How can I reclaim table space from a puzzled housemate?
Q: There are three of us in my student share house, and one dining-room table. A housemate began a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle on this table, restricting all other uses of it. She is completing it extremely slowly. Can I sweep a half-finished puzzle back into the box to reclaim precious table space?
T.F., Geelong, Vic
Illustration by Simon Letch.Credit:
A: I totally understand. From my memories of student share houses, the dining-room table is the epicentre of the home: it’s where you sit, chat, drink, study, play games, eat Maggi noodles, roll reefers and scrape reefer dregs out of the table cracks with a bobby pin when the stash tin is empty.
So a large jigsaw puzzle would really hamper all these essential student share house activities, especially if it’s one of those cheap, tiny IKEA tables with only enough surface area for a couple of UPPLAGA Maggi-noodle bowls and a BLOMNING stash tin.
But sweeping a housemate’s half-finished puzzle back into its box could come across as slightly aggressive: you don’t want to create tensions between housemates – a broken share house is very difficult to put back together, even if you start with the edges and try to match colours.
It might be wiser to quietly work on the half-finished puzzle when this housemate is not around: she’ll never notice if you just do a couple of pieces a day – at 500 pieces, you should have your table back in about eight months or so.
Or just ask her nicely if she’d mind sliding the puzzle onto a large piece of board: then she can do the puzzle in her bedroom, in the lounge room, in the bathroom, in her next share household, in every house she ever lives in, and eventually in her aged care facility where she can take up all the precious space on the communal arts and crafts table.
To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.
Danny Katz is a columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He writes the Modern Guru column in the Good Weekend magazine. He is also the author of the books Spit the Dummy, Dork Geek Jew and the Little Lunch series for kids.