because I'm not sanding or varnishing anything.  Maybe next year.