Company's coming...

...in a few days and there's a lot of work to do. We haven't had overnight guests since we moved here last winter, and it's a smallish house, with smallish rooms, comfortable for a couple. And so we've been putting on our thinking caps and rearranging things.

The dining room I think we've got well in hand now. It's a bit disorienting, walking into a room with a table going 90 degrees to its previous position, and with a leaf added and more chairs. But, hey, once we got it set up we asked each other why we didn't set it up like this before now. It's actually easier to walk through, this way. Who would have guessed? So, anyway, that was an experiment that turned out well.

Finding somewhere to put a spare double bed mattress... now, that's proving a bit tougher. I'm sure there's a way to do this. I just don't see it yet...

Wednesday morning update: The dining room experiment turned out more beneficial than I anticipated. We had heavy rains last night. The most recent roof patch seems to have solved the leaks in the kitchen - but we had a bit of a flood in the bathroom (right next to the tub, of course - we couldn't be lucky and have the water go into the tub, now could we?) - and we had leaks in the dining room, which was unexpected. Leaks, I will add, that would have landed on the table under the old arrangement. Well, some of them would. There are several leaks, all of them (knock wood) missing furniture at this point.

I talked to the landlord this morning. He says he'll go up himself after the rain stops. He's been paying other guys to do the patch work. This obviously hasn't been working too well. It's not for lack of caring, I might add. A few days ago I met the guy who'd gone up on the roof and taken down the crumbling chimney and done the roof patch. I didn't know who he was until he introduced himself. (And, not that it matters, he's not as young as I'd thought, back when I'd only had a glimpse in passing.) He asked how things were going now. When I told him about some leaks in the bathroom during a storm shortly after he'd been up there he was deflated. I really think he really thought he'd banished our leaks for good.

Here's hoping the landlord has better luck. Or that we don't have storms when our elderly relatives are here, needing to shuffle through the bathroom.

Lest you get the wrong idea, on the whole I love this house. It's old, but mostly in delightful ways - skeleton keyholes in the doors and built-in kitchen cabinet from floor to ceiling, that sort of thing. And it's cozy. Well-proportioned. Comfortable. It does need a few repairs. And if it were my house - if I owned it, I mean - and if I had money to spare, there are a few things I'd change about it. I'd lose the carpet in the kitchen and the spare bathroom, for instance. I don't understand putting carpet in bathrooms and kitchens, to be honest with you. But mostly I'd just add fresh paint and let it go at that. It's a homey place.

But company's coming in a few days, and I still haven't figured where we're going to fit in another bed. And, of course, I've been cleaning and trying to lose some of the clutter, and...

One really nice thing, actually, about these visitors is that I know they wouldn't care in the least if I didn't clean or tidy up any. They care about the people in a house, not the house. But that only makes it all the more fun to try to get things in better order. It can be a gift when it's not an obligation, I guess.