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In the first flushes of real love DH and I moved in together. To be more precise, DH decided he quite liked me, bought a house, then just assumed I’d said yes to moving in because he’d had the conversation so many times in his head. I didn’t have anything better to do, so went along with his plan.
We are big planners. Or at least that’s what we thought. Having been devoted to the
Anne Maurice since she graced television screens back in the early days of Channel Five, we knew exactly how to neutralise the Gaudi-inspired (lots of banana yellow wallpaper with contrasting lilac gloss woodwork…) DIY disaster zone that DH had mortgaged his soul to buy. Think neutral, think contemporary, think tasteful. Think lovely cream carpets in the bedrooms, a few shades darker on the stairwell. Fast forward three years to the arrival of the dog. The yet-to-be-housetrained-dog. You get the idea.
It’s not as if we didn’t do our best on the damage limitation front. We had firm plans that the dog stayed downstairs, where the wood floors have been lovingly sanded back, until she knew that the only place she could relieve herself was beyond the back door. She would sleep in the shower room (lino floor) where she would be neatly contained during the night, we could set the house alarm and come down in the morning to a dog happy to see us.
By day two, she’d figured out how to escape and promptly set said alarms off at 1am. The neighbours loved us for that, I’m sure. She was then left in the kitchen until the heartbreaking sounds of her throwing her little body at the (metal) dog gate in a desperate attempt to get near to us broke what was left of our will power, and has since found her ideal spot to sleep in an altogether more suitable environment. Our bed.
Four months later she seems to be fully adjusted to the idea of peeing in the garden, even if DH has to carry her down when he gets up at 6.30am because she was a little to comfortable wedged up against our feather pillows to want to visit the garden. Which means that I can get down to the tricky business of cleaning the carpets, which are no longer as cream and unpatterned as they used to be (remind me to tell you about a late-night poo-spaying event when you are not eating and I have recovered from the distress.)
Weighing up my options, I convinced DH that ‘we should invest’-ie: he should pay for- a carpet cleaner of our very own. Given the go ahead, I took advantage of a free 30 day trial of Which? online. Bugger all use as no advice. Undeterred, I ordered my machine, together with special pet-specific cleaner and waited. The day arrived, the box arrived. I unpacked and constructed the beautiful gleaming Bissell monster with not a little excitement. Careful reading of the instructions followed. I planned the event carefully. Got out the Hoover to ‘prep’ the area. And it didn’t work. So now I have a non-working Hoover, a gleaming and fully functional carpet-cleaner crying out to be used, and more dirt on the carpets than ever before.
