TV Drama

This is a post about a rarely seen corner of our living room - where the TV lives.

It's no surprise it's rarely seen, given that that corner is fugly.

Please, by all means, take a look (Spring Watch is on the TV by the way):

If you ignore the Sex and the City/The Wire DVDs on the floor you will see it's basically loads of black stuff sat inside a dark thing with a big TV on top. Given that the rest of our living room is white it sticks out like a sore thumb. 

Not only that, but our beige fireplace (that we are living with until we win the lottery) demands that the size of whatever replacement TV unit we find is restricted to 95cm wide. 

I hate the whole set up though. Inside the current unit (which is just an old Ikea Expedit we used as a bookshelf in our old house) is a home cinema system with 6 speakers, a sub woofer, our Virgin Media box and our rooter. They all kind of need to be in that area, and obviously the speakers should really be spread around the room for surround sound, but the whole effect just screams bachelor pad to me. I'm not exactly a flowers and hearts girl, but too much shiny black stuff annoys me. Plus it makes the whole corner so dark.

Ideally we would find a unit that holds most of the stuff that can be hidden (router/home cinema) with some kind of shelf that could hold the bits that need to be seen to be used and then enough space on top for the TV. But can I find anything that's not a horrid glass 'media unit' or  £300+ or under 95cm wide? Nein. 

And then there's the colour issue. Do we go white so match the other built in storage cupboard in the room? Do we go vintage wooden? Do we go space age? I literally have no idea. 

Halp. 

V is for Vampire

An example of why I don't have any money. I buy overpriced cards on the internet and then forget. It's been another fun post day. 

To be fair though, I already had the frame and £4.50 is (a huge price to pay for a card) a small price to pay to entertain my strange, vampire obsessed boyfriend. Also, cheap art yo! The frame was £3.99 from Ikea and had been neglected because the mount board is a slightly different colour to the other two frames I'd bought with it (which were for some more cool art I was given by my lovely friend Nat). So be wary of that Ikea lovers. 

Turns out I also bought this. I think I might have ordered these the day I dropped a speed bomb and started up my new smack habit. 

Mirror Mirror

I didn't notice just how bloody vain I was until we moved house and didn't have any mirrors on the walls. I found myself checking myself out in my iPhone screen, oven and random car windows more than I'd like to admit. So as soon as we repainted the hallway I put up a mirror I'd had since my house sharing days, so I could finally gaze at myself in glorious technicolor before leaving the house. 

It's alright. It used to be white shabby chic and I painted it a dark grey in an attempt to make it fit in more to the current white/grey/depression chic thing we've got going on at the moment. But the thing was I loved my (fake) Eames Hang It All more and that mirror just didn't go with it. 

Anyway, a few weeks ago I was having a look around the downstairs bit of Pop Boutique (a nice little vintage clothing and home ware place that's not whacked up its prices too high) and came across a teak harp mirror that had the whole Danish thing going on. As you can see from the picture below, I bought it. 

As you can also see, we are back to iPhone pictures. 

Anyway, it was £30, which although not exactly pocket change, the thing is real teak! Any because it is real teak it's insanely heavy. So it sat on the floor in front of the radiator for approximately three weeks whilst I built up the courage to hang it on our crappy plaster board walls. 

I eventualy went to B&Q with a view to buying some hard core rawlplugs and screws to keep that bitch nailed to wall. Instead, I came out with these Nylon Self Drill things. They had me at 'self drill' because I HATE getting out our current crappy Argos basic drill. I long for a Black & Decker cordless. Anyhow, you basically just screw them into the wall (they are specifically for plasterboard walls btw) and there you go. I used 4 of them in a row because I was scared and the mirror was heavy. I don't think they are really recommended for extremely heavy items, but the 4 screws I used have kept the mirror on the wall for over a week now so I've got my fingers crossed. 

Duck!

I'm trying to write a post about painting our front gate, but I am losing the will to live. Fast. That and the fact that it's raining (shocker) so I can't get an 'after picture'. The blogging gods are against me today.

Instead I'll show you my duck lamp:

He's not new or anything, Ben gave him to me for Christmas a couple of years ago, but I figured he deserved some screen time. He's from a cool little shop in Manchester called Oklahoma. Better than a gate any day.