My House: A Basic But Happy-making Ikea Hack

As Ikea hacks go, giving one of the Swedish homeware giant's classic Frosta stools a paintjob is as simple as they come. But sometimes simple is what's required – especially in my house where colour and pattern can get a little carried away together.

I found this sorry looking stool on the way back from a dogwalk, sitting sadly outside someone's house with a note saying 'take me'.

I've got into a habit of painting everything black lately (more of that anon) and thought I should deviate. The stairs in our house are painted several different colours, I'm kind of tiring of them to be honest but the effort it took to paint five flights, even though they're very small flights, hasn't yet faded and so they're staying.

Bear with me: this is relevant because, to rein in the visual chaos that's easy to get when you're a bit of a collector, as I am, I find a house palette is a helpful thing. And my stairs pretty much dictate that palette. (That they might be the chief cause of visual chaos is something best unsaid until there is energy to repaint them.) Anyway, here they are.

I have a box full of all the paints used for them. There was quite a lot left in the tin containing the blue of the bottom stair. So that was the stool's destiny. First some sanding.

I had actually been going to paint the top, but its clean, smooth paleness was so pleasing once sanded that I wanted to keep it exposed. Legs it would be then.

By the way, yes the garden tiles are filthy. They got a good wash after these photos, but they never look close to pristine. I have made peace with this.

It looked pretty good with white primer and I was nearly swayed, in my trying-to-be-more-minimalist enthusiasm, but also a little cold. The blue is a rich, warm blue. Greek island blue.

Annoyingly, I opted to mask everything off carefully rather than simply unscrewing the legs. The masking actually took longer and turned out to have been a waste of time as I couldn't pick all the tape off afterwards and the messy bits, even though they were underneath the stool, really bothered me. So off the legs came.

Back to the sander. I picked off all that paint I'd put all over the screws, too.

I wasn't sure what to do with the top – Danish oil, perhaps?

The garden table you can see in the background further up has been oiled and it looks great, but it's an outdoor table and I like it being a bit richer in colour in that context. I tried wetting the stool's surface to see how the wood changed colour and considered some kind of limewash to highlight the paleness, but what I had in the cupboard, and what I thought would let that nicely exposed birch ply shine through the best, in fact, was matt varnish. I painted it over the tabletop and over the legs, to protect them from chipping (and getting ruined when I spill tea over them).

And now here it is in its new home, picking up the blue in the Dutch wax cloth DIY valence (it's stapled to the top of an ugly divan base) and looking happy next to the bright yellow Parker Knoll, revamped by Jay Blades, now of Jay and Co, which you can read about here.

Before & after: garden makeover

It's been a very long time since my last post, for which apologies. In the interim, I've got married and done up a house, as well as generally working full-time. 

I'll dig out some suitable wedding pix and post those soon, but meanwhile – there was also the garden makeover, which came about thanks to the wedding generosity of our friends and family. I'm going to start with the (almost) finished version.

It started life as a to-scale drawing done by clever Declan, my now husband.

I'm dreaming of a zen bedroom

This has to be the most drawn out room pimp ever – and the changes weren't even that dramatic. But it's done, and our sleep space now feels calmer, zenner and softer underfoot.

Here's how it looked before:

Kind of busy, right? It was always a temporary arrangement; the bridge between the long period when the room – the biggest in the house, and an ensuite – was rented out, and the period when it would be transformed into something new when my boyfriend moved in, the lodgers moved out and everything got switched around.

Christmas lights – should they stay or should they go?

Every year we seem to accumulate more fairy lights – this year we acquired some gloriously garish multi-coloured ones from an ancient box of Christmas decorations that belonged to my gran.

And, every year, as the decorations come down, I find it hard to part with the joyful sparkle of a string of festive bulbs. Well... should these ones stay or go back in the box until December 2016?

DIY: Sofa pimping with DFS

It's only a small pimp, but a significant one I hope you'll agree. And one not unlike switching the buttons on a high street coat to give it a posher edge.

So this is how my sofa looked before I got into the DIY lite zone during a holiday at home, last week.

My sofa, before

Ever since I bought my DFS green sofa, quite a few years ago now, I'd wanted to customise it. Had I had the upfront money, rather than around a tenner a month for the handy interest-free credit that DFS offer, I'd have gone for a swanky Habitat or Heal's number, or the wonderous emerald velvet design that Ikea was recently selling.

Most importantly, I'd have liked the legs. That was the only real downer on my DFS: it looked ropey downstairs. The shape of the legs is a little naff, in my opinion, but I could live with that. It was the pale, uninteresting wood and the fact that some of the legs hadn't even bothered to match that bothered me (look closely and you'll see the horrible black plastic feet in the corners).

My plan was always to paint the legs. Several years later – so much time has passed I've even paid off the sofa in full – and I've got around to it.

Initially, I was inspired by Pretty Pegs, an innovative Scandinavian company of which I'm a big fan. They make replacement legs for exactly the predicament I was in. I nearly went with one of their designs (above), in fact, but in the end thought that a couple of coats of paint would do the trick instead. (I have upcoming and exciting PP news though, concerning my new bed, which did involve a set of their designs.)

So here is the sofa after possibly the easiest DIY revamp ever.

Black's a pretty safe colour and goes with quite a few bits around the living room too. Plus – *bonus* – it disguises the plastic feet that were once so prominent.

I should mention that I've checked, and the sofas at DFS have improved in the leg department since I shopped there, so if you're in the market for some credit it's still worth a look.

But let me know what you think of the leg update. I think it makes a surprisingly big difference. Do you?

Before & After: how to arrange furniture in an L-shaped room (or my living room makeover)

This, below, is how my living room was looking until quite recently. There had been a revamp brewing for some time. I kind of liked it but it had stopped feeling right, somehow. It wasn't happy.

Declan summed it up when he said that it looked pretty, but that 70 percent of the room was unused, dead space. And he was right, because we never ventured far from the green sofa.

Nor did the dog and the cat.

Our reason was that I'd put the TV directly in front of it, and very close, too. Below is an ugly photo from ages ago, which shows just how close it was.

And this is what the décor in this spot morphed into. An improvement of sorts in that it was warmer, but it always felt – and looked – like a temporary measure.

It was that classic "what do you do with an L-shaped room?" issue. I'd previously gone for a divide and conquer approach, giving the space multi-functional potential – in the second photo down from the top you can see there was a desk bureau in the top right corner, and my lovely yellow "writing chair", pimped by Out of the Dark. Tucked behind the door is the music area with my beloved old flashing light record player.

It all made more sense when I had lodgers and we didn't all want to budge up on the green sofa together (although, actually, we nearly always did because you couldn't see the TV from anywhere else). The idea was that I could be tapping on my laptop at the bureau while the sofas created another zone. But when the lodgers moved out, one-corner room thing became a thing. The rest of the space looked lonely. How could I reunite the two sides of the big "L" and give the room the happy feeling I knew it had the potential for? Months passed. It wasn't obvious. Until a lightbulb moment. Ta da...

The green sofa needed to be what you saw as you came into the room, not to be hiding around the corner – not because it's beautiful (it's not especially) but because it's surely good feng shui or something to be facing a door when it is opened. The old 60s leather sofa, which I had bought on eBay got sold again on eBay. And a cosy rug from the Plantation Rug Company came in.

As did a total bargain new clever coffee table by Leitmotiv (£25 ex-display, should have been around £80) which stops lazybones old me from having to reach too far to put down a glass or a plate when sitting on the sofa, since it has three table tops that swivel around to just where you need them, or stack neatly when you don't. It's very 1980s bachelor pad, or it would be if I had a black leather sofa. I like it.

There was an exciting eBay adventure to get the pink chair. We went on an expedition to Essex to pick it up and the guy who was selling it has a massive couple of barns stuffed with treasures, including some pristine Morris Minors, of which I posted some Instagram pictures. But back to the chair: I had in fact bought two much smaller versions in the same fabric, but when we spotted this one peeking out from behind a pile of chaotic, dusty furniture it was a much better size and he let us have it for £20.

The other L-shaped room revelation was the position of the TV, which I'll come to in a later post as I'm not going to share photos of the whole room now, since there are a couple of parts still under consideration (including the thing the newly well-positioned TV is sitting on). But you've got a little taster of what I think I'm happy with so far.

When the Morris Minor man told me the provenance of the pink chairs, and that he had had a great big job lot of them, I slightly went off the idea. Not because it was anything unsavoury – quite the opposite, they were in pristine condition having been in the lobby of a 1980s hotel that never took off. Too pristine? But I've grown fond of the chair again, and I do love that shade of pink.

And the palm, which is printed onto silk and was falling apart until rescued a few months ago by a frame, had been camping out in the bathroom, but it looked so good here that it had to stay. And don't worry about the fox.

She has been rehomed against the wall behind the dog's bed. They look quite alike, I think. And the monochrome canvas on the wall isn't, in fact, a curly version of the rug but a piece of fabric designed by Australian mid-century textile designer, Florence Broadhurst. It now hangs with much more breathing space outside the bedroom on a big, white hall wall. I've also got some of her Rampaging Horses' fabric as cushion covers.

The stripy fabric is by Sonia Rykiel and was picked up at a sample sale for under a quid. Luckily, a friend introduced me to possibly the friendliest and most affordable picture framer in London, and so having it – and the palm – framed was most manageable.

The Anglepoise was a chuck-out from Declan's old office (you can almost see the health and safety label on the base, must take that off). I quite like the pile of books that were meant to be a temporary prop. And the paint-splattered stool was my gran's.

And it's SO much nicer to be sitting by the window now. More photos of the rest of the room to come once I've finished faffing about it with it.

But, so far, it's an improvement, right?