Nightmare on Lavender Hill

Picture the scene:

Alex buys coffee table on ebay.

Seller says it will definitely fit in a car.

Alex goes to pick up coffee table and waits outside sellers house for Lynette to come to pick her up in the car.

Seller drives off to Wales.

Lynette nearly crashes into a police car driving to find Alex.

Alex and Lynette clear general shit out of car.

Coffee table doesn’t fit.

Nightmare.

Alex and Lynette struggle for ages to get the sodding thing in the car.

Coffee table definitely not going to get into car.

Alex and Lynette discuss other options (which are limited to say the least).

Alex and Lynette decide best option is to get it into cab to clapham junction where Alex can take it on train back to Earlswood to be met by Tobes to carry it home.

No way box is going to get in cab.

Alex goes to “borrow” trolley from Asda but gets told off by a man that doesn’t speak English. No trolley.

Alex and Lynette take an hour and a half to carry the bugger 5 minutes down the road.

Alex and Lynette are reduced to eating malteasers in enormous quantitys and summoning Tobes to Clapham to help.



Tobes gets on train

Alex and Lynette struggle down the street to the station luckily avoiding punching people that give us sympathetic looks. One man actually says “it is heavy!”, another says “it’ll take you about ten minutes to the station depending on the traffic” (even though we were walking).

Alex and Lynette wait for Tobes outside Clapham Junction station. Malteasers finished. Minstrels.

Alex sees Tobes and goes to get him, Lynette waits with the box.

Pregnant woman sits down next to Lynette on the box. Lynette nearly pees her pants with the hilarity of it all.

Lynette goes back to the car and drives home (luckily, safely).

Tobes spend first ten minutes telling Alex how light the box is. Alex comes close to pushing Tobes in front of incoming train.

Tobes and Alex get on train, phew.

Drunk man discusses coffee tables with Tobes and Alex at length.

Tobes and Alex finally get box out of train at Earlswood.

Tobes and Alex wheel the thing up the hill to the house using a cunning Ikea trolley.

Home at last, four hours later.



Tobes and Alex very happy with new coffee table.

In search for the perfect pendant...

Finding pendant lampshades that I love rather than just like has been a daily bind since we moved in to No. 39. It's easy peasy to swan into Habitat or Heals and pick up something modern but understated if you're loaded but us mere mortals are surprisingly limited when it comes to cheap alternatives. While bare lightbulbs look trendy in ultra-modern lofts, they're just not going to cut it down-town Redhill.

Luckily Dunelm Mill has surpassed itself with it's new range of pendants





Click here for link to Dunelm Mill's website

The top one of these pendants will be installed in our sitting room and dining room as soon as I can get my hands on it.

I don't want luxury

In a magazine I was reading in the sun (ah the sun- I couldn't be happier!) today there was an article raving about quirky, cooky places to stay in the UK. It got me thinking about the luxury of staying somewhere not so luxurious and how I have a habit of interchanging 'unusual' for 'luxurious' in the context of overnight retreats.

Two years ago we had the luxury (and it really was the luxury) of travelling in Indonesia. We stayed at The Temple Lodge. Although our room had no walls and you had to cover up your toiletries to hide them from the monkeys and mating frogs kept us up all night, it really was the most perfect hotel I have ever come across. It was also one of the cheapest.





What's tricky is that nowadays stars mean nothing when choosing where to stay overnight. Chain hotels are never luxury (well not unless you pay squillions for a super duper suite), they're just samey. Boutique hotels, normally beautifully designed but small. I'm not claiming to be an expert (I'll leave that to the competitors on Three in a Bed- see BBC3 i think) but what I really want from a hotel nowadays is unusual and not necessarily luxury (so long as there arn't cockroaches scampering along the bathroom surfaces).

Crisis

Crisis: a dramatic emotional or circumstantial upheaval in a person's life. A condition of instability or danger.

or

Crisis: The moment I pushed my hand to the back of my wardrobe while ferreting for a top that was definitely there last week, only to find that my hand kept going...the back of my wardrobe had collapsed against the wall behind.




Being built in wardrobes it dawned on me that there was going to be no quick fix. Cross. Not just because said wardrobe had swallowed up half of my clothing behind it but because I opened the doors of Toby's wardrobe beside mine to check it's structural integrity (just incase I could palm the 'crisis' off on the wardrobe's 'low quality craftsmanship' rather than the poor thing collapsing under the weight of my general paraphernalia). What Toby's wardrobe actually revealed was the borderline obsessive compulsive nature of my boyfriends shirt hanging routine and a perfectly stable and structurally sound cupboard.

Some minutes later whilst trying to think of a good excuse for the wardrobe crisis and putting some underwear away, my hand went straight through the bottom of my knicker drawer. Was this thing taking the piss! I never liked it anyway. Hopefully wood glue will come to my rescue and I can steer Tobes away from my blog until I find time to empty the entire unit, paste in a heap of wood glue, wait ten hours for it to dry and put my clothes back in the wardrobe. Luckily for me my boyfriend has approximately no interest in my ramblings or interior prettiness so I think I'm safe.

I should be on commision with Jali...

After hours of debate about position/ colour/ position/ width/ length/ height/ position of door handles etc. etc. etc. etc....(and there are lots of etc.'s) we ordered our Jali units to go either side of our fireplace.



Six weeks later they arrived and Tobes excitedly began the construction phase. He quickly realised that walls in victorian houses are not straight and floors aren't flat and that generally flitting anything square in our house was going to be a complete nightmare. After the first day he was still smiling (just) and happily stood back as I admired a days worth of handy work.

The second day didn't go quite so well. I got a voicemail at around midday from Toby declaring that he was on his way to the hospital because he had a piece of saw stuck in his hand...disaster. Luckily after a few hours in A&E, a load of x-rays and somewhat humiliating conversation with a nurse about why exactly he thought Savlon would help get a piece of metal out of his hand he was out and surprisingly nonchalant about the saw versus hand situation. Although handicapped he powered on and after a whole lot of sanding and almost having a mental breakdown over trying to keep the paint on the units and off the walls they were finished. And they are beautiful.

For the bargain price of £183 each we have two perfectly fitting units either side of our fireplace. We'd previously been told that they would cost around £1800 so we consider this a result. Jali are on to a winner and I can't speak highly enough of them and their laser cut MDF. So much so that I've taken it upon myself to be their resident Surrey salesperson. I've passed on Jali's details to about ten people who are seeking furniture that actually fits rather than paying a fortune in John Lewis for a unit that kind of fits. Happy days.

Ouch

I am now the proud owner of a pond vacum cleaner. £100 closer to a cleaner pond and further away from a new front door. I'm hurting. I'm also becoming less keen on the pond.

If only

A hand painted card by Anna Fraser that I found on design is mine. One for our bedroom? Yes but not right now.

We've got people staying in our spare room/ attic in 2 weeks so I need to do some serious sorting in that department. The attic has got to become a priority amongst all the other bits and pieces: I've got a blind to finish, mice to make (see earlier post for the full story!), curtains to make, painting to finish, a mural to finish, curtains to take up for a neighbour, a picture to mount and put up, a kitchen to paint, a cabinet to up-cycle, a chair to finish upholstering...along with a whole heap of other things I'd like to start. Argh! I need to CALM DOWN with the projects or I'm going to give myself a coronary. I nearly threw a bowl of porridge at Toby the other day when he asked "is that masking tape ever going to come off the ceiling" - YOU COULD DO IT I thought, biting my lower lip. I was only cross becasue I know I have to do it- he was just pushing my buttons- anyway I'd be cross if he did it. Chances of me ever finishing a project before starting the next one? Slim to none.

Paul Robson, you hero.

...make that all the time.

Check out Paul Robson for more inspired posters.

Oh so cosy...

We have an attic room which is going to be our guest room when I get around to giving it a lick of paint. We've rather been working upwards through the house so, as you can imagine, at the moment it's a serious dumping ground.

For a year and a half I've been coveting this picture...



This room makes me want to snuggle up immediately and strikes me as the perfect spare room. Having said that in the summer our poor guests will be less than comfortable if forced to sleep under all that cable knit.

Since I found this picture I've been eyeing up Sanderson plaid fabric but I just can't bring myself to buy any because a) it costs a flipping fortune and b) that room does not lend itself to seasonal Britain.

I'm going to have to let go of 'the cosy room'...unless I ever move to Scandinavia...in which case I'll be first in line for a pair of antlers.

Something fishy

For the last week Toby's been banging on about our fishpond. So much so that I thought he was going to lynch a neighbour when she suggested that the previous owners might want the fish back. Unfortunately I have a proper job (unlike him) which requires me to be in the office during daylight hours, we were away last weekend which has all meant that I've missed out on the whole fishy experience.



On Wednesday last week however I was met on my walk home from the station by a beaming boyfriend. I hadn't quite realised the significance of that day until he blurted out that it was the first day I was home with enough daylight to help feed the fish.

Let me tell you that these fish are MASSIVE. I had no idea! I'm having to grovel deeply now for laughing at poor Tobes for suggesting that they were anything bigger than tadpoles. The two biggest fish (which were big goldfish, then were koi now are catfish...we think) are, no jokes, just short of a foot long!

Toby's got the ancient pump working and we now have a lovely (if a bit green) waterfall- not just a trickle, a full on waterfall. He's investing a worrying amount of time either on the internet looking at pond cleaners, standing over the pond planning...stuff or perched (so's not to cast a scary shadow over the pond for the poor dears) just by the pond dropping in very smelly fish food.

I may mock but come summer I'll be very happy sitting in the sun with a large spritzer next to the most loved fish in the whole of Surrey. And if those neighbours want anywhere near them, there'll be serious trouble. (I'm convinced that Toby's sudden desperation to lock our back gate to keep our house safe has much more to do with the safety of the fish).

When I get home tomorrow night I'll take a couple of pictures so you too can share our the love of the pond.