Working at the kitchen table
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Cottage tales | 15 comments
View from the back door of the cottage
Loads of home workers actually operate from the kitchen table. I have, for the past two years or so. I’m positioned so that I can see the bird feeders and the front drive of the cottage. Sometimes in the summertime I open the back door and sit at the other side of the table. I look over the long deep herbaceous border, I can see the pond through the gothic arch in the yew hedge.
This sounds idyllic and in many ways it is. But if the Tidy Fairy boycotted your christening, working at the kitchen table can cause enormous strife. Gradually I moved from having a laptop and a pile of reference books to a working silk painting studio and sewing room. Even if I cleared up each evening there were boxes everywhere. Sometimes I didn’t bother to clear up as I was too busy trying to get orders finished.
And not just those boxes. There are suitcases and huge boxes of the ingredients for my scented bags and pot pourris that live in the sitting room. Alongside these are crates of stock.
I didn’t tell Danny but when the man came to change the meter, his chirpy remark was.
“So you’ve just moved in then?”
A cardboard box storage system isn’t very practical. Especially if things are just tossed in at the end of the day. So quite a lot of time is spent searching for that box of thread or piece of silk. This combined with being in a hurry means that there are little avalanches beside the boxes. Beginning to get the picture?
Of course if the Tidy Fairy stayed home and made a cake instead of attending your christening, you are blessed with the ability to see beyond the mess. The Good Excuses fairy did turn up at mine.
“OK everything is a bit messy but I’m having fun, making money and contributing to the household income. Surely that’s more important than wafting around in a pinny and waving a duster?”
Now, let’s get things straight here. Danny is a messy Virgo too. His bedroom and Rat Room have been worse than the kitchen for months. He does not sit buffing up his elegant, manicured fingernails between conference calls. But when he comes downstairs to relax in the evening, he likes order and a tidy space. And I would like that too, rather than feeling embarrassed when someone drops by.
Now. I had no idea that this mattered to him so much until a couple of weeks ago.
We had an enormous row. I was all for selling up, dumping everything except the Min Pins and going to live on my own in a small box anywhere that was a long, long way away.
It was Danny who came up with the perfect solution. He used to run a small business from home and needed the Rat Room for storage. He’d given up trading in the summer.
“How about I trade the Rat Room and the Best Bedroom for a tidy downstairs?”
I looked up from my laptop and the property lists on the Shetland Islands.
“It’s a deal.”
Now we are busy sorting out our old rooms for the swap. Danny’s realm will be the guest room and I’m excited to be moving into the suite that I put together as a working sleeping space before D arrived at the cottage. It has loads of storage space and the view from the Rat Room window is just the tops of trees and sky.
I might even invite the Tidy Fairy to tea.
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Oh how it gladdens my heart to read all of these comments. I am not alone!
Our household is the same at times- depends on the activity- I’m trying to finsh off a small mosaic at the moment-which needs space as there are various bits of tile nippings that fly all over the place- not found a good way yet of containing them, and E is gradually returning to the Hospice shop, where she is a volunteer, the large collection of toys we have had in store for over a month, waiting to go back to the new premises (the old one was to small-now in a new bigger place)
I can empathise with the problems of sharing a space 24 hours a day. Not just the messiness aspect (though we are both untidy!), more the need to negotiate mental and physical space. When hubby and I started working together from home, there were some … ahem, frictions, until we worked out how to carve out our own spaces and define spheres of responsibility. Now we know exactly who’s responsible for what, we can collaborate in a much calmer atmosphere 🙂
I am so with you on this problem. We used to live in a huge flat in a converted victorian house and then we moved to a tiny 3 bed semi. I had a big shed, sorry, workshop in the garden but it was damp and I still couldn’t get everything in!
Then a miracle happened-my son fell in love, he and Emily have bought their own home and I have a dining room and a spare bedroom, first time in 30 years, woohoo!
I will never be a friend of the tidy fairy but, like Alice, I am decluttering via Freecycle and the local tip when that fails. Eventually the Ikea storage fairy will visit the spare room and I might, just maybe, get a little tidy.
Well done to you both for your solution,
Happy Christmas.
Gosh, I love your soulution (typo, but I’ll keep it in since it’s apt). Also, I empathize with how a house needs to change as we evolve. D and I have traded rooms, repurposed space, packed up supplies in order to make room for different supplies, and then have found ways to bring old passions (and their things) back into active use with other re-organizations.
If the Tidy Fairy comes round, could you please try to persuade her to pop round and see me? Thanks
Anyone who makes things will know the ‘untidy table’ scenario. I have similar storage/making problems and do seem to have taken over most of the house..but I live with the untidiest man in the universe,so I’m not yet convinced he has noticed…..
Yay I’m glad you were able to resolve your conflict! I used to be a messy Virgo too until a few years ago when I realized that it wasn’t so much that I’m naturally messy, it’s that I had too much stuff. It was hard to let the stuff go, but gradually I did and the more I did it the easier it got. And the best thing is how much easier it became to keep a clean and tidy house when there is less stuff around.
Hmm, sounds very much like our place Fiona, ever since we knocked down a wall to ‘utilise’ the dining room, making it into a larger farm kitchen, the table just gets piled high with ongoing stuff.
Thats an elegant solution to restore harmony-with the added excitement of a new realm to create in 🙂