Lost

In a couple of my recent posts I mentioned our house. All the mess created by the bathroom make-over brought this on I think. As you might know by now (and if you don't and want to know, see this post and this post) we bought our house about 10 years ago. When we were looking for a house with officespace we contacted a couple of estate agents if they knew of a house for sale in this particular area with the space we needed. One of them sent us a brochure with a picture on the front of a small farmhouse. We frowned. Had we not made ourselves clear? We needed livingspace and a lot of space for the offices. This house could never have so much room. We opened the brochure and found a floorplan. It listed 23 rooms! We kept turning the page, back to the photo on the front and then back to the floorplan. How the he.. did they fit 23 rooms in this tiny little farmhouse? So we made an appointment to see this weird place and the rest is history. A lot had to be done to make it livable. Oh, by the way, some of these 23 rooms were slightly overrated. A small hallway between two rooms was also 'a room' according to the estate agent, which we found a bit of an exaggeration. And the toilet...also a room. The total building had two toilets, three of those small hallways, a big closet (yes, you've guessed it: another 'room'). Although when we started counting the rooms, we did not even nearly reach 23, it was a small maze. We left the building/installing of the kitchen and the bathroom to 'the professionals'. The kitchenpeople were, the bathroombastards unfortunately not, hence the need for a new bathroom. We did a lot of the other work that was needed ourselves, with the help of my parents, who were aged 75 (my dad) and 68 (my mum, well obviously) at that time, so it was doubly great of them to do so much work. My mum is great in cleaning (I don't take after her), my dad loves to paint. My mum had never painted anything before, but she dressed up in white overalls, boots, gloves and a baseballcap and really attacked the ceilings with a paintroller. It was a scary sight. Every time she caught a glimpse in a window, she would frighten herself. One day, hubs needed some sort of tool, I don't know what it was anymore, that he had left somewere in wat was going to be our office. My father went on a mission to get it. It took ages for him to return. Just when we were thinking of organizing a search, he appeared with a bright smile on his face. "You know", he laughed, "I just found the garage again. Couldn't remember where it was anymore. Knew there was a garage somewhere. Went through a couple of wrong doors and found it! Ha!" My mother shook her head, I laughed with my father and hubs wondered where his much needed tool was. "Tool!", my father said. "Yes, well, that's the thing, found the garage, couldn't find the office anymore!" No, it wasn't a case of dementia. Lots of people get lost in our house. We often jokingly offer a survival kit to fresh guests if they ask us where the toilet is, just in case they get lost and hungry. Although after the last renovation a couple of years ago when we (intentionally) lost a couple of staircases and gained a flat roof, things have gotten slightly better. It's only occasionally that we find a confused guest in the library when he/she actually wanted to go to the toilet. And no.....our guests are usually very well behaved and don't pee in a bookcase. We allways blame the cats for that. I wrote the above post last Friday and, just to prove it, yesterday we had a party in our house and my aunt at one point entered the livingroom: "Can someone please tell me where the toilet is, can't find it anymore!"