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.