Monday 21 January 2013

What to do on a snowy Sunday morning?

Move the furniture round in your bedroom, of course.  It was all the lovely boyf's idea and a damn fine one it was too.  There are only two options for our room, the bed sat facing the main window and the wardrobe sat to the side (you get a full height wardrobe but you lose one of the two available lights, which has been gently annoying us, especially in the winters) or to swap them around.  

This was option one...

So swap them we did, easier said than done.  Moving bedroom furniture can be, at the best of times, a pain; moving bedroom furniture in a 600 yr old cottage with walls, floors and ceilings that curve, slope and undulate, is a whole other challenge!  The bed could go nowhere but the other end of the room by the front window and the wardrobe then had to be moved to where the top of the bed was (the only other spot in the room tall enough and with enough space to then work), before it could be dismantled and put in place properly. Getting it there involved dragging it, tilted at various angles depending on the ceiling height, frequently getting it jammed and stuck on the ceiling and some swearing and tears (both mine!)   

Moving stuff in tiny places involves a little crazy, Megs was not amused.
Then we, I say we, it was the lovely boyf, but I did take the pictures, set to "adapting" the wardrobe to fit it's new home.  I say "adapted" because it sounds nicer than we chopped the drawers and legs off, which we did!  

Man plus saw =
this used to be drawers +
much, much shorter legs!
And whilst that was happening, I found that the top of the wardrobe was lined with some pretty funky wallpaper!
The architect of destruction... rather enjoying himself too.
Half an hour later, we have a new wardrobe... and to give you an idea of just how wonky our floors are, look at the legs, the difference is nearly 4".



Since moving to this house, I have come to love collecting old weights, they are perfect for leveling everything out.  We have the wardrobe at 3" just now, but will need to go shopping for more; we also need some for the bed, unless we want to sleep with our feet raised!


And that's it.  Our new room.  We will need to find a matching light for the other side of the bed and I am going to take the opportunity to paint the walls as I have a pot of Craig & Rose's Hemp Beige which I've been itching to use somewhere in the house.


I will need to find something to use as a bedside table, as it seems that I may have now stolen, rather than borrowed, the globe lamp (!), and then came the fun bit; finding new homes for all my bits and pieces...

I love the red of these Moroccan slippers.
And the space at the top of the wardrobe to display a few, normally, hidden things.
The Wedding Basket tucks nicely into the gap and makes a good bookshelf.
And it's pair sits at the other end of the room, a depository for the contents of the boyf's pockets! 
I also needed a new home for the picture frames, some sit on the window to the side and this one, one of my favorites of the 11yr old (when she was about seven, I guess), sits on the main windowsill with my Omani silver, my Grandmother's pomander pot (which still smells wonderful after what must be more than 40 years), and one of my memory boxes....  and, yes, constantly foggy windows are a fact of old, cold cottage life....



Finally, my Grandfather's card table, which sat at the end of our bed, needed a new home. Originally it came upstairs because the wood was too dark in contrast to our furniture downstairs but, with the addition of a couple of other pieces, it now works just fine.  


It is, as the decoration suggests, to be a drinks table, and a card table when I find the cards. I feel rather grown up, with a drinks table in the house!

And so, on a budget of nothing (the boyfs stipulation was that we could only spend money, eventually, on a new light and any weights we may need) we have a new room.  It certainly works much better; the bed is no longer near the cold outside walls and window; the full length mirror can be used properly as such and already it's brighter, as the wardrobe isn't blocking the one available light source.  Sleeping with my head to the hallway wall felt a little odd, rather like there was space behind my head, not solid wall, but that's just my crazy talking. The room feels much lighter and airier which, as my old amah Chan would have said, is because the feng shui is "Good!" (not easy in our house) so I'm expecting lots of lovely nights' sleep!  

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