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

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…

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.