Wednesday 16 January 2008

When Free is Better - When Not (aka “The Cinema Job”)

Finally got my dad-in-law to do some of his packing, as he is returning to Pakistan in a week’s time. It’s not that I’m in any hurry to get rid of him, its just that the last time he visited, he and my husband remembered to do his packing the night before he was due to go back.

What has come in handy is the free suitcases my better half picked up in a house clearance he had to do – saved us spending £200 on new ones (he also got a new boxed heater and lots of hello kitty hair stuff in bags and gift bags that saw me through two Eid parties).

What also came in useful for the party was a multitude of little children’s seats that my husband picked up from a book he recently booked clearing out a cinema foyer and restaurant.

After a 12-hour working day he came back with 60 purple sofa’s, 40 children chairs, 8indestructible tables and a host of other stuff including an enormous purple beanbag which is taking up most of our living room and serving as a bouncy castle for the kids at the moment.

He was also being offered two giant fridges (I think the type they keep drinks and ice-cream in), but convinced the cinema manager that it was still useful (he’d have never got it out the door and into the van). Shame, I could have frozen enough veg to last till next year, would just have had to keep the fridge in the back room next to the stack of chairs which we also don’t need.

He managed to get rid of a lot of metal chairs by selling them to the scrap-metal man. Dumping the furniture costs money and cuts into the money he received for the job, so a good alternative is a boot sale. He dragged the stuff off on Sunday morning, with his two trusty assistant removal-men (dad-in-law and baby brother-in-law) in tow. They managed to sell a good number of the items extra cheap and left the rest there for people to take away free.

In the meantime, the free car I mentioned in a previous post is still gracing the front of our house (and still obscuring my flowers) and is still full of other junk we don’t need – more metal trunk than car really. Until yesterday we also had the humungous tellie that someone didn’t want, well radio really, you can hear the channel, but you can’t see the picture. It sat outside the house for a week, waiting for us to fall over it until the gypsies across the road asked if they could take it (“course you can!”).

No-one could decide what to do with the bean-bag until the kids started wrestling on it. And we decided to hold on to it until we get sick of not having enough room to move. Till then it’s pretty nice to snuggle on with my reading book.

No comments:

Post a Comment