Easy Living

One of the stars in The Blob's dramatis personae is The Sofa. Obvs part of the supporting cast! In 1996, we bought The Farm including quite a modest, for Ireland, farmhouse with 500mm thick solid rubble-in-courses walls with a footprint of 450 sq.ft ~= 40 sq.m and an upstairs of the same size. There is but one "reception" room downstairs. It took us a year of builders [fix: no chutes, no taps, no t'ilet, hole in roof, bees in soffit] to move in. We had two rooms downstairs: a living room 3m x 4.3m and a slightly larger kitchen. Eschewing sofabeds (neither a good bed nor a good sofa) we went off to Habitat (Conran the Baptist to Ikea as the source of worldly salvation) and bought a sofa that would sleep a <6ft = 185cm guest. It was white ("to brighten the room"); it had legs so a half-finished jigsaw could be slid under; and it was our loyal support for 27 years. But it was also a trampoline for tweens, a magnet for spilled coffee, and the original loose cover frayed to fritters after years of washing. The springs had sproooiinnnngged under 'my' end of the sofa.

The Boy and his team were coming to visit for August, and shame wouldn't allow us to present our old sofa hammock . . . not least because the Gdaus are now of trampoline age. Accordingly we went on a circular tour of furniture emporia in and between the cities of Waterford and Kilkenny and . . . eventually . . . bought a sofa and a matching square foot-stool as a compromise between "corner-unit" and "limited space". Eircode revealed when the van from EZLiving Centraal circulated in our area and we had a date for delivery - of the sofa. The matching foot-stool was still in a container somewhere in the Indian Ocean; but that could wait. 

It was on us to make space for New Sofa. The sofa-fairies came and took our Habitat heirloom . . . and temporarily replaced it with a  pair of lawn-chairs - like we're the indigent transient students of our youth not the bougie Upstanding Pillars we are now. Rather than leave it out in the rain they transported it uphill to a second life in the poly tunnel:

Note the prosthesis under the left-hand seat cushion. That's where the upholstery springs had fractured and the void has been packed with a couple of pillows . . . it being impossible to use a lap-top if your knees are higher than your ears. Bystander asks: "But, if you leave it in the polytunnel, won't your once-was-white sofa get covered in dust and bird-shit?"

Yup, sound advice. Turns out that the fly-sheet of one of our several "partial tents" is just the right size to catch bird-splat and (we devoutly hope) the territorial marks of the neighbour's tom cat. How ever did these "fairies" move the sofa? You may well ask. Let's just say that, ~50 years ago, one of them served time in NCL National Carriers, the ancestor of Lynx Express, now a wholly owned subsidiary of UPS. What couldn't be door-delivered with a 7 tonne van, had to be schlepped to destination on a sack-truck. EZLiving deliverers have a "driver's mate"; in my day it was just me and a sack truck, which is an amazing power lever. See I've included it in the pics - pride of place, at the Right Hand of Sofa, too.

A few days later, my pal René called to visit. He was delighted at the outcome "See?! I told you 20 years ago: that polytunnel will change your life, you'll live up there". I'd only moved the sofa to keep it out of the rain until the CoCo has a free Furniture Dump Event. But y'know, I like having somewhere to sack out in the fresh air and the WiFi signal penetrates the plastic pretty well.