Yet more on beds, also, the garden and windows

Time again for yet another post on our bed (we like our sleep, what can we say?). Last week, the lovely man from Homebase finally delivered the bed frame to match our new mattress, so it was out with the old and in with the new.

Our only complaint (but mind you, a big one) with the old frame was its incredible, constant squeakiness. In an effort to keep the otherwise good frame, we resorted to a number of measures:

From Briar Crescent

Duct tape on the joints to reduce rattling, cork and foam to keep the slats from banging up against the metal, bubble wrap to reduce slat-on-support clanging. These efforts worked....for three nights. And then the base started to pull away from the headboard and everything was back to its night time clamber.

As you can see, the new bed frame is all wood and very simple, and I am happy to report, noise free.

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Gloriousness!

Besides putting the new bed together (quite a feat, I can assure you), I've scrubbed from the living room windows their deep layer of mud, dust, plaster-splatters, and sawdust, which has meant: a) we can see the beauty of the front garden better and b) I no longer feel guilty every time by Czech book wants me to talk about 'moje ciste okno'.

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And in the garden, we've really enjoyed watching the camelia suddenly turn pink.

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But, the most exciting spring development has been the small signs of life on the rhodadendron:

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Hopefully more little leaves will follow soon...

More on beds

Lukas and I have a problem. We got the new, 6 inches larger bed without....um...trying it first.

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(Bed in box)

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(Bed on frame)

Once the bed was released from its vacuum packaging and we spent a few nights on it, a trend became obvious.

I (she-who-needs-10 hours-of-sleep-and-then-some) am going to bed at midnight and waking up at 7 and humming happily whilst making breakfast.

From Briar Crescent

From Briar Crescent

Poor L., on the other hand, (he-who-goes-to-bed-at-2am-and-wakes-up-annoyingly-5 hours-later) is feeling less chirpy in the morning.

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Difficult decisions await....

In other news, the light that was in the bedroom when we bought it, has been cleaned up, broken glass bits have been removed, and it's found a new home in the little room - adding a bit of glamour to our storage.

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Also, we've added to our art collection with this lovely wood block print (from eBay, of course). Now, we just need to find a frame...

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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.

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

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(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.