The sofa bed

The wee house is now ready for over night guests thanks to a naive eBay purchase. We've been looking at sofa beds for a good four months now in anticipation of finally having guests over to stay. We do feel a bit guilty about what past guests have been forced to sleep on (mostly sagging fold-out sofa beds and, on occasion, the floor), so we were determined to find something stable and comfortable.

A few weeks ago, right when we were about to shell out the money for a new sofa bed from Ikea, a mostly-identical one came on eBay, within a 25 mile radius of us. You can imagine our pleasure, then, when we won the auction at a fantastically low price, and the bed was ours to collect.

A 25 mile radius is, country lanes in England considered, a generous distance it turns out. The distance is even more generous when someone has left the sat nav at home and someone else is forced to navigate with an ill-proportioned map. Things can get all the hairier when exact direction to the location have been, er, misplaced. Nevertheless, we found the sofa's owners in their higgidly-piggildy cottage after only one wrong turn that turned out, in fact, to be the right turn.

Additional bits of fun that day: bringing the sofa down a very narrow, very twisty staircase (while, all the time, it did its best to turn into a bed) and pushing it into the unwilling car boot.....in the pouring rain.

Delivery from Ikea was looking pretty good by the time we got the thing home.

However, now that we have it, we could not be more pleased.

From Briar Crescent

(sitting in the lounge whilst we recovered from its collection)

From Briar Crescent

(now in its rightful place in the office, awaiting guests)
And future guests should be especially pleased that we have used the money that would have been spent on a new sofa bed to upgrade to a larger mattress for ourselves, meaning our old, still-very-nice-though-a-bit-small mattress will be able to add an additional layer of luxury onto the sofa bed.