cornerbycorner.co.uk

I think the experience of emptying out the kitchen wardrobe may have gone to my head. It was really incredibly soothing to find I could empty an entire piece of furniture into the house, and then dispose of it (it sold on ebay today! I’m hoping the winner will come and take it off my hands in a matter of days) and find I could create space, seemingly out of nothing. Like when you arrive home after Christmas with a car full of luggage and presents, then put all the things you’ve gained into their proper places, the suitcases and bags are finally empty, and the house seems to sigh a little breath of relief.

So I turned my attention to an offending corner of our front room.

There we have it. There are several problems with the current set-up. One being that the lower shelves of the bookcase are totally inaccessible. One being the fact that our bin lives on top of the Trofast Ikea storage unit. It moved up there one day when India was newly mobile and I came into the front room to find she’d found the bin, and tipped it over, and was chewing something from it happily. But the main problem is because the bookshelves are so hard to get to, the girls climb up the sofa, stand on the arm precariously, and leaf through the available books to choose one they want. They do this in spite of my having created a floor level book basket, the contents of which I vet and rotate. Nope. No interest. Straight onto the sofa arm for my budding gymnasts.

So I turned my eye to the Trofast and decided that something had to go, and it would be first. Stupidly, I had this thought before I’d even contemplated blogging about it. So you can quite clearly see in this picture that the drawers are empty. But you’ll have to believe me when I say that they were full of stuff. Nappies, mis-matched pyjamas, swim nappies, about three different types of nappy cream. All sorts. But I was unafraid. The girls were romping the garden. Oli was mowing the lawn. I saw my window of opportunity, rolled up my sleeves, and got stuck in.

And here is all the stuff I cleared out. One carrier bag of stuff for Rosa’s room, one for India’s room, and some random other items that will go elsewhere. Note, if you will, the three ‘nearly empty’ bottle of Oilatum. Because obviously, when you nearly reach the end of a bottle or tube, the sensible thing is to move on to the full one….

But that is as nothing compared to the ‘nappy change / post bath stuff’ basket that I pared this little lot down to…

Yup, that’s it. From that entire Trofast unit down to this little basket (I do love baskets) which can live in our dresser. I decided early on that really all we needed was a small amount of nappy change paraphernalia, and everything else could go elsewhere. I won’t try to describe my feelings when I edited more than two carrier bags’ worth of things down to this, but you will have to believe me when I say that for a moment my troubled soul was very VERY soothed.

Which leaves us here. The Trofast (so handy! So cheap! And yet…. not really very attractive looking) has been consigned to the basement where its utilitarian capaciousness will be turned to organising our DIY stuff. The bin – controversially – has been moved to the floor. It is still entirely possible that India will try to eat and/or play with whatever is in it, but I suppose we will have to brazen it out, just like we do with the Christmas tree every year. (We’ve always had a Christmas tree, and I’ve always put one up no matter how mobile and curious and strong the girls were, just because I believed we should have one, and believed – against all available evidence – that I could keep it upright and the decorations intact simply by force of will. It has kind of worked so far. But there’s always next year….)

It’s not really an after picture, as you can see several problems remaining. The principal of which is the bookcase itself, which was one of Oli and my first purchases when we moved in together. It was the cheapest bookcase we could find, and appears to be fashioned of wood-effect corrugated cardboard, held together with staples. It needs to go. And that pile of magazines and sticker books on top needs throwing away editing. My plan is to get a bookcase for the alcove on the other side of the chimney breast, which means all the children’s books can go in there, leaving me with a question mark about what goes here long-term. I will still need some storage for board games, and puzzles, and etc. And frankly I am a believer in future-proofing storage, which is to say you should always wherever possible buy a bit more than you need, partly in case you carry on getting more stuff (just, say) and partly so that you can arrange what you do have in a relaxed and pleasing manner, rather than shoving it all in tightly and getting stressed about it.

We can move the sofa over a bit more to the left than it is here, which gives us a few more options. So I was wondering about some kind of coffee table with storage underneath? Something a bit like this, maybe? Not the most beautiful thing, but look at the storage potential! I have been admiring the ottomans with storage inside them at Young House Love, and wondering if this might be the answer? Who knows. I will ponder it. For the moment, though, the Trofast is outoutout, and I am feeling wonderfully soothed. Not bad for half an hour’s work.

It was only in my last post that I was planning all manner of sensible (ok, very slightly frivolous, but largely sensible) things to do with my kitchen-wardrobe-cupboard corner.

There it is again, in case you’d forgotten how random it’s looking at the moment. And since that post, I have very sensibly finished clearing out the wardrobe, and even listed it on ebay. I really wasn’t joking about getting rid of it. If you want it, let’s talk. And of course I have been mentally rehearsing my plans for the newly empty corner, which include a magnetic blackboard painted onto the wall, some children’s art display space, some stuff up on the walls, and even a low-level spice rack-come-bookcase for some low-level reading material for the girls to ignore as they empty the cleaning cupboard / rip up my recipe books.

Image from X2 Connect

But earlier this week I was reading the Times property section, as you do, and my eye fell upon an article about BT selling off a fresh batch of their original phone boxes. Curses to the Times paywall: I can’t link to the article here, and I refuse out of a sense of moral duty to link to where the same story was featured in the Daily Mail. So you’ll have to take my word for it. Or look at X2 Connect Telecom Solutions’ website here.

I have a real soft spot for red phone boxes. I like to think it’s a very hip, knowing thing where I am very fond of all manner of iconic pieces of British imagery because they fit in with my quirky decorating style. And it’s true that there may be a grain of truth in this. But I fear it might mainly be old-fashioned nostalgia. Or an abiding fondness for the colour red.  Whatever it is, it is definitely the case that these phone boxes are a piece of British history, and pretty damn cool to boot. And for only £2000-ish, really something of a bargain. (Before you scoff, remember you are talking to the woman who, when she heard they were selling off old Routemasters for three grand, engaged in a semi-serious conversation with a friend about where on earth you could keep one, if you were to invest…)

So once again, I was sitting at the kitchen table, and was reflecting on how great old-fashioned phoneboxes are as I read the article. And I thought to myself, “Yes, but where on earth would I put one?” when suddenly, in a strange echo of what happened last time, my eyes were lifted from the Times property section to my erstwhile wardrobe corner.

And for a moment, I really believed it could happen. I thought to myself, “Yes! We could totally do this! The kitchen already has a red print up on the wall. When we redecorate, it could be a monochrome kitchen with a few red accents, one of which would be our very own phone box! Only two grand – surely it could only appreciate in value?! It would be an investment of the very smartest kind. We could put frosted window film up on the glass, and use it to solve the under-stair cupboard dilemma. It would be the coolest, most iconic storage solution that our hoover and ironing board have EVER seen! When our house is featured in Living Etc, the editor would pull out our ‘phone box kitchen cupboard’ in her letter at the front of the magazine, swooning over how much she loved it, and commenting that our sense of style and humour epitomised all that was best about british interiors!”

And then I woke up.

It is a pretty cool idea, though, isn’t it?

Ah well. One day, in my fantasy home….

I have been a bit under the weather recently. But I knew I was getting better when I suddenly raised my head from the kitchen table, looked directly across the room and had a bit of a eureka moment, “I know what we need to do with that corner!” I said, determinedly. Oli, who is used to these kind of random interjections, knew better than to question. Very wisely, he settled for, “Great. What?” as his response. Good option.

Because this particular corner of the kitchen has been bugging me for some time. There it is in the picture above. That piece of art is a footprint painting Rosa and I did last summer, in a flurry of painty activity one sunny afternoon inspired by some welly-boot painting over here. That cream thing is not just a random box, but a ‘funpod’, which I found second-hand for £30 and was powerless to resist. And that hideous orange thing…. yes, that is indeed a wardrobe. Bear with me….

You see, our house has no under-stair cupboard. It was only when we first found ourselves without one that I truly started to appreciate the vital role that the under-stair cupboard has in promulgating harmony and peaceable living. Without one, all manner of unattractive-looking household objects just lie about the place, periodically tripping people up, and making a nuisance of themselves. In our second flat, without an under-stair cupboard, the broom, mop and bucket all lurked clumsily behind the kitchen door, where they would every now and then feel ignored and fall over with a clatter to draw attention to themselves. The hoover was reduced to sitting beside the sofa, patient and ugly, like a dog waiting to be fed. It drove me mad.

Here, we have no under-stair cupboard for what I will conceded is a very pleasant and spoilt reason. That reason being a basement! Now naturally, a basement holds far, far more storage potential than a humble cupboard.
And yet. And yet. Does one want to trek all the way down to the basement in order to retrieve the dustpan and brush? Frankly, no. Does the hoover with all its Dyson-patented electrical whizzery really want to live down in the (very slightly damp) basement? Again, no. So here we have a kitchen with a problem.

I pondered it for a while, and I really did think that this wardrobe, slightly unpredictably, might be the answer. There is apparently no such thing as a tall cupboard any more. I even found a furniture site which told me as much, slightly apologetically, as I was searching. But a wardrobe, I thought, if just a single one, could be small enough to sit in the corner, yet capacious and tall enough to hold mop, bucket, broom, dustpan, brush, and maybe even the hoover! I thought I could paint it white or cream, and perhaps do something else (I was getting a bit vague here) to hide its Narnia-ish-ness. So to ebay I went, and the wardrobe was mine.

That was some time ago. And sadly, the flash of inspiration that hit me so suddenly while the girls were engaged in painting their faces blue and hamming it up for the camera meaningful artistic activity, was that this piece of furniture was not working for me in any way. In spite of being in a kitchen, and full of under-stair cupboard things, it retained, stubbornly, an almost hilariously wardrobe-ish air. As if we had a lodger living in our kitchen who might appear at any moment, strip off, and start rummaging in it for a clean shirt. But worse than this, I realised it was not at all functional as a piece of furniture, as it had actually started to ATTRACT stuff rather than corral it.

I can’t be alone in having noticed this tendency? Some pieces of furniture, or storage, are a solution. They minimise rubbish, adding organisation and peace to justify the space they take up. Others are like a big beacon for tat, attracting every stray receipt, every lone shoe, each floating pen, endless piles of ‘just needs sorting’ letters, every weekend supplement that I surely-must-have-saved-for-a-reason-but-what-could-that-reason-be? You see those bags of icing power and the small pots up on top of it? That was taken AFTER I’d had my epiphany, and after I’d emptied it. Even empty, it still Attracts Things. I looked at my trusty kitchen wardrobe with suddenly murderous eyes as I figured out that – particularly since the goddamn hoover never even fitted in it – I could accommodate everything in it elsewhere in the house. Specifically, I could put some hooks up on the wall beside the stairs down to the basement, I could hang the mop, bucket, dustpan, and broom there. And then I could Get Rid of the wardrobe.

And then I realised, I could use the space it vacated to create a proper solution for displaying the children’s art that is creeping around our house in a steady march of unidentifiable paint blobs. I could take down the ‘painty footprints’ piece that has been up for longer than I care to think, and use the space rather better.

Because for ages I was very taken with frames like these ones, where you can drop pictures in and out. Or perhaps something like this. Or this. I had beautiful plans for something very tasteful and lovely. Chic and assured. Parentally indulgent, yet also artistic. Something which said, ‘I have children, but I still have taste.’

But then in a rare moment of clarity, I thought, ‘What if the art your children bring home isn’t A4? What if it’s shaped like a butterfly? Or it’s often A2? Or it’s a cereal box with an empty fruit punnet lovingly masking-taped on top and won’t fit any of the frames you’ve purchased / spray-painted / otherwise invested scarce time and energy into?  What then?’

So when I saw this on the fab Apartment Therapy I was instantly smitten. Yes, I thought. I could hang three of those Ikea curtain rails on the wall behind where the wardrobe currently is, and move all the children’s paintings / drawings which are currently all over the fridge. ‘AND THEN!’ I thought (because this is the kind of dramatic interior dialogue I have with myself when the girls are throwing paint at each other, and Oli is washing up) ‘AND THEN! I could move the funpod into the corner, and use up the rest of my magnetic blackboard paint,by painting the girls a low-level blackboard, turning what was ugly-wardrobe corner into a kind of children’s art corner.’

When I remembered that I have a rather lovely white, frame that we got for Christmas, and which I’ve been hanging onto because I hoard frames because I was looking for the right place for it to go, I knew it was all falling into place. The frame could, of course, go on the right-hand wall, where the ironing board is currently.

So what next? Well, a trip to Ikea is evidently in order. Such a fun, relaxing place to go of a weekend, after all. We need to sell the wardrobe (does anyone want it? I am not at all joking. We’re in East London). I need to dig out my pot of magnetic chalkboard paint, probably discover it’s all dried up, and buy some more. Oh, and of course I need to undercoat and gloss the backdoor and the bay window. Not to mention getting the whole kitchen redecorated at some point to disguise the very classy ‘damp proof course’ look we have going on at the moment, what with the bare plaster to waist height.

But the important thing is that now I Have A Plan. Not having plans annoys me. More on that in a future post….

Not more stuff up on the walls? I think I might be on a roll.

Actually, I tell a lie. I think my sister might be on a roll. She made us these rather wonderful personalised pictures, and I am so in love with them that almost the second she walked through the door holding the folder that contained them, I ripped it out of her hands, put them into their frames, and put them up on the wall that night.

The idea is that you provide her with a list of things you like, and she turns it into these amazing pictures. (If you like the look of this, she has very enterprisingly set up an Etsy shop here.) There is much to be pleased at here. First of all the fact that there is lots of lettering, something that I have long loved on anything. The personalisation is naturally also very pleasing. But I only realised when I kept reading mine and smiling, how nice it is just to have a list of lovely things up on the wall.

This picture above means you can read more of the things we chose. My favourite ones are India’s love of ‘DANCING (TURNING AROUND LOOKING PLEASED)’, my ‘THINGS IN THE SHAPE OF STARS’, Oli’s ‘WINNING THINGS’ and Rosa’s ‘CONKERS AND PEBBLES’. I am also very happy that the girls’ pictures will function as a bit of a snapshot of who they are right now, and their current preoccupations. Doubtless it will only be a very short period of time before they find them incredibly babyish and humiliating… but isn’t it my role to humiliate them, really?

I haven’t ever put pictures up as a geometric block before, and the square-ness of the formation is a nice feature, particularly right by the front door which is panelled, with frosted glass with clear lines, so there are a lot of lines and right angles round there.

They are hanging right by the front door so that you can read them as you’re coming in. I like how they function as a visual key to who lives here: This is our house. These are the things we like. Come on in and have a cuppa.

Sometimes when I am contemplating the gap between our-house-in-my-head, and our-house-as-it-is, I feel a bit depressed by it. I then often go and sit on the sofa, half-watching trashy TV, half-surfing the net with the laptop. It’s a very mature, grown-up way to deal with things.

Other times, I remind myself of the ‘little by little’ mentality that made me start this blog, so I get on and do something. This was one of those times.

Little by little, I am trying to build up the Stuff we have up on the walls of the house. I have always been rather distrustful of people who immediately fill their walls. (See also people who ‘do up’ their houses too quickly.) Obviously this is not in any part due to jealousy at people who take a shorter time than aeons to do things. No, no, no. It is all part of a carefully worked-out philosophy which says that your house should be full of things you love, and your walls should be covered with things you love. And in most cases, when you have a job, and preschoolers hanging off your legs shouting, “Mummy! Mummy!”, finding things you love, and locating frames for them, and then putting them together in pleasing groups, and then trying to remember where you put the blasted picture hooks, and then trying to find a time when the children aren’t asleep, but also aren’t hanging off your legs shouting, “Mummy! Mummy!”…. well, these things all take time. So although the walls of our house were resolutely empty for a long time, I consoled myself that it takes time.

To a certain extent this is true. I did a lot of displacement activity during this time. Primarily pinning, and ripping out of magazines any pictures I ever saw of a wall full of frames. Because I just LOVE walls full of frames. I also did a lot of buying empty frames, and promising myself I would fill them with lovely things. The empty frames pile was leaning precariously in a corner of the study.  It got bigger, and bigger. So it was pretty obvious that this was where things were headed.

I put some stuff up in the hall, but I think there’s space for more. And that’s when I found these.

That’s a box of 100 postcards. I mean, just look at how cool the box is. That alone was almost enough to sell it to me.

But look! There are a hundred of them. One hundred. 100. Not to mention the lovely ribbon that the box has so you can get them out. I found them in Foyles for £14.99 and in spite Oli and I having agreed very seriously together that it is the Age of Austerity, and we have to stop making frivolous purchases, I marched straight up to the till and bought them. Along with one or two other things. Ahem.

But look! One hundred. Did I mention there are a hundred? Now, obviously in an ideal world one would have an entire huge room filled with original Penguin books. With wall to wall shelving, and a librarian’s ladder on wheels. But in the absence of such a room, it strikes me that this little box of book covers is a highly responsible purchase.

I spent a few happy moments riffling through them. Then I spent a happier moment in the basement realising that one of my empty frames was a multi-aperture one where the apertures were exactly the right size for the postcards. Then I spent a few more happy moments whittling my selection down to three.

I am not sure whether these ones will stay forever. I quite like the idea of changing them frequently. But for the moment, the selection makes me smile because they refer to the people in our house.

And here they are in situ. Apologies for the really appalling photos. I will replace them once we get some natural light. So probably some time in May….. You can just about see that although the frames in the hall don’t match, they are a mix of light-coloured wood. And one clippit frame, like a lone relic from the 90s. The rest of the stuff in the hall includes framed hand and footprint-impressions of both girls when they were babies, a print from Not on the High Street which says, ‘Raising kids is part joy, and part guerilla warfare’, a print of Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’, and a picture I made for Oli for Christmas of all of our handprints inside one another. Not an original idea, but a rather lovely one, I thought. It was his present from the girls. Oh, and a stained glass star of which I am pleased to say, ‘I bought from a local artist‘. Just because saying that makes me sound like someone else. Not like the kind of person who normally says either, “I got it from Ikea.”

And here it is again.

Obviously framing three postcards and putting them on the wall does not a finished house make. But it’s one more small step, isn’t it?

Has re-organising half of one cupboard ever been more thoroughly hyped?!

Yup. Here is it. The results of my mini-makeover. All the stuff I’d ordered arrived, and yesterday evening I put it all together, took everything out, and put it all back again. I felt very soothed.

So did the plan come together? Yes, in general. The muffin tray cups did not work as well as I’d hoped. I can’t figure out whether this is because of the design of the cups, or a problem with the magnetic stick-on stuff, or just because it was a slightly silly idea in the first place.

Basically, the lovely Ikea cups are not completely flat on the base, but have a small ‘lip’ running all the way around. This means that when I’ve cut out a circle of sticky magnetic sheet, it sits inside the lip, and therefore doesn’t touch the muffin tray, and, er, therefore doesn’t really stick. I did try cutting out another circle and sticking two together, in case that helped. It didn’t.

So I just placed the rest of the cups into the tray, and only time will tell if this is going to be helpful or not. The thing that should really help is storing all those crayons and things vertically. And what do I take from this picture, other than the fact that it’s horribly grainy (sorry) because it turns out that the cupboard corner of my front room is like a black hole, sucking all the natural light out of a sunny day, and funnelling it somewhere far away from my camera?

Well, I can probably safely stop buying boxes of crayons. Which is a helpful realisation in itself, and should stop a few un-necessary panic purchases in the future!

I am also pleased by the fact that there are two cups empty. I know it’s not aesthetically pleasing, but I find few things more frustrating than new storage which is instantly full, and therefore not future-proofed. Supposing I find some new wonderful drawing product tomorrow, for an amazingly bargainous price? I can buy it, safe in the knowledge that the blue and green cups are sitting empty; expectant and hopeful for just such a purchase.

The shoe-holder is a measured success until I attach it to the door in a more secure fashion. I put it up using the metal over-door hangers it came with, but I am definitely still planning to get some velcro Command strips and to fix it using those instead. The over-door hangers are far too rattly (and will almost certainly result in the whole thing being pulled off by over-excited hands very soon) not to mention that they show on the front of my lovely bureau when the door is closed, and might even scratch it. Not acceptable.

But on the other hand, cutting a large shoe-hanger down to size was almost hilariously easy. I literally just chopped it up with scissors, then hemmed it back up again. I shortened the top, and cut down the size of the pockets by just hacking across, by eye, with a pair of scissors. There are only a couple of things in there at the moment, but  I think I’ll put more in as India gets older and a bit more reliable. Probably some reasonably front room-safe sticking materials: Pritt-stick, a box of googly eyes, some foam shapes. That sort of thing. The kind of material that walks that fine line between being exciting to the under fours, but also having limited ability to completely trash the room in an irreparable way.

And I do love the letter-trays. Having the paper, in particular, accessible, and able to be pulled out, without dislodging an entire teetering pile, is fabulous. Currently the top tray is for paper, and the bottom one is for scribbling colouring books.  I think I might even get another one, so we can have one tray for paper, one for colouring books, and one for stickers. I also plan to glue the trays together (is this the excuse I have been looking for to purchase a glue gun?) , to make sure that keen little grabbing hands don’t dislodge them.

You might notice the butterfly oversize pencil-case next to the trays. This contains the felt-tip pens. Putting them here is something of a risk. I am basically risking the future of my sofas on the overall chance that India probably won’t figure out what’s in it, and probably won’t grab it and open it up speculatively. Hmmm. Even just typing out those words is making me feel a bit nervous. I might take a break from posting, and move it…

And what’s that on the floor? Well, I realised that the magnetic doodle-pad, if it’s going to be accessible, would have to be either on a shelf on its own, which would be a monstrous waste of space, or somewhere else. So I put it somewhere else, which is to say on the floor. Problem solved.

And there you have it. My re-organised cupboard. Now, what next?

Here is the dresser that sits in the corner of our front room.

I love this dresser. It cost me about £60 on ebay (and, ahem, about £140 to physically get it here. But let’s gloss over that). I know that dark wood has been a bit unfashionable. But I love it. It’s not an antique. But it’s old, and it’s solid, and it has a faintly respectable look about it. I knew it was ‘meant to be’ when I measured the alcove at the side of the chimney breast and realised it would fit in perfectly, with just a few centimetres spare on each side. It made a huge difference to our front room, lending at once a certain air of grown-up glamour, and simultaneously some much-needed storage and display space. Note, if you like, the cups and saucers from my grandmother’s tea set, the mirrored star, the ‘crystal ball’ and the by-now traditional empty photoframe…

But here is the problem. Let me introduce you to the inside of the cupboard.

Look at that. This is the place where the girls’ drawing stuff resides. We had previously tried putting it in a basket in the Expedit unit. That was spectacularly un-useful, since all the paper kept getting scrumpled up whenever either of them leant into it to retrieve something. Besides, after the offical toy-explosion of Christmas, we needed an empty basket to put more plastic into. Craft stuff lives in the kitchen, in plastic lidded boxes, which (whilst they don’t delight me) certainly do the job. Drawing stuff I wanted to be more accessible.

Hence the problem. Nothing about this cupboard is currently working. And up until recently, not being able to think of a solution for it was throbbing away on my conscience, bugging me. Let’s draw a little closer, shall we? – just to recap on the things that are going wrong here.

Take a look at that top shelf. Hands up if you can imagine the tin of crayons, the flashcards, and the pencil case coming crashing out any time that either Rosa or India decide they want to use the Megasketcher? Yup. There is a basic principle here, which is that stuff in piles definitely doesn’t work for the under 4s. Let’s be honest, it may not work for older children, either. I’ll report back. For the moment, though, I can definitely confirm that the law of piles dictates that whatever is at the bottom of the pile, no matter how studiously it’s previously been ignored, will suddenly take on a new aura of attractiveness, and will be grabbed and yanked.

And there’s the bottom shelf. Note the hotchpotch of paper (crumpled), colouring books, a just-seen box of crayons peeking out on the right hand side, a barely visible corner of a Gruffalo pencil case on the left. Given how chaotic and unappealing all this stuff is, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the girls aren’t keener on drawing.

In summary, then. This cupboard is not functioning for me (it creates mess) or for the girls (who just trash it periodically, in bored way, then move on). It is, in the immortal words of William Morris, neither beautiful nor useful. So it has to change.

But I have a plan! Oh yes. It all started when I saw a picture online of a muffin tray with cups in, to store arty materials for children. I pinned it onto Pinterest, naturally (that’s just the kind of rock ‘n’ roll life I lead) and I pondered it. And it occurred to me that if stacking was part of the problem, storing stuff in such a way that the girls could retrieve things easily might be part of the solution.Then I wondered: what about office-style filing trays for drawing paper? And then it hit me that I’d seen another useful solution for cupboards, and pinned that, too, here.

It was around this time that I started rubbing my hands together in the manner of a cartoon villain. Ok. Not really. But I thought that I might have a way forward.

So my mental list of supplies to get looked something like this:

• muffin tray
  “Do you know the muffin man?…” And, more pertinently, do you think I could spray paint a muffin tray? There is a fine line here between making something look beautiful, and insanity, I fear.

• self-adhesive magnetic sheet
  I prayed that this wouldn’t end up being one of those strange craft materials common in the US but unknown over here, and the great gods of ebay answered my prayers, and it was so.

• cups
  Ah, IKEA. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. And ah, the wonder of ebay meaning that for only a small premium you can find the cups you were after and pay someone to post them to you rather than having to drive to Edmonton.
  

• shoe holder
  (I started to read the instructions for making your own… but I found they made me feel a little weary. I know the author stresses how easy it is, and how she rushed her holder out whilst her child was napping. But I find sometimes reading words like ‘sew bias tape along the top edges’ makes me want to sit down for a while. So I thought I’d buy a cheap one here and see if I could chop it up and sew it back together to make it fit. Turns out I was right. More on that in a later post.)

• command hooks
  to hang up shoe holder. I am not drilling holes in my lovely dresser. That is the end.

• letter trays
  This was a little bit harder than I’d thought. My criteria were ‘must be jolly’ (a surprisingly useful life-rule), and ‘must stack together by themselves and not have little metal risers that could be knocked under the sofa and annoy me’. But I got there.
  

So now all of these things are currently either sitting in my house awaiting deployment, or are winging their way to me. I am really quite dis-proportionately excited.

But here’s the thing. It’s just so much effort trying to get everything sorted and looking nice. This is literally one half of one small cupboard, and it seems to have turned into a military operation / entire project in itself. And whilst I hope that the end result of this thinking and purchasing will be useful and pleasing, the fact remains that once the cupboard is closed, it will be completely invisible *weep*. So these people who do up their entire home in a few weeks: HOW DO THEY DO IT? Do they not have any stuff? Or are the insides of their cupboards piled up like a secret Monica-closet-of-shame in Friends?

Answers on a postcard please.

(An ‘after’ post on the offending cupboard is on its way as soon as the supplies arrive…)

I am starting to wonder whether baskets might be the answer to everything.

For a long time there,I thought it might be hooks. I swept through our last house like a demon, putting hooks on anything that stood still for long enough. Don’t get me wrong; I maintain a soft spot for the well-placed hook. I still firmly believe that there is practically no internal door that couldn’t benefit from a good set of hooks drilled onto the back of it. In fact, I believe that hooks on the back of the spare room door (preferably with a dressing gown hanging from them) are a vital sign of thoughtfulness towards guests. But I digress….

We have now, however, entered the age of the basket. I had the kind of open-mouthed epiphany that can only come from happening upon the crashingly obvious when I realised that if only I had containers, and used them, then many of the small bits of ‘stuff’ that swill about the house like so much flotsam and jetsam would instead have somewhere to live. And I could tidy them up quickly, and find them again with ease. Turns out it really was that simple.

I started with cheap plastic baskets in our under sink cupboard. I hope it’s not too hyperbolic to say that this has changed my life. Previously, our undersink cupboard contained about a million bottles and cans, many of them duplicates, at varying levels of fullness. To find anything you had to sit down and empty the entire cupboard. Nice.

So some plastic baskets from the pound shop came home, I labelled them with a Tipp-Ex pen (just call me Michaelangelo), and here we are. They’re pretty tatty now, but still amazingly useful.

I was standing in the kitchen staring around in a vaguely dis-satisfied way when I realised that the humble basket might be the answer to some other problems, too. Like the very useful but undeniably tatty old cardboard box on top of the fridge that held my food processor and all its assorted bits…

Supposing that was a nice wicker basket instead? (Note the touching collection of things on our fridge. I particularly like the ‘Have we no WINE here?’ Shakespeare quotation magnet. And of course the empty frames, which I think have been sitting emptily on the fridge for over a year now, waiting for me to fill them.)

And – AND – supposing I got one for the steamer, too? Wouldn’t that look about a million times better on our wire shelves than the old, faded box it came in?

Sorting out the spice containers was a particular high point. These plastic beauties (whilst, ok, technically not baskets) were food containers from Lakeland, and are just the perfect height and depth both for our cupboards, and for the herbs and spices, which had previously been roaming, free-range, all along the shelves. As I suspected, the chaos of the storage had led not only to multiple emptyings-out in search of the right thing, but also to several duplicates.

It was at this point that I sank to a new level of craziness, as I looked at our chaotic fridge and pondered whether some kind of basket-based storage solutions might work here, too…? (I know. Check out the Lindor chocolates. I’m sure there was a good reason for them being there…)

Turns out I was right! Meet the cheese basket.

And here he is in situ. Already making life easier. Obviously this genre of basket works particularly well for us,with a fridge that has to serve one vegetarian, the Baby-Bel habits of two small children, and one of the greatest cheese-lovers that has ever existed.

The only problem that I have is finding the right basket. Baskets are plentiful, but they’re not always right. They are sometimes flimsy, or the wrong colour, (or often almost hilariously expensive) or more commonly the wrong size, and often some combination of the above. Sets of three matching baskets in gradually reducing sizes are very common but don’t strike me as very useful. A set of three matching baskets the same size would be very useful indeed but is oddly much rarer. For a while I was carrying around the measurements of the baskets I needed for the food processor and the steamer around in the memo section of my phone,hoping to happen upon them one day.

I did find the right ones, of course. I think Homebase came up trumps. DIY places, pound shops, Wilkinsons, and IKEA are all places where I’ve had some success. But I’ve still spent a lot of time measuring baskets and then putting them down sadly.

As an inveterate online shopper,in theory it should be possible to find a basket of any size, but in reality you could waste a lot of time going through measurements of height, depth and width, and still not find what you want. What I’d really like is a website that would act as a link to other sites. An online basket-search facility, where I could select from drop-down menus for size, material, and colour, and pull up a list of matches. Amazing!

But then, it is also entirely possible that I have thought about this too much….

Why not start things off with a corner that I am actually pleased with? Why not indeed.

This is Rosa’s reading corner, a little project for a corner of her room that I dreamed up while India was tiny and I was spending a lot of time breastfeeding, and reading other people’s blogs.

It was this post on the ever marvellous Bambino Goodies that started it off. I think this planted the seed in my mind. Now, I look at the pictures of Kat’s book corner and wonder whether part of what I was trying to capture was the beautiful serene image of what life with two children could be like. Which is to say, peaceful, Scandinavian-style print-filled, and bookish, rather than fraught and milk-sodden.

But the vision obviously stayed with me. So when I saw people online raving about book slings, and linking to a tutorial (and then received a sewing machine for my birthday), and then my Mum offered me an old child’s rocking chair, it felt as though things were falling into place.

The whole thing was quite instructive in terms of how long these things take, and also how hard it is to carve out time for house stuff when you have small people around. I thought to myself, “A small project. Perfect. All I need to do is make the book sling, paint the rocking chair, and make some floor cushions. Lovely.”

Except, of course, that in order to make the floor cushions I had to buy material, and it took months before we got to Ikea, who selfishly do not sell their beautiful and cheap material online. And I had to buy some stuff to stuff the cushions with. I was stymied there by not knowing what ‘cushion stuffer’ was called, and sat paralysed by wordlessness in front of google. (I did wonder whether it might be called “Stufflepuff”, and I do think still that this might be a rather brilliant name for it. But apparently polyfill is more commonly understood.) And I needed to get some self-cover buttons, which rather disappointingly do not actually cover themselves, but require you to faff about with scraps of material. Oh, and I had to learn to use the sewing machine.

“Book sling!” I thought to myself. “Surely a quick win? For, look! The internet is full of people raving about how easy they are to make.” Hah. There I needed not only to purchase material, but also to find a double-curtain-pole-bracket, which is one of those things apparently common in America, but not so much over here. And had to get hold of some dowel and get it cut to size. And reacquaint myself with the drill, with whom I had something of a falling out whilst trying to put up shelves in our old house.

And that’s even before I’d started trying to repaint the (previously purple) rocking chair, and found that the first coat of white paint I put on was like trying to paint with milk. With just an hour’s work I went from a perfectly acceptable purple chair to one that was purple with a very very faint wash of streaky smeary white all over it. I think the chair took four coats in the end, and honestly, if I’d known, I might not have started.

But look! Wasn’t it worth it? In a final flurry of self-flagellating resolve, I planned to make a cushion to fit on the seat… until I found that I had in fact bought a cushion on sale at Hunkydory Home that would squish into the seat nicely. And it has Russian dolls on, which I am very into at the moment.

The print was also something I found on Bambino Goodies, and I thought was pretty bargainous at only a tennerish from Etsy (it looks like the original has sold out, but there’s a very similar one here).

When I look at the whole corner now, I realise with the Ikea curtains, cushions, fabric-made-into-floor-cushions, and Moose, the whole thing might be more appropriately named ‘the Ikea textiles corner’. But still I do love Ikea fabrics. Bright colours and animal prints. Lovely.

And does she use it? Do I peep upstairs to find her happily curled up in the rocking chair, leafing through the pages of her favourite picture book?

Of course not. In fact, I would go as far as to say that both girls actively spurn anything I have carefully placed down at their level, preferring to risk their necks by scaling inappropriate items of furniture to retrieve whatever I thought was out of reach. And I even know this. See the copy of the Large Family book nestling in the sling (dark book in the centre, at the front)? It’s there because I really can’t bear those books, and have put it into the book sling, knowing that there it will be untouched, and effectively hidden, so I won’t have to read it.

Ah well. I think I did once find Rosa sitting upstairs, having placed various of her cuddly toys lovingly on the cushions, and pretending to read to them. So that, plus the knowledge of how much I like it, will have to act as recompense enough for the effort involved.