disposing of safely

Despite the amount of floor space in the flat being halved due to the presence of the yet-to-be-constructed flat-packed-but-still-very-space-taking-up replacement sofa we headed out rather than wasting good daylight on an indoors-based task. The evil oil company portrait award show was partly illuminated by artifical light but contains things definitely worth going to see, especially when it's free. Only one of the top three appears to deserve the prize awarded and it's a shame there weren't some other categories, such as "best scarily photo-realistic but still obviously painted and slightly caricatured" and "most obviously painted from a photograph including the narrow DoF and out-of-focus highlights". Good work by the highly-skilled, much of it was. The gallery was reasonably quiet for a Saturday morning but earplugs were required for bits of it when people wearing Drizabones and carrying hats started waiting for each other to turn up at a particular painting so that they could loudly discuss things, possibly in compensation for the relative lack of pretentious bullshit on the information-cards compared to normal.

After the gallery and a pop westwards to Costorphine's premiér pram showroom I wandered back (after seeing Nicky safely back to the car) to compensate for not having walked to the gallery in the first place. I was half-inclined to pop back into the gallery for another poke but the exhibition is there for another month and will be quieter to pop to during lunchtimes. Or at least it should be. It'll probably be full of old people creaking and shouting at each other.

As we really don't have enough floorspace to use up half of it with something we can't use I started assessing whether or not all the required components were present after getting back in, having something to eat and having a poke at some of the pictures from yesterday evening (which (as expected) turned out to be far too shit to use (given the appallingly low light levels in the pub) though there might be one or two usables from the restaurant so I'll wait to see the results before filling in yesterday's space) before attacking the sofa. I considered wasting some time setting up some sort of time-lapse photography before starting but in the end just got on with it, finding with some surprise that it only too eighty minutes and seemed reasonably sturdy. There are one or two bits I might go back and strengthen (particularly the join between the two halves which might not survive many pushings or pullings to and fro) but on the whole the slot-together nature seemed to be reasonably sound. The most important thing is that it was relatively easy to fit through the unnaturally narrow door from the hallway, something our old sofa obviously once achieved but which was only possible with the door and doorjambs removed. Fortunately the existing sofa was cheap enough to be easily reduced with the aid of a jigsaw into a number of smaller components which fitted through the door relatively easily.