Playing Mind Games

Back to the spare room.

We are going to try and get some paint on the walls this weekend so I'll be sharing that soon. But really we need to figure out how this room is going to work for us.

It's a bit of an oddly shaped room because it incorporates a chimney breast and some built in wardrobes (which were made for a baby and we can't really hang anything in them as they aren't deep enough - score!) The main bits of furniture we want to make sure are in there are our Ikea PS Murbo sofa bed and some kind of desk which we have yet to buy,  so Ben can write a special novel he talks about once every few weeks. Everything else can fit around as it's smaller, like CD towers etc.

Until we actually get the sofa into the spare room (if we ever get our proper sofa for the living room from made.com - never going to let it go so don't bother) it's going to be hard to tell. I did a bit of a 'to scale' sketch using floorplanner.com and Photoshop, and this is what I've come up with:

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

I'm siding with Option 1 at the moment. I think if we can find a desk that is narrow enough to allow the sofa be to opened without it destroying anything in its path, then we could be rolling. 

Option 3 looks like it would waste a bit of space around the chimney area, but I'm wondering if we could put some shelving or something in there. The sofa bed needs to be able to open fully if we have people to stay so finding a set up that doesn't mean moving furniture every time someone stays over is going to be a bit of a mission.

The main reason for doing this virtually is so we don't have to move furniture around a freshly painted room too much, but I'm quickly realising that this might be the case anyway. All suggestions on how to win at the mind game are welcome!

Seriously?

You know when I posted a picture of our un-rolling rug yesterday? Well after I'd posted it, I was sitting at my computer looking at the picture and then looking at the scene in real life, and I noticed something...

...it's our old friend damp! AGAIN. 

At first I thought it was a smudge on my computer screen, or even a smudge on the wall from grubby mits, but no, it's cold and feels a bit wet. You know it. 

After sitting in a bit of a mood and shouting 'why meeeeee', I waited until Ben got home and then we went outside to check out the pointing. It was hard to tell, there weren't any obvious signs of holes or missing mortar. It's pretty much 100% not rising damp, given that it's just three random splodges in the middle of the wall, and also that I am basically an expert on damp now. I had a mild panic that maybe the shower was leaking but then realised the pipes don't run down that particular wall and there were no signs of that anywhere else in the house. 

Ben called Trevor (our new best friend and damp expert) this morning and he thinks it might just be condensation. We don't really open the windows as much as we probably should as the downstairs in our house is pretty cold as it is. We use our extractor fan when cooking but I guess it could be condensation and it's manifesting itself on the wall in protest. Anyway, Trev will be coming over on Saturday to hopefully put our minds at rest, so fingers crossed. I guess it's just something we will deal with consistently given the age of our little house. 

I really hate the horrible feeling I get in my stomach when anything like this happens to the house. It makes me feel incredibly grown-up and I'm uncomfortable with that. 

Rug-ged

I'm going to talk rugs again.

I'm sorry but that's what happens when you have exposed wood floor boards and live in the North West.

Since we've had the floors refinished we've been trying not to be too precious of them. They are actually  the original floor boards to the house and it was built in 1902, so they are very much in their twilight years. It's hard not to worry about them like you would an elderly relative.

So you can imagine my horror when our lovely Eames replica dining chairs started doing this to our poor old floor:

You can just about see it in the picture...little round dents in the wood. It's actually far more apparent in real life, especially when the sun pours through the patio doors (we live in Manchester, it's not a regular occurrence, but still). 

I was worried. The little dents where everywhere around the dining table. We've been using the space a lot since we got the new table and chairs, so there have been people sitting on the chairs and denting the floors pretty much every day for the past three weeks. 

So it needed fixing. I thought about maybe getting some kind of sticky pads to put on the bottom of the chair legs, but was worried that they might just compress with people's weight on the chairs (no offence friends) and end up not working. 

So once again, it was rug time in Ikea. Also known as Ikea Sunday in our house.  

We found this 260cm X 130cm Morum rug for £49.99:

It's pretty neutral and inoffensive which was a must as we have a patterned rug in the living room stealing everyone's thunder. It's also really thick and hard wearing and mentioned on the label that it's ideal for dining areas as you can move chairs about on it smoothly and without harming the rug. Basically everything we needed for a bit of a bargain price, given the size and all. 

The only problem is this:

It won't lay flat. 

It came rolled up and per usual, but because of the thick, straw like material it's made of, it just won't unroll itself. 

It's really bloody annoying. 

We had a bit of a Google to see if there were any tricks and the 'masking tape around the edges' cheat seems to be the least inconvenient for now. Most people suggested putting books or furniture around the edges, but we kind of have to walk through the dining area so it would have been a massive pain. We also thought about rolling the rug the opposite way but apparently that can damage the carpet and make it come apart (worse case scenario). 

So for about a week this is how we will live. I'd imagine it will become one of those things that we just get used to living with and then totally forget to sort out, so if there is still masking tape there in a few weeks I need to be pulled up on it. Also, how much of a random formation have I applied the masking tape in? It's like some kind of window into my mind set. 

Not Much

It's been a bit quiet on the home front this week. Mainly because I've FINALLY got myself a new iPhone and have therefore dropped everything to play on it 24 hours a day. Who needs a house when you have a new phone.

I downloaded this fun 360 degree app which patches together your pictures. This was my first attempt of the living room and dining room (you have to click on it):

And here's a picture of my fit chairs in the sunshine:

That's all for today. 

Spare Room

This weekend we attempted to remove some of the madness from the spare room. By which I mean a LOT of empty boxes and things that could find a new home. We even put some things in the loft which is novel, never had one of those before. Ben ventured up there because I was a little apprehensive. I totally fell for his cry of 'Oh my god is that a COFFIN?'... I don't know what's wrong with me.

By the end of the day things looked like this:

In genuinely looks like we've done nothing, but honestly we did. A whole day of stuff! That's how bad it was in the first place. There is still a lot of stuff in there that needs to find its real home, like the bedside tables we found and still need to re-finish, loads of art work and boxes upon boxes (upon boxes) of CDs that need to be unpacked. 

This room used to be a little baby's room and looked much like this when we viewed the house for the first time:

It needs a bit of loving before we will be able to utilise it in the way we want to, as a study slash guest room. We need to paint the walls and the built in wardrobe doors, add curtains, clean carpets again and basically de-baby-fy it. Then the idea is put a desk in there and also bring in the sofa bed, that we are currently using as our main sofa, to house people who want to come and stay chez Hernandez-Stroud. We have a way to go yet. 

One thing that is troubling me is this:

Bit depressing, right? Bit prison cell. I'm not sure if that's just an incredibly small light fitting or if we need to find some kind of ceiling rose to cover up the lovely hole. 

Either way our guests will be starting up at it for a little while longer. Alongside sleeping on a blow up bed until made.com decide to deliver our sofa. I can already see people queuing up to stay in such luxury. 

Runner Running

I found a runner for our hallway in Ikea.

You really can't fault them for stuff like that. We needed something that wasn't going to get ruined by people traipsing in and out of the front door with wet/dirty/snowy shoes, so it needed to be hardy.

I looked at a few natural fibre one's like this Jute runner from Argos and this natural looking one from Ikea, but they just seemed a bit blah. A bit 'the same colour as the floor-ish'.

I saw this Andrup rug on the Ikea website and kind of dismissed it until I saw it in real life.

I thought it might look a bit hippy-ish (no offense to hippies) or like something I would have had in a student house, but actually it's really not. It's REALLY Scandinavian looking (shocker that it's from Ikea) and I think it really brightens up the predominantly white and grey hallway. And it was under £30. 

It's also 250cm long which is a bonus as our hallway is ridiculously long and most runners stop at 200cm. 

I like it. 

Matchbox

Here's something you can do when you are waiting for your computer to download a massive update that keeps on making it crash.

Cover a match box in Washi tape!

Oh yeah, I went there. I am now a crafter by default! I've got one of these Bjorkefall candlesticks from Ikea which is lovely, but I always leave a bit of a crappy pound shop lighter in the bottom of it for easy flaming. Can you see the crafting lightbulb moment?

I had a box of matches and some Washi tape and tadaa! Pretty matches!

Not exactly rocket science, but satisfying none the less. Big props to Washi tape!

PS The picture in the background is of me and Ben and it was drawn by the film director Michel Gondry! Cool no? He will draw you if you email him a picture! I bought it for Ben as birthday gift a few years back so it was a bit cheaper than the current $99.95 but it's a pretty cool keepsake. 

I look like a deformed Kelly Osborne. Here's the picture he took it from:

You can see a whole collection of them here. 

Decking The Hall

The hallway is shaping up nicely. Although we are so high on the intense VOC fumes from all the bloody glossing I've done that we might not be around much longer to appreciate it.

Word of advice, bannister railings take FOREVER to paint. Avoid them at all costs. I was basically weeping into my pot of white gloss on Saturday, desperate for the torture to be over. Thankfully it is now and all of the skirting boards and other wood work have been glossed in the hallway and on the landing.

We even put up my fake Eames (we have way too many knock-off Eames products) Hang-it-all. I got it on eBay for £45 back in October, as a treat to myself for nothing in particular. It's pretty sturdy but I'm not sure how my weight it can really take. Probably more form than function in this case. 

We also hung the mirror I mentioned I'd painted using the same tester pot I'd bought for my stool make-over. It used to be a flat white shabby-chic style mirror, but I've had it for about five years and it was basically just looking shabby without the chic element. It's scrubbed up nicely with a couple of coats of paint. 

Here's how it's looking from the top down. The pictures on the left are of Ponyo and Totoro, a couple of Japanese Anime cartoons I really like. 

We really need some kind of runner rug to make it look a bit cosier, but I've not found one I like yet. 

Postcards, Prints and PayPal

My god PayPal is a dangerous thing. Click, click, oops-I've-spent-loads-of-money-but-it's-virtual-and-I-didn't-have-to-enter-my-card-details-so-it-didn't-really-happen.  I swear the amount of mornings I'm surprised and confused as to what the post man has brought me is getting out of control.

Today was no different, although I have to press the point that I never really spend over £20 on impulse purchases. I have some kind of in-build stingy mechanism that makes me stop before I click 'purchase'. Anyway, this morning I bought some wicked little post cards and a print from Seventy Tree. It's a beautiful little online shop run by Kerry of the blog also named Seventy Tree. Kerry's prints are right up my street, loads of geometric patterns that totally appeal to the OCD side of me. I find great satisfaction in repeated patterns. I'm a bit like Rain Man, only not as good at counting. 

So this morning I bought the following three postcards at £1.50 a pop:

Mountain Green Postcard

Grey Drop Postcard

Hello Dala Postcard

Nice right? You see the tape that's in the bottom pic? That's Washi tape, it's another little obsession that's been bought on by reading blogs. Everyone is talking about it man, it's like the Sunny D of 2012. It's basically masking tape with pretty designs on it and it originated in Japan. I think a lot of crafters are in to it, but I really like the way Kerry uses it to tape pictures to the wall in non-permanent displays...and I am totally going to copy her once my postcards arrive FYI. I have no shame. 

I also bought this great A4 print for £12 in my little mid-morning spend-a-thon:

The City Fox

I'm going to frame him I reckon. To be honest he's a lot healthier looking than your average city fox (thinking the Crack Fox from Boosh) but I like him none-the-less. 

Looking forward to forgetting I bought these and receiving them in the post soon!

Love'ly Carpet

We are finally rid of the red carpet of doom on the stairs and landing!

Why would you choose red carpet? Seriously? The annoying thing was that it was basically brand new and also really nice and fluffy under foot. But it was red, so it had to go.

The hallway, stairs and landing still have a way to go yet. We threw up some white paint at the weekend and I primed the woodwork, but it all still needs glossing and a million and one other things like light fittings, art work and probably some wallpaper in the distant future.

Anywho, here's how things were looking this morning:

We ended up getting our carpet from a local place (called Love'ly Floor Coverings, I kid you not - why the hyphen?) that is literally at the end of our road. I debated going to John Lewis and Carpet Right, but ultimately these guys could do it 1) quickly 2) cheaply 3) love'ly and that's all we really wanted. The carpet choices in there are endless and they really knew what they were talking about. 

Although the original Red Devil was really cushy and soft it was actually wrong for a stairs and landing situation and it was flattening out because of the traffic and because of the way people run up and down stairs. Especially in period terraces like ours where the stairs are incredibly steep (like running up a wall a friend once said), so we went for a Twisted shorter pile that is made from Polypropylene and could hold out a bit more. You can really clean the hell out of it and it stays in good shape which is what we wanted, plus it's actually almost as cushy as the Old Red Slapper was so we're not loosing any comfort either. 

TADAA!

As you can see we went for a mid grey...it's a bit lighter than this in real life, but once again my iPhone failed me. Our underlay was in good nick so we didn't have to pay for that or any carpet grips (although we were quoted £50 for new underlay should the original not be worth keeping) which was a bonus, so the whole shebang including *removing and disposing of the Red Wonder cost  us £239. The carpet itself was £19 per sq/m which is relatively cheap and I think we needed about 9 sq/m for the stairs and landing.

*As a side note about the whole removal/disposal of the original carpet thing, we were a bit concerned as to what to do. Friends had said we could do it ourselves, but as we wanted to keep the underlay and the carpet grips we were worried we'd damage them some how. When I mentioned it to the guy in the carpet shop and he said they remove and dispose of old carpet for only £20 we went with that straight away. I guess it depends on your circumstances though. 

It was worth every penny in my opinion. It's so much lighter and brighter on the landing it's insane. 

Like I said, there is a way to go, but this is a massive change for the better! Plus it's the last huge change we need to make to the house for a while that is going to cost big bucks, which is a relief (we are ignoring the cracked tiles in the bathroom for now). 

Now I just need to paint the living crap out of the 'off white/we love a bit of a nicotine stained look' woodwork without painting the carpet. 

WHY GOD, WHY!?

Hello. I Love You.

Chairs are here!

I'm in love with them in a weird and creepy way!

Not only do they look amazing, but they are really comfy too! 

They arrived in two parts, but we just had to screw the legs on to the seat which took no time at all! They feel really sturdy, although I keep telling Ben to sit down on them softly because I'm scared he will hurt them. 

We went for the plastic option over the fibreglass for two reasons. One was just simply that this style chair with wooden legs only comes in plastic on bluesuntree.co.uk and I preferred the wooden legs to the metal. Secondly the plastic ones were a hell of a lot cheaper, I'm talking half the price. I was bracing myself as a friend had mentioned he'd seen some plastic and fibreglass replica chairs like these in a shop in London and he'd said the plastic one's looked really poor in the quality stakes. But these are wonderful in my opinion. 

Lovely stuff. 

Moderate Makeover - Home Edition

I did a little make over on a stool this weekend. I really enjoyed it and feel like I am a real blogger now because I can offer a before and after! Hooray for me.

Anyway, I found this stool at my local Salvation Army charity shop. It had some dubious stains which the man in the shop assured me I could just scrub out. Y'alright love. I also have to admit that even though the stool was priced at £8 I only paid £6. I haggled a charity shop. I am going to hell, but honestly I only had £6 on me in cash.

I had big plans to re-cover and paint this baby, so I popped to Ikea (yeah popped, it's like fifteen minutes away in Manchester) as I really like their graphic-y textiles.

I picked up a metre of this cool stuff that has hand drawn planks of wood on it for about £5. I was thinking about painting the rest of the stool white, but seriously, we can not have any more white things in our house, so I decided on dark grey and went home via B&Q. I grabbed a tester of Crown Flat Matt Emulsion in Herringbone. FYI that tiny 125ml tester pot covered two coats on my stool and also two coats on a mirror frame I'll show another day. Pretty good value for £3.25.

When I got home I unscrewed the top, cushiony part of the stool and laid it on the floor (stapling can be violent). Then I simply stapled the fabric tightly over it, leaving the old fabric in place. 

The corners were probably the trickiest bit, but they were still do-able. I sort of pulled them up and folded them under themselves, like I was wrapping a present (worst. description. ever).

And there you go, one re-upholstered stool seat. 

Next up for some make-over action was the base. It's made out of some kind of mock, MDF, plastic nastiness so I decided to prime it with some Dulux Ultra Grip primer before painting. Then I just applied two thin and even coats of my Crown emulsion paint and left it to dry for four hours. 

Et voila, once screwed back together again it's looking pretty slick if I do say so myself.

Clearly being snowed in makes me far more proactive than usual. 

I Win.

I'll shut up about this now I promise, but OMG, after the head of Customer Services called me yesterday, now this!

https://www.facebook.com/note.php?saved&&note_id=353785344641280&id=110119682334549

I feel like a MOVIE STAR. In a really gripping thriller about a girl from Manchester who complains about customer services. See it now!

That is all.

They Made.com Me Angry

You might have seen me ranting about this like a mad woman today if you follow me on my personal Facebook or Twitter accounts. Or you might have seen Ben also retweet-ranting like a social media affected mental patient,  because that's what we do. We take down the bad guys one tweet at a time. Because we are THAT GOOD (and cool). You heard.

If you dodged that bullet then it's about to hit you right in the face now anyway. Sorry.

This isn't a post about home improvement so much as about how important customer service is to the (stressed and poor) home improver.

Way back in November I posted about how we'd bought a sofa from a website called made.com. Back then I was a happy, carefree, naive girl about town who loved the idea of saving some money by purchasing an expensive item via a website who make lovely things cheap by making their products to customer demand. They have some wonderful customer testimonials on their site, their Facebook page is full of praise and links to new and beautiful furniture and they assure you on their website:

So we ordered the bloody sofa and were told that we had an estimated delivery date of the 21st of February. Fine, no probs, we new it would take a while as like they say on their site, items are made to customer demand. Come the end of January I checked the delivery date again. Still estimated. I tried to click through to the so called Real Time Tracking System they have in place for 'every step of the way', and it just took me back to their website. Ok, again no probs, I'll just ask them when they are able to confirm the delivery date so I know when this sofa is going to be: in my house for sure/ I can make sure I work from home/ we can move the current sofa we have. 

So I took to their fairly active Twitter account and asked them. (*As note here I just want to add that made.com don't have a phone number).

"@madedotcom Hi! I have an estimated delivery date for my sofa, I was wondering when this will be confirmed? It's currently estimated for the 21st Feb, so will I hear closer to the time? Thanks."

"@anahavana Please email contact@made.com, thank you"

Ok, well that's a bit annoying as surely at least try to answer my query, but whatever, I'll email you. 

So I emailed the same question, both from my email account and via their online contact form. I waited. I waited until closing time (5pm) and nothing. So I waited again this morning, surely they would be checking their customer emails first thing and drop me a quick like just to reassure me that they are looking in to it? Nada. 

Then I got pissed off. 

I know that email and social channels have made us all (or maybe just me) more impatient with response times and I know that I am guilty of being frustrated when people don't get back to me straight away via email. But this is a business! They have £900 of my money! They should check their fucking emails! Not only that but I could see that they'd been active on their Twitter and Facebook channels, so someone was obviously there checking them. So I tried Twitter again asking if they could reply to my email. Completely ignored. I tried a few more times. Again nothing apart from a tweet promoting a new item of furniture. So I tried Facebook. I wrote on their wall, they deleted it! I wrote on their wall again. Deleted straight away!

You what! Do you really want to anger this beast made.com? I'm a half spanish, red headed, Scorpio. I will basically murder you. 

So I emailed again, going a bit bonkers. I couldn't believe they were ignoring me! Then I went mad and I did this (you'll have to click on the image to enlarge):

I found that if I complained in their comments boxes they didn't delete them. So I copied the same complaint into every comment box I could see (with a bloody typo in it which is REALLY annoying and kind of takes away from the 'I'm taking you DOWN made.com' feeling of it all.)

But low and behold I suddenly received an EMAIL! Guess what. They were awfully sorry but our sofa is going to be delayed. They have no idea when it will get to me but it's not even getting to them until the end of February! Wow! So what was that about 'being in touch' when anything changes? Oh right that was a load of wishy washy bullshit for your site. 

I basically said as much in my reply to them. I also told them I would never shop with them again, yada yada. Within minutes another email came through (made.com in 'Suddenly Able To Email' shocker) offering me a £25 voucher if I wanted, as way of an apology. I said no thanks. Nothing on their site is less than £20 and I'd end up paying for P&P and waiting forever anyway. Plus I kind of had to stick to my guns about the 'never shopping with them again' thing. 

So there you have it. I was angry, our sofa is probably never going to get here and I've realised how far a simple tweet can go to appease a concerned customer. Let that be a lesson to you made.com.