A home for everything, and everything in its place

One of the things I'm enjoying most about my new home is the added space compared to my old Edwardian two up, two down. This new house, a1970s ex council house, is still essentially a two up, two down, but it has halls and a normal staircase, oh and a garage!

Certainly, if I owned this house instead of renting then there is at least one wall I would knock down. However, as I don't own it and can't do whatever I want, I am enjoying the necessity of being flexible and resourceful in how I utilise each space.

I have strong feelings on space in my home. I don't like any to be wasted, and I like clear areas for activities. One of the ways this has materialised in the past is a general dislike of open plan designs. When I lived in a house with an open plan area living/dining/kitchen area (a gorgeous old cottage in Kidlington, Oxon, where I spent the late noughties and early twentytens, which had a massive attic and a garden with a well, and where I was able to keep hens) I tried to section areas off as much as possible and in effect put up invisible walls.

With this new house one of my niggling annoyances was that there is no big downstairs cupboard, the sort you keep ironing boards and hoovers and the like in. So this week I fixed that.

It started off with my dining table being too big for the only area I could put it. Well, technically the table fit in the area exactly, but unfortunately this meant you would only ever be able to fit two people at it, both staring at the wall. While not an actual problem in itself as I am only one person and looking at the wall in no way impedes the eating of my dinner, it felt like a badly utilised space and a problem that needed solved.

Then, two weeks ago I saw an advert for a small square table on Facebook Marketplace. I requested the measurements and it sounded like it would be a much better fit for the small alcove in the living room I have assigned to dining. At £10, going to collect it 5 miles away was a no brainer. Lugging it into my house myself, and dragging the old dining table out into the hall was slightly more complicated - both items being heavy pine, and Merlin seemingly determined to try to 'help'. However, it did eventually get done. The fit was ideal and I felt like the dining issue was solved. The new table seats two very nicely, and in a push will seat four. It has a few pen and scratch marks I will eventually sand away and repaint, but for now it does the job admirably.

This left me with a blooming great dining table stuck in my hall. I vaguely thought I might paint it with waterproof paint and put it in the garden at some point, but in the meantime it was too heavy for me to move to the garage and just sat there making the hall an unpleasant space.

At the same time, in an effort to focus this year on slow and simple living, I have been trying to take up old hobbies and activities I've enjoyed at certain points in the past but have let slip for various reasons. One of these old hobbies was doing jigsaws, which I enjoyed as a child but haven't done regularly since, and I've not done any since the dark days of the pandemic. It very quickly became evident to me that the new, smaller dining table, while ideal for actual dining, was far too small for the jigsaw carry case I have which I can lay the jigsaw out on and then folds over the jigsaw and keeps it together when I need to move it.

So one day, when I was bemoaning how ugly my hall looked with a chest freezer, a hoover, a dining table on its side, some pictures I've not put up yet and two extra dining chairs all scattered around it, I had a little brainwave and thought that there was almost certainly enough room in the hall to use the dining table as a hobbies work table.

So, thought into action, I shuffled a few things around, Merlin did some zoomies to express his excitement, and lo! I have the cutest understairs hobby nook! All set for jigsaws, and sewing machines, and a very fiddly build your own bookshop hobby kit I bought a while back but haven't started yet.

Once that area was sorted it, that left the unhung pictures, hoover and chest freezer, all now in the back hall area. This area had bothered me since I moved in as it felt like such a wasted space. It has a back door to the garden that I never use as the living room has two huge patio doors, so the back hall was a neglected, unneeded area which I was just using for dumping stuff in.

Looking at it, and the things that were there, it looked like a cupboard - albeit a doorless cupboard that you could see everything in and so it was a complete eyesore. What could be done? It's not like as a renter I could put up a studwall and door.

I could, though, hang a curtain - which is what I did. I had an old tension pole that fitted perfectly, and an old curtain I had used in the old house to stop draughts, and which was still awaiting a home. So, I put it all together, and now I have a perfect home for all my cleaning detrius and the chest freezer, and it doesn't look half bad at all. I might put a shelving unit in there at some point, but for now it solves a problem and means the space is being used well, which makes me geekily very happy.

So for the princely sum of £10, I now have a lovely dining area, a hobby nook, and a downstairs cupboard. And if I ever have more than four people round for dinner I can temporarily move some things, put the dining and hobby table together, and seat eight. Sorted.