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.

Were watching a fascinating documentary series on BBC Four this week called ‘All Mod Cons.’ It’s being shown as part of ‘1997 week’.

The programme makers describe the series best:

“All Mod Cons illuminates our changing attitudes to domesticity, home ownership, gender roles and children by looking at the ways in which we have chosen to decorate and redecorate our homes over the past fifty years. Interviews and the witty use of archive combine for an intimate and affectionate social history of British homes.”

Bubb and I are hooked and have been sighing wistfully over the gorgeous open plan homes with their sleek G-Plan sideboards. We have also had quite as few laughs at the RP accents at the BBC in the 1950s, and how it was absolutely de rigueur to wear a tie whilst cracking on with the DIY. I am also surprised the anyone visiting a 1950s home escaped without being slathered in contact adhesive and having a piece of Formica attached to their person - it was everywhere!

The show references the themes of Britain’s recovery from post-war austerity and the major impact made on our homes by the 1951 ‘The Festival of Britain‘. Digging around this morning I’ve found some great sites on the subject, particularly the Mullen Archive. It features scans of all the major newspaper and magazine articles at the time of the exhibition. The Museum of London also has a great mini-site on the festival featuring stories from people who actually attended.

Although the post-war modernising of London’s Victorian terraces was not always a success (those hideous 1960s gas fires for example. One of which I am looking at right now in our lounge), you can see why it was done - the spirit of contemporary living had arrived!

Image: Architonic Source Library

We’re a thirtysomething couple, Bobble and Bubb*, living in London and we’ve just bought out first flat. The idea for this blog was born from our frustration at not being able to find stylish, ‘green’, and affordable things for our home - that fit.

London is currently the fifth most expensive city to live in worldwide (third if accommodation costs are taken into account), and affordability is a major issue for first time buyers. Something, of course, has got to give and that something is either location or square meters.

The first House Price Per Square Metre Survey of London conducted last year showed that prices per meter squared varied between £2,013 to £6,033 across the city. Apparently, the average size of a London abode is 93.3 square meters (really?) which in Kensington & Chelsea would cost a tidy £562,998. Not surprising then that trying to buy an ‘averaged sized’ house in one of the ten most popular boroughs of London is beyond most first time buyers. Where did we put that £300,000 again, Bubb?

Anyway, what do most London buyers do? They look at their bank balance, their commute time, the walking distance to the nearest tube and then lastly consider how many square meters they might get - just like we did. Talking a quick straw poll of friends, our two bedroom flat of 60 square meters is the real average. On the plus side if we ever move to Manhattan or Tokyo we’d feel right at home…

As we said at the start our major problem is finding affordable stuff we like at a size to fit our living space. Oh, and not hurting the planet would be good too.

If you look at most design magazines or interior design shows and you’ll see marvellous stuff in inspirational homes that make you want to run to Habitat and grab the latest must have lamp. But wait, that kitchen island or that modernist sofa you’ve fallen in love with… it’s designed for a much bigger house…

We both love the midcentury modern aesthetic - originally made for larger post-war homes. After a succession of rented flats comprising wall to wall IKEA veneer and dodgy landlord carpets we long for some nice pieces in our home which really reflect our tastes and our individuality.

Using our own flat as a ‘test-lab’ we want to explore clever ways to create a dream living space. Ours may not be a grand design (we love you Kevin) but it’s a great little one. Fancy coming along for the ride?

(*Yeah, we like computer games too.)