Giant bean bag

Last year I meant to get a bean bag: I thought it would be useful for the overflow if we had loads of people on the sofa, or as extra outdoor seating on our lawn. I never got around to it, and the X Factor final came and went with ten of us squashed on the sofa or on cushions on the floor.

This year I got proactive and ordered one after a friend sent me a link to made.com. The colours I wanted were out of stock so I settled for chocolate brown and a week later it duly showed up. Despite articles written about made.com's (lack of) customer service in the press and various complaints on Twitter I'm happy to say that my experience with them was absolutely trouble free.

The only problem was the size - Rob said if he knew just how big the bean bag was going to be he would've vetoed it. As it happens it takes up a LOT of floor space but at least the kids can both lie on it without annoying each other.

Plenty more leaks

I should have updated immediately after the last post. I just couldn't bear it. The next morning we got up to find not only did we have the dreaded leaks back, but they were worse than ever before.

A bucket we put down had three inches of water within a few days. The previous polite and intermittent drips now almost rained down (no pun intended) - not necessarily when it was raining, but hours later. And it leaked in several places. Again. This is not what we had in mind by 'bringing the outdoors in'.

Sunfold agreed to come back a week later with an engineer from the steel manufacturers. The engineer duly showed up but unfortunately the Sunfold guy couldn't make it due to having a kid off school. The engineer refused to come inside and take a look without the Sunfold rep there. I pleaded but no, he said his gov'nor wouldn't allow it. So that was that. Three weeks since the 'fix-it' job and two weeks since the engineer couldn't come in, and still no sign of a rescheduled appointment.

I'm convinced that the steels are at fault as the rubber seals have been redone so many times. Probably from having the vents drilled in after they were manufactured, instead of at the same time.

Pictured is a nice view of east London taken from the London Eye last week. No rain.