For some unknown reason ‘Pining’ has been having a wee bit of a nervous breakdown over the last couple of days and a couple of recent posts completely disappeared but they’ve turned up again and things seem to be back to normal. I hate technology!

Anyway, the schools have been back here for three weeks now and as my husband is a teacher I’m home alone during the day so I’ve been trying to get all those things done around the house which I’ve been putting off for ages.

The de-cluttering is continuing and at last I can actually see some difference in the place as I heave things out for recycling, charity shops, the tip and that fantastic site Ebay. One woman’s dross is another one’s treasure and all that!

The best thing that happened this weekend though was that we were able to wave bye-bye to four big lumps of furniture which have been sent off for auction.

The worst thing was the shame of seeing ten years of dust which had accumulated behind them all. Honestly they were all too big and bulky to move!

So tomorrow I’m going to be busy painting the dining-room that oh so exciting colour of magnolia and generally freshening everything up. I keep telling myself that I’m neutralizing the place but that sounds horrible and somehow quite dangerous. Magnolia is just deeply boring but I’m following the advice that all estate agents give you which is probably just as well because people have been known to take a sharp intake of breath when they went into that room for the first time, when it was painted jade green. It was just too much for them. At the moment it’s a sort of pale blue colour which was supposed to be a sophisticated shade of grey, but you know what paint colour is like, never what you expect from the charts.

I think I can safely say that the magnolia will turn out to be magnolia. If you’re really lucky I might photograph the finished result!