Today our expensive six-month old washing machine broke* down. Of course, it was full of water and clothes and in the rinse cycle.

Lesson of the day. Before you rant and rave and spend an eternity on the phone to the service centre, read this, the Washerhelp site.

We had a broken bra strap** and a 20p piece blocking our pump impeller.

*washing machines are the most likely appliance in the home to break.

**bras are the number one enemy of washing machines - get a small net laundry bag to put them in before placing them in the wash.

After the disappointment of last week, finding out that we have to put much of our refurbishment plans on hold we have decided to make our house lovely, little bit by little bit.

The lounge is coming on a pace with three quarters of the walls now painted in their undercoat of matt white. Tonight we should be able to put the furniture back in and just have the area around the fireplace to do. We can’t really tackle any of the woodwork in any of the rooms yet until we get the very badly put in central heating system removed. We have pipes upon pipes! Most of them blocking access to all the skirting boards and just looking a godamn mess…

I’ll take some after pictures when the lounge is painted… hopefully we’ll see a difference from green woodchip wallpaper!

Last night our latest eBay acquisition came - a narrow 1960s Danish midcentury modern chest of drawers for the hall. It’s lovely, and again has turned legs that match the dining table and the sideboard. I still can’t get over how much of a resource eBay is. It wasn’t the cheapest chest ever but it is exactly what we wanted… I could of searched a hundred car boot sales before finding something as lovely.

My plan for the hall is to have the chest sit below a large G-Plan-esque wood framed mirror (round, irregular, rectangular shaped - who knows!) and have my handturned walnut bowl I bought from Venice on top. The bowl will serve as a repository for M’s pockets when he gets home from work and wants to put his keys, mobile and wallet somewhere. The top will also hold a small cheery vase and a place for post. The mirror will serve two functions: to open up our dark hall and aid last minute hair checking before venturing out. See, I got it all planned. The chest itself will soon be filled with accessories like gloves, scarves, small umbrellas, hats, ballet pumps shoes and all those little outer wear items that never seem to have a home.

We also framed two recent art purchases. One is a poster that everyone and his dog seems to have but I just adore, in fact the text is fast becoming our motto when we get stressed about the house: “Keep Calm and Carry On”. This is going in the hall in it’s trim white IKEA ribba frame. That way we can see it when we walk though the door and remind ourselves that it could be worse

Etsy is addictive. It’s crack for crafters, it should be made illegal. There is such a wide variety of things on there: paintings, paper goods, prints, bags, purses, jewellery, clothes, toys, photographs… I almost click with dread when I go on Etsy, I just know I’ll end up buying something cute.

Well, I have bought a few things for me and the flat recently and wanted to recommend the lovely sellers who’ve brightened my day and my home.

The Black Apple

Every Jot and Tittle

Florspace

Tinymeat

Modern Art Everyday

Creative Thursday

Absoluut

Melissa Moss

Support artists, shop Etsy.

Updated 27 April to add:

One Good Bumblebee

Magic Jelly

Tummy Ache

Art and Ghosts - a photoartist friend of mine who is criminally talented

Sugarloop

It’s the time of the month to buy magazines. ‘Living Etc‘, ‘Elle Decoration‘ and my guilty secret magazine ‘Real Simple‘ are all on the shelves.

Living Etc. is good this month as it is ‘The White Issue’ - do I ever love white. Apparently different shades and textures of white are OK in your home, wall to wall brilliant white is not. I’ve always loved white homes, however impractical they might seem. In fact they are highly practical, you can see all the dirt and one can easily keep a can of white paint handy for occasional touch ups. We are doing our entire place in Dulux Trade matt white eggshell at the moment to get rid of our crazy inherited colour scheme. We look at this purely as ‘undercoat’. When we can finally decorate - in October now, gah - our walls will be perfectly prepared. I’m looking at ‘Swedish White‘ (Dulux Heritage range) and ‘Cornforth White‘ (Farrow and Ball) for our lounge, both soft grey whites. In the hall - as it is tiny - we plan on ‘Ultimate White’ from the Dulux Light and Space range, a super reflective white designed to increase the feeling of space. The lounge will also have two feature walls in vintage 60s/70s wallpaper.

Would you believe it, Elle Decoration has a lounge special this month; wall to wall sofas! Great timing ED. Well, as I have neither £2000 or a 3 metre long space I am safe from their temptations but some of the smaller ones from Dwell and Habitat are good. Talking of sofas I am still drawn to vintage ones from eBay etc (look under Antiques>Sofas>20th Century). Some sellers even do delivery, *sigh* However, I am sure M is not as keen as I am on a Danish / Eames /Hansen delight. I am sure it would look awesome in the lounge but I guess M is thinking “Would it sag / smell / have fleas?” Vintage furniture lovers had a treat this week on ‘Grand Designs‘ with all the 1930s stuff the featured couple bought. Buying old and reupholstering / refinishing is the smart way to go kids*.

Real Simple has great tips as usual. I now know I can use baby oil to clean my stainless steel taps and cook the perfect dish containing leeks.

*That said I’m now looking at importing my perfect sofa from America, whoops. Watch this space for the continuing sofa saga.

Heard from our freeholder today - they have to come into our flat to do the planned foundation work. So, we do have to move out for a few weeks, pack up and unpack our worldly belongings twice, and be put in a hotel/accommodation of their choosing. This also means we can’t do a thing to our flat, like put in a much needed new kitchen, bathroom, electrics, flooring, underfloor heating…

The scheduled date is September, just when my new academic year starts… thanks a lot.

As we were lied to by our vendor and freeholder as to these works I am going to fight like hell on the choice of removal company, storage facility and hotel.

I’m angry and upset and I feel my house dreams - temporarily - have been ruined.

Last night I truly joined the uptight club; I labelled the inside of my clothes drawers. It’s not as mad as you might think though.

I’m working in the City during the Easter holidays from University and every morning when I get up at stupid-o-clock I can’t find a thing. My tiredness isn’t helped by the fact that my clothes live in three different locations across the flat at the moment. Until we get our bedroom storage solution sorted out this problem looks set to continue…

My temporary solution is make a specific place in the three different rooms for each type of clothing; t-shirts, socks, work skirts, work trousers, jeans etc etc. Then affix a discreet label on the inside of the drawer, so that whether M or I put the washing away we know exactly what goes where. As a side effect I also sorted out some old items for the charity shop. Tonight I might do the same thing for my shoes and some of M’s stuff.

I feel virtuous.

It’s time for a new sofa.

My current sofa, a stalwart IKEA Klippan has been with me through thick and thin; three different boyfriends and with four different covers. In sofa years it’s in late middle-age.

The lounge in our new home dictates the size we can buy, no bigger than our current one unfortunately, a two to two and a half seater. I’d love to be able to buy (and afford) a massive B&B Italia one but we’d never get down our pipsqueak hall.

We are asking a lot of our next sofa : it must be affordable, couple snuggly, super stylish, washable, have nice fabric, be delivered, be able to accommodate a tall man and either be midcentury modern or shabby French chic. Finally, it must have wheels, nice classic castor ones. We also flirted with the idea of it being a sofa bed for occasional guests, but that is asking too much of one piece of furniture!

[Gorgeous Picture by Lazybones Cafe on Flickr]

We plan to use our new sofa in two different ways (hence the wheels), either in front of the TV for snuggling down to watch BBC 4 (our current favourite channel) or against the rear wall of the lounge for parties or just when we want more space. Having the sofa at a prime TV viewing angle also means that our new Besta unit from IKEA is directly behind it and that looks messy to me, but we must go with the flow in appartmento piccolo. Wheels offer us a solution here.

M is tall and suffers a lot with our current sofa. It has a low back which offers no support to anyone taller than an eight year old and for the very tall causes neck and shoulder ache regularly. With a sad backward wave at all the low Italian sofas I start looking for a sofa plus one extra requirement - a high back. A high back that doesn’t compromise on my style aesthetic. Oh brother, where am I going to find one of those?

We’d like to be able to get a midcentury modern one secondhand (sans fleas please) and feel virtuous at our recycling thriftyness. How green! I’d then learn to / or enlist craft friends to help me recover it in a slubby 1950s/1960s eames fabric. However, all the times I’ve looked on eBay the size problem strikes again. That and not owning a car for the pick-up problem.

After a trawl through the internets and back copies of several home magazines I decide on a shape that seems to fit our style and height requirments:

Browning Sofa by Sofa Workshop

and the wheel type:

Unfortunately, they all seem over 2m long or cost more than £1500! Is thwarted

Last night I stumbled on sofa.com - bingo! M and I measured, checked and cogitated and we decided on their 2 seater ‘Jackson’ sofa.

Now all we have to decide is the colour. As it’s not exactly cheap we have to ‘future proof’ it against changes in our house and colour scheme.

So it’s either, ‘Heat and Dust’ (Grey), ‘Porcelain’ (Off-White) or ‘Taupe’ (You go figure):

What do you think?

All we need do after that is attach our perfect wheels…

We really should of started this blog with the infamous before pictures. You could then gasp with amazement at the during and after photos and marvel at the floor plans we made with ‘Google Sketch-up’ before we even moved in. I’ll try and get some of those up shortly so you can see exactly what we plan to do to our little abode.

One of the main reasons for not posting the before pictures is that some days I feel like we’ve done very little and that gets me down. The prospect of *maybe* not being able to do much in the next seven months also gets me down. For those of you who have heard this tale before, apologies, look away now.

This January we were just about to start our grand transformation when we heard very bad news from our freeholder (we are leaseholders of our property - oh for freehold!), they needed to do major work on our building. This work had been known about since December 2005 - both the vendor and the freeholder ‘neglected’ to mention this to us when we bought our flat in October 2006. Had we known we probably would not have bought.

You can imagine our immediate reaction to being told that both ground floor flats in our block (us and the little old lady next door) could potentially be moved out for six weeks, our possessions stored and us put in temporary accommodation - with all that that implies. If you’ve experienced the joys of moving you’ll know that packing up and moving again - twice - is the last thing you want to do. What they need to do you see is correct a problem with the car park next to our building. It was built without foundations on sandy Thameside soil and now it has dropped and sagged to an alarming degree since the 1960s. When it rains we have a lake outside. They want to fill the hole underneath the car park, which extends under our building, by injecting foam and to make good. At the same time they want to repair the drains which have suffered due to the drop. The building itself has no problems as the foundations are good and strong and everything is made of reinforced concrete.

The kicker, which we have been waiting for since January, is whether they need to come into our flat and boot us out to make these repairs or whether they can inject from the outside the building. What makes this decision all the more crucial is that we plan to install underfloor heating throughout and brand new walnut floors. Imagining a pneumatic drill ravaging our newly laid floor is heartbreaking. Due to the order in which works needs to be done the floors hold us up majorly with all our other refurbishments… Also the timetable of the freeholder keeps ’slipping’ first the work (and our potential move) would take place in July. Now it’s slated for September, right slap bang at the start of the new academic year. Thanks freeholder b@$!&%£s.

We thought about suing. Someone - or several people - are to blame. Our freeholder, the previous owner, even our solicitor. I was and am hopping mad about this. On reflection, we probably can’t afford to though. We’re new homeowners and I’m a full-time student. It’s galling but there you are. I want someone to pay for this but realistically the deceitful old dear we bought from probably hasn’t got any money now - it’s all spent on healthcare and gin.

So the news. I had a call from the freeholder yesterday. After promising in January that we’d know one way or the other in six weeks (!) we have now been told that we’ll know - hopefully - this week. They also mentioned, in reply to our earlier question, that if they do drill through our floors they will need to drill through each room in our flat. We can’t even start on ‘just the bathroom’ or ‘just the kitchen’ as we’d hoped. Keep your fingers crossed for us please that it’s good news.

To comfort ourselves in the interim we’ve been doing what we can, which is not a lot. The crazy colour scheme of bright green over woodchip wallpaper and urine yellow and navy paint that the previous owner left us with is slowly being erased with white eggshell undercoat. Each wall needs stripping, repairing, smoothing then undercoating with three coats of white. We plan to strip all the miles of bumpy woodwork too.

Eventually, we’ll have a smooth blank canvas upon which we can start again.

Last weekend we won a sideboard on eBay and it was delivered yesterday. Those who know me well will tell you I am bit of a sideboard fetishist and have hankered after a 60s piece for a while.

Last year I’d never of thought about buying furniture on eBay. How the hell do you get it the items home without owning a car for starters? But, after finding a delivery service and hooking up with some very nice buyers who will deliver I’ve overcome my eBay furniture fear. I spend hours now guiltily browsing Antiques > 20th Century > Tables or Collectibles > Vintage > 1950s. Buying ‘preloved’ furniture means you are recycling and avoiding (in a very small way) filling the planet with yet more chipboard. Post war furniture is often of higher quality too and not made in large production runs.

Plans (if they can be called that at this stage) for our lounge / diner comprise a dark wood floor, a mix of modern and midcentury modern furniture with a new ‘hole in the wall’ type fireplace to replace our current sixties gas horror. So far in the dining section we have a round early 1960s rosewood dining table (with four ‘ellipse back’ chairs) that can extend to accommodate six people and the new sideboard. Extending dining tables are very good in a small space as they sit neatly when closed but can be pulled out into the room when needed.

We got a bit of a bargain on our table set as they chairs had been very badly covered by a former owner. After stripping off the dusty material the original seat covers were still there but sadly in poor condition. Bubb took the seats outside to hoover and removed forty years worth of ick then I reupholstered them in Cath Kidston fabric. I’ll write another post about recovering I think!

Wanting a sideboard of my own has a heavy element of nostalgia about it. My parents owned one and I think most people of my age can remember one being about the family home. My parents called it - variously - the ‘radiogram’, ‘the drinks cabinet’ or when stubbing a toe on it’s deceptively slender legs ‘the ruddy great thing’.

It was made from a golden light teak and offered it’s owners two sources of delight. If you opened the hidden top (like a piano lid) you were presented with a radio, all AM/MW/LW with twiddly gold knobs. I remember it being set to BBC World Service for the Forces Overseas every Sunday before lunch. Mum would listen to the DJ playing songs for absent husbands requested by the wives back home while stirring some dish on the stove. My sister and I were more fond of sliding pennies or sweets across its impossibly smooth top in an impromptu game of ‘air-hockey’. Dad - when he was on shore-leave - would fetch the best cutlery from one of it’s baise-lined drawers and shoo us children away so he could retrieve a bottle of something from the end cupboard.

What memories one piece of furniture can hold… and now I have my own.