Hammer time

I’ve had a greatly productive time recently. This is less to do with any great sense of motivation and more to do with realising how many jobs had built up around the house and garden that required bashing things with a hammer.

Hammers are great – they’re one of those tools that only adults are allowed to use, yet requires skills no more complex than those of a toddler. Bash, bash, smash. So I’ve had a little hammer time, whacking nails into walls and moving pictures about. And trying not to leave holes everywhere.

The former owners of our house seemingly used our spare room to house Britain’s largest private collection of shelves. Sadly they took them with them when they left, leaving dozens of exposed rawl plugs up and down the walls. I fairly confident that if presented with any size or type of shelf or storage unit I could find a set of correctly spaced holes to screw it soundly and comprehensively to some vertical surface in that room.

I’ve even cleared out the loft, which was still packed full of the cardboard boxes we used when we moved into the house. Going through them all was a bit boring, but crushing and flattening them all for recycling was fun enough. We’d been collecting them as rigorously as the previous tenants had amassed shelves. During the actual process of moving into the house, all this packaging had been undeniably, reassuringly fantastic; each one complete with custom cuts chunks of protective polystyrene moulded to the contours of its contents.

So in the years since we moved in, we’ve continued to save the boxes from new purchases and gifts. However it was only when I went up to the loft this week that I realised that we’d kept one or two of them for significantly longer than we’d kept their original contents. A substantial proportion of the floorspace was being taken up by the box for a television which we no longer owned. One of the whacking-great fat-assed models that ruled the roost before wide-screen. You popped them in the corner, but they still jutted four feet into the centre of your living room. The TV is long gone, having been razed to the ground to make way for a shopping centre. But I’d neglected to eject the receptacle in which it had crept in our direction.

It was probably big enough for me to actually fit my entire body inside it. Although probably not.

Likewise, even in instances where we still had the appliances in question, some of the boxes were hardly worth keeping even if we did decide to move again. It’s debatable how bespokely snug and secure the packaging needs to be on a set of bathroom scales. If they can bear my weight of a morning I hardly think they’re going to need when we pack them up and ship them off to pastures new.

And even if we do want to protect them, that’s what old newspaper and bubblewrap is for. And bubblewrap’s always fun. Although popping it with a hammer tends to feel like overkill.