De-junking

The mid-century fixation continues as we're enjoying more space. Our wider than normal hall which leads to the spare room now houses the retro bar (pictured top). And we finally hung the teak mirror I bought 18 months ago on eBay (pictured below).

The middle floor now feels like a shrine to G-Plan with the mirror, sideboard, bar and coffee table. Having this stuff in place makes the room feel like more or less finished, which is a bit of a relief after nearly three years. Now all we need to do is hang our accumulated art.



This photo shows the spare room now - a couple of weeks ago you could barely see the floor or walls for boxes stacked in there. Apologies to everyone who's stayed here since we moved in - but feel free to come back and revisit!

G-Plan sideboard

It's the imminent arrival of certain guests that suddenly propel action in our house. For nearly three years we've ignored the piles of boxes in the spare room. Each one labelled 'office' or 'books' so hardly exciting enough to warrant invesigation. Rob's parents are arriving this week - at the time of writing they were delayed due to the freak snow storm in Wellington and hadn't made it onto their flight - but we used the last two Sundays to sort out those boxes.

Pictured top is the gorgeous G-Plan sideboard I bought on eBay for the bargain price of £110 + £45 delivery. It looked pretty impressive in the photos on the listing and I have to say, it's even better in real life. We had to remove the legs to get it up the stairs, and it suffered a slight scuff on the front being hauled over the hand rail, but a dab of wood stain and I'm sure it'll be fine. The two photos below show the sideboard in our upstairs TV room.

The next de-junking project has to be the boxes in the kids room, the garage and under the stairs...

Hackney is lush

The civil unrest and looting in Hackney had a lot of New Zealand friends and family texting and emailing the last couple of days. They had a vision of the whole of East London burning to the ground. Well, these are friends etc who weren't on social media, so I guess it proves that traditional media over there is reporting way behind 'real time' events. As a rampant user of Twitter I felt as though I was on top of the slew of information, until some numpties started to spread untrue rumours about the state of various local places.

This article from Vice on the battle of Mare Street shows some graphic images as it all kicked off - Mare Street is a few minutes walk from our house. We were none the wiser, having cycled through Victoria Park to get home. The only clue was the helicopters overhead and the anxious people walking towards Victoria Park warning me to 'not go that way'.

Looking out from our kitchen was the view above - hardly any other buildings visible, just a mess of gardens and trees, which is the Hackney I prefer to think of rather than the broken mess that was left behind on Tuesday.