Order of importance

I'm a bit behind with the reportage of our final lounge activities, so apologies for that. This entry is dated August 16 but I'm writing it a week later. I have an excuse, which I'll come to later.

Anyhoo, today was the day for finally starting to move the furniture back into the new lounge. Well, I say "back" but of course it's never been in there at all, seein' as it used to be the dining room. But let's not get too hung up on semantics.

First order of business: hanging the curtains. Which included putting the curtain rails back up after giving them a thorough clean. These are our bargain eBay curtains that Nikki found. Probably around 400-quid's-worth of curtain for £70, and they match the sofas pretty much exactly. We just don't have that kind of luck normally.

Talking of sofas, we'd arranged to move them in tomorrow with Annie's help, so for today we enlisted the large conservatory cushions, sofa cushions and spare pillows so we could all camp comfortably on the floor for the afternoon and evening viewing sessions.

Which left the final item on today's agenda: the TV. I'd been procrastinating feverishly where the telly was concerned on account of it being so heavy. 70kg. Somehow I managed to lift it off the stand by myself, and Nikki and I penguin-footed it into the lounge in short bursts. Deciding the exact position of the stand in its new home was the subject of much debate. Not too far out into the room, the right angle to be seen from both sofas, not so close to the wall that I couldn't crawl behind it to cable everything up.

The cabling isn't such a nightmare as it was the first time round, 'cos I've labelled each end of every cable with its "from" and "to" locations. Blythe looked at the pile of cables and asked incredulously: "do you know where all those go?" Yeah, but I have a plan now, so it looks easy. When I first connected the media unit, PVR, surround-sound system and XBox together it took about 3 hours and 4 attempts to get everything right. Having multiple connections for sound and video signals is a luxury, but it can also be darned confusing!

Getting the TV back on the stand? Luckily there were sufficient hand-holds for us all to pitch in, and with four people lifting, it went on like a dream.