I have a room!

At long last, I have my very own space.  It is pretty, with green on the wall.  Now why has it taken me this long, you might ask?

Well I was supposed to be in this room:

But it wasn’t ready when I moved here, Ana Maria wanted to paint it pretty colours for me.  I thought it was pretty colours already!  But it turned out, she was going to paint it new and surprise me but Katie at head office said that I might not like that very much, so she didn’t.  But I would have liked it!

Instead, I ended up in this room:

I ended up here because there were volunteers in all of the other rooms when I showed up.  But I didn’t like this room because there was no curtains and the windows rattled any time something loud happened, so I ended up sleeping in until like 7 every day which isn’t very fun.

As soon as the volunteers went off to Cusco I moved in to this room:

(messy, sorry)

Which is where I have been for a while.  I like it, and I live on the top bunk with my ghost, but it isn’t very personal (seeing as how it has four beds in it), and since we have new volunteers showing up this week, we need the beds, and I don’t want to share with the volunteers.

So last week we got to start painting my new room, because there were places where the paint was peeling or bubbling.  We scraped some of the paint off and Ana Maria discovered that one of the walls was very damp and a little smelly.  We tried painting one of the other walls but we had the wrong kind of paint – there was an acrylic on the wall and we were using a water-based paint, so it just beaded up and didn’t go on evenly.  So we made a mess, and gave up.

But still, there was the problem that we needed space for the volunteers.  There was enough room to keep them all, but it would be really difficult for me to move later, since I would need to move into a room that would be occupied by a volunteer, evict them, and take over their space.  Not very nice.  I had my eye on one particular bedroom at the top of the stairs (it has a balcony), that is a bit small.  It had two bunk beds in it but really didn’t have the space for both of them; there was barely enough space to get around the first one to get to the second.  We had been avoiding putting volunteers there, and it was actually being used more or less as a laundry room.  But Ana Maria and I had discussed moving one of the beds into a different bedroom, one that’s huge and already had four bunk beds and plenty of space.

I suggested moving in there and she thought that was a fine idea, but we would have to move the bunk beds out and get my new (old) bed in it.  So I said “let’s do it!” and she gave me an incredulous look and explained that she had no idea how to do that, you would have to take the beds apart and last time they hired professionals to do so.

This weekend, I got bored.  You maybe can see where this is going!  I went through our toolbox and discovered that we don’t have any wrenches, so I went out to Plaza Vea and got me some wrenches!  Turns out, one of them was the right size, so I went about destroying things I mean, disassembling the beds.  After most of a day of hard work (it was hard!  It was just me, do you know how hard it is to screw a bedframe together when you don’t have someone to hold the other end?  Or lug mattresses up and down stairs by yourself?), I finally got all the beds in the right places, and my new room all ready for me to move into.

Voila!

(messy already, but that's expected)