Le grand nettoyage

Oh yes indeedy, hence the infrequent posting - I've been busy. 
We are now decluttered and superorganised and spring cleaned and I learnt a new phrase in French class today!

It all started with my frustration that our living room was not "cosy".  So I had to move the furniture around.  Again.  (This is something I have a habit of doing, so Mr Gonecycling is used to it, but still hates it when I do it, ever since he came home and found a wardrobe stuck across the landing).

Anyway.

I knew that if we emptied and removed the large bookcase, swapped it for the blanket box, budged up the sofa and moved the rug, we would (a) have a cosy place in the living room to sit together of an evening, and (b) I could move one of my megacupboards down from the office - and wouldn't have to keep running up and down the stairs to fetch my supplies (not to mention disturbing Mr G when he's trying to work...)

So!  Here is a "before" of one megacupboard in the office (I have two):

Here is the (newly-edited) contents of said megacupboard:

taken out and spread all over the floor, in readiness for the great furniture removal which took place after the Girl's bedtime on Friday. 

Here is a bad pic of the other megacupboard:

Unfortunately, the stuff all over the floor had to go into this cupboard, so the stuff in this cupboard could go in the cupboard that was destined for downstairs.... The stuff on the floor is stuff I need, but is boring, and the stuff in the other cupboard is "nice" stuff, like fabrics, threads and my hoard of unused sketchbooks, which I wanted downstairs...with me so far?!

 Even more unfortunately, the cupboard to be moved was too heavy even with the empty drawers, so I had to remove them all.  And they are all screwed onto runners.  And there are 15 drawers.  And they hadn't been taken apart for 10 years.

Eventually, we got it downstairs, and I had to start the reassembly - except the pressure of the overloaded drawers over the last ten years suddenly being released caused the whole thing to warp and twist and it wouldn't stand up straight.  It's at this point that Mr G's eyebrows reach the ceiling, and I begin to feel a bit sheepish.  Luckily, the application of some felt furniture pads (to the cupboard not the eyebrows), a couple of hours of sweat and toil reattaching the runners and a liberal dose of magic silicon drawer-glide stuff, and the whole thing was sitting pretty and all the drawer contents were reassigned and my knees were completely wrecked and it was 11.30pm on a Friday night!  Don't tell me we don't know how to have fun around here.

As well as the grand furniture removals, the grand clear up has also meant dealing with unfinished projects, like cutting up my collection of jumble sale and charity shop clothes and dyeing the pieces.  This killed two birds with one stone, as I used up the dye from my class which has been sitting in a crate in the office since we did dyeing last summer term...

And another crate of dyeing equipment has been sitting on top of the filing cabinet for about six years, waiting to be put in the loft.  But it couldn't go up the ladder and therefore at an angle, until I had done something with the jamjars of acid dye that were in it.  So this was my project yesterday evening:

It's come out a bit washed out, but then the dye is six years old...and at least the crate can go now!

So I have created space, order and room to work, if not Art!

The Girl, meanwhile, has been getting creative with her food and wanted me to take a photo: