Getting set for a cozy winter snuggling up

We've moved the siting room round to make it feel more cosy, we've got the stereo set up, I have blankets a plenty and now we're going to have an open fire too. It's over a year since we made the fireplace look a bit nicer and now, finally we got the chimney swept.

Here is the very nice A J Coles with a well earned cup of tea after using his giant Henry style hoover to suck out all the sooty stuff. Luckily for us, he gave us the all clear to have an open fire without needing any repair work for the chimney.

Now all we need is a suitably lovely fire basket - seems like a job for Stephen Lloyd to me!

Song of Reproduction

We've been on holiday so that's why we've been quiet for a while. But the holiday has given us time to plot House of Love changes and the first comes in the shape of a sitting room shuffle.

We want to have our stereo in the sitting room, rather than tucked away in the music room, so that we can listen to music when people come over and they'll think we're still young and trendy and that we don't just listen to Radio 4 ALL THE TIME*

So even though I measured everything very accurately I forgot about the poorly laid and pointless second skirting board. So that had to come up!

Hammond and bureau switch-a-roo!

and now I can listen to Flanders and Swann! Oh yes, this is our second F&S themed post; I told you we were actually young and trendy!

P.s. the post title come from a song title off the first record we listened to on our new Hi-fi set up. You need to listen to it to understand - it's not about sex; get your minds out of the gutter people!

*We also sometimes listen to 6music, which by the way has a very amazing playlist.

Keep on boarding

Jon's keeping up the good work and adding a few more loft boards in the evenings. What a trooper!

Hasn't he done a lot!

Garden wish-list

I think I'm going to change the garden a bit. This summer it's been more than I can manage and I'm not going to be getting a whole heap of extra time anytime soon. We also want to make it a bit more future proof. So while John and Jon lofted, the Mothership cleared away all my salad crops that had shot to no good.

With a newly cleared space I thought it was time to have a think about my wish-list for the garden.

• Space to eat and sit outside, at the moment if we have people over it feels very cramped.
• Space for lying in the sunshine on a picnic blanket - I still don't like grass though, so maybe a flowering lawn.
• Veg beds that are easier to maintain and keep weed free, maybe it's time to look at square foot gardening?
• Better use of the back bit of the garden where the shed used to be.
• Throwing out all the old pots I don't need, but keeping the little ones that are vital for seedlings.

With this in mind Mum Guthrie has dedicated part of her garden in the Warwickshire countryside to a clover lawn nursery. 

Going up!

We've got a loft. This is amazing. It means we have extra storage. In our dreams our loft would become  a glamourous penthouse master bedroom with en suite and balcony. But as with many things in the House of Love, our dreams are so far away it's best to think a bit more practically. There's a lot of space in our loft but no boarding, which means if you miss your footing, you come through the ceiling. Not very healthy and not very good financially, as we don't have accidental damage insurance. 

So, cue John Pass and a load of loft boards.

Look at all the junk and insulation in our loft!

Imagine what a lovely bedroom this could make if only we had a spare £40 thou or so (take note wealthy benefactors and rich long lost relatives).

Me and Mum come to inspect the work.

A well earned cup of tea

Oh yeah, Jon helped too. He looks a bit like a crazy serial driller killer in this photo.

And he found a coffee table! We just need to give it a sand down, maybe a lick of paint and some legs.

Sorting the Sofa situation

For a while our lovely yellow sofa has been getting more and more tatty. This in itself isn't a problem in the House of Love; tatty has become part of our style. But I have been yearning for a sofa on which I can fully lie down. So much so in fact that it's pretty much all I think about in the evenings, how much this comfy sofa would make my life infinitely better. So, we saved up enough money to buy a brand new, really good sofa. But we had one major problem; that narrow doorway. Even sofas with removable arms and legs weren't going to fit through a 58cm wide doorway, followed by a narrow corridor AND be super comfy and snugly and long enough for me to lie out on completely.

Step up Ikea. Yes, we caved and went flat pack. So ok, maybe it won't be the classic, hard wearing, super beautiful dream sofa we'd been planning for but it did fit though our door and it is so comfy I could even spend a night on it if we had a mega family visit.

Bonus 1: washable removable covers, which is going to become more and more useful.
Bonus 2: it was only 450 quid so we've got enough money left from sofa saving to have an extra weekend away in a hotel before Christmas.

Clearing the way for the new sofa

adding the legs

putting on the covers

screwing on the back

stuffing the cushions

Tamsin and Camilla came round to borrow the drill, perfect timing to help us position the sofa

sorting out the scatters

All this means we now have a spare yellow 2 seat sofa, free to anyone who wants it!

Lamp-post

We got another Anglepoise! My dad got this somewhere and brought it on the bus to me at work.

It's another red one but I don't mind. This does make us a 4 Anglepoise lamp household, but I think there are probably worse things to be.