Just What To Do With The Old One? 11th December

Sovereign Wharf

Good job we didn’t loiter too long in bed this morning as Mick’s phone rang alerting us that a large parcel was soon to be delivered. The gates at the wharf are locked all the time except on a Friday when the office is open, so Mick walked up to meet the delivery driver. He’d said that he was in a pink wagon (sadly no photographic proof) and sure enough he was, Mick couldn’t miss him, big and bright pink. The wagon was too big to turn into the wharf so Mick was handed our parcel, almost six foot by two foot square and fairly heavy. He managed to get it back to Oleanna without too much hassle. We decided that unpacking it could wait a while until we’d finished our breakfast and sorted out room for it’s contents first.

First job was to strip the bed, putting all the linen straight into the washing machine. Then the old mattress was lifted, but where to put it? The sofa came in handy for a temporary place whilst we got things sorted.

Tilly was very keen to help, checking the bed structure was all okay as it was hoovered and then seeing what lay beneath it. The holes that Finesse had cut for ventilation are just the right size for our mini cat to squeeze through, sadly I wasn’t quite quick enough to get a photo of her hind legs straight up in the air as she wriggled her way into the drawers.

Our new mattress has cost us quite a bit, so we’d decided to invest in an underlay that would help to keep it away from the wooden base of the bed (Thank you for the suggestion from Jennifer on NB Cyan). The ventilation holes are good, but as this mattress comes with a ten year guarantee we thought it would be best to give it the best treatment possible to get the full life out of it. The underlay had arrived at my brothers last week and was quite a bulky thing to bring home along with all our presents. You can only buy it in fixed sizes which you then have to trim to fit. Out came the scissors and the main section of our bed had a layer cut to fit. We could have added this to the section that pulls out, but this would mean there would another thing to put in place when making up the bed on an evening and as this section of the mattress gets turned over every day we felt it gets enough airing. The remainder we will use under the dinette cushions.

Now was time to bring in the large sausage of mattress and undo the bag that was holding it all in. Two pieces of mattress and a pillow (a freebee) all wrapped up together slowly uncurled. I hoped that the mattresses would bounce back into the dimensions I’d given as they were all a touch too big. Luckily as the foam relaxed back into shape the overall foot print reduced as the thickness of them increased.

We left the mattress to do it’s thing all day. Here’s hoping it is worth the money and that Mick can still fit on the bed without going diagonal and pushing me out the other side! We’ll let you know tomorrow.

Just what to do with the old one? The narrow section sits nicely on the sofa, but the main section is too big for anywhere really and we don’t want it for anything else. So we need to find a way to dispose of it. Not having a car means we can’t take it to the nearest tip in Alkerton, some 7 miles away. It may be that we end up having to chop it all up and dispose of it in C&RT bins. If you happen to want a second hand foam mattress and can pick it up from Banbury in the next day, please give us a shout.

The washing machine has been very very busy, Christmas cards are made and Mick has even started to put the Christmas lights on the outside of Oleanna. A large food order has been placed which will hopefully see us across to Napton. Just a few more bits of present shopping to do, a wool order to pick up, a few boaty jobs and we can be on our way again.

0 locks, 0 miles, 1 seriously bored cat, 1 pink wagon, 1 large box, 2 pieces of redundant foam, 2 new cool blue mattresses, 1 free pillow, 3 designs of card, 1 side with lights, 6 boxes on order, 30 interesting Tilly sized holes, 1 smelly new day bed, 1 very full boat.