Sitting room - before (another photo heavy post)

Okay, enough dilly-dallying, on with the warts and all expose of my living space. See the following posts for other rooms: Hall, Bathroom, Kitchen.

Today, it's the turn of the sitting room. I actually took most of these photos at the start of the month, just before I went away, and then December caught up with me and it's only now, after a couple of quiet days, that I'm coming back to it. If you read my post from a couple of weeks ago, some unexpected visitors (who never did turn up in the end and still haven't contacted me to say why) led to me spending a few hours sorting out some of this mess so things are already greatly improved, at least from one angle.

Sitting room
I've changed this room around a lot, from when I had almost no furniture and then as I got bits and pieces and tried out different things. I quite like the way it is now, or at least will, once the excess stuff hanging around has been found homes. But let's start with a picture of the Table of Doom from April. This was when I thought I was nearly finished clearing it and then moved a box and remembered there was a load of stuff on the side table as well. So I cleared off the side table, like so,

which left me with a once-more crowded table...

By the start of December, it all looked a bit like this.

This was the view of the sitting room taken from the bedroom door. The boxes in front of the big cupboard (which holds wool, material and 'stuff' for all that crafting I'm going to get around to doing sometime) have reduced now as I got them filled up with presents and sent off around the world. Since this post is going to be long enough though, I'll stick to the before photos and do a second post with the partially-after later.

This is the other side of the room, taken from the hall door. Note the suitcase on the floor which was in the previous photo of the kitchen. As I was going away, I had to take all of the music out of it and that has ended up stacked on top of the side table (which was beside the table above), now moved to in front of the bookshelves. The blankets on top of/behind the couch are actually resting on a mattress - used for visitors (or for me, when visitors are using my bed more like) - it's covered in a decorative throw so not immediately obvious.

This is the other end of the room, taken from the corner where the table is. The door you can see is the door to the bedroom. This red and white cloth 'wardrobe' is one I had in my bedroom for ages but moved out here during my last round of trying to get everything sorted. It contains mostly spare duvets and bedding. To the left you can see the stacks of music from the suitcase, topped with the lilac folder. They are still there but now nicely arranged on the white side table that I moved over there.

There are shelves all along this wall and my plan is (or was anyway, I dither on this) to hang curtains all along that wall in order to hide the mess and hopefully bring a more calm vibe to the room. Anyway, behind the cloth wardrobe in this photo you can better see the tall boy, which is currently full of kitchen stuff, lesser-used baking stuff and larger serving bowls, for example. The small set of shelves on top of it are my 'unread' shelves.


 At least mostly. The bottom shelf has the complete set of Harry Potter and the complete Wheel of Time Series. The rest is all my unread stuff and since I got so many books for my birthday, these shelves are now absolutely groaning with books.

And here we have the very messy "curtains" - for the first year or so I just used the black venetian blinds that the previous tenant left. I had tried to put up curtain rails but the wall directly above the windows is thin plasterboard (I think there used to be shutters there, of the type you roll down outside the window but now there's just a big gap between the plasterboard and the outside wall) and I gave up, then got depressed and didn't get around to trying again. When I got sick of the black venetian blinds though I just got rid of them and decided I could live with nothing for a while. Then I had a visitor, who was going to be sleeping on the sofa-bed, which at the time was in the sitting room and so I had to do something at short notice. So I dragged out these white curtains I had gotten on special offer before leaving Ireland and hung them over some wool strung around the top of the window. And there they have stayed. For, oh, probably about two years now. The picture is just a cheap print my sister gave to me, along with a second similar one. I cannot find that second one though and think I may have given it to my brother or a friend moving into a new place. When I do get around to painting the hall, I'd like to move this picture out there. In it's place I'll hang the felt landscape I bought at the Craft Fair earlier this month (still need to do a post about what I bought there, too). Along with this print and the Van Gogh print you can see in the table photos above, I have one small wooden butterfly picture that I bought, I think, at a school jumble sale as a teenager. It hangs from a nail on my CD shelf.

Furniture in the sitting room (yes, there's too much of it but I don't want to get rid of any of it and hope it will all fit better in the next place I move to)
1 light-coloured CD shelf (freecycle)
1 up-lighter (is that what they're called? I mean the white lamp in the photo above - originally bought from Argos in Ireland and for my first year here the only lighting I had in the sitting room)
1 yellow couch (gifted from a friend when I moved here - I think when I'm done with it she'll take it back though - one of those things she had replaced and didn't have room for any more but which she didn't really want to get rid of)
1 armchair (from my parents' house - hate the blue covering and will get it re-covered one day, in the meantime it's covered with a white/green/yellow throw - I rescued a few things from there when my stepmother sold up after my father died. Was really pleased to get the couch and two armchairs, as well as two small chairs but then moved into a tiny house with only room for one armchair. So the other armchair and two small chairs now live with a friend in Ireland and my brother got the couch, which he then had to leave behind him when he moved and the new place was too small to get it up the stairs. It would have cost me in excess of 600 euro to get it collected and shipped to me in Germany at that time so I just had to let it go)
2 old wine cases which serve as end tables either side of the couch (free from a wine festival I went to a few years ago)
1 writing desk (second-hand from Cash + Raus, I think it cost 40 euro but it might have been 60 - it's a really solid piece)
1 tall-boy, darkish colour (from my parents' house)
1 small, mid-tone, book shelf (second-hand from Cash + Raus, part of a three-part set that cost, I think, 20 euro, again a really solid piece)
2 large dark bookshelves (from my parents' house) -  1 has just fiction, 1 has cookbooks, reference books, photo albums.
4 smaller sets of light-coloured shelves, 2 x 3-shelf, 2 x 4-shelf, currently stacked to give me 2 x 7-shelves, exactly the height of the other large bookshelves (bought these new about ten years ago)
1 light-coloured large bookshelf (second-hand from Cash + Raus) - contains files and folders and some old school/college books.
1 light-coloured wardrobe (originally Ikea but purchased second-hand from Cash + Raus) - wool, material and other crafting supplies
1 light-coloured set of five deep drawers (originally Ikea but purchased second-hand from Cash + Raus) - contains candles, hardware stuff (tools, etc.) and the 'present' drawer
1 smaller set of mid-tone drawers (second part of the three-part set mentioned above - the third part is a corner shelf unit which I have in the kitchen) - contains all my stationery stuff - card, envelopes, plastic covers, jiffy-bags to be re-used and so on.
1 table with three chairs (purchased second-hand from Cash + Raus - there are four chairs but I use one in the kitchen)
1 white side-table/telephone table (freecycle)
1 darker wood small cupboard/telephone stand with three small drawers and one cupboard (second-hand from Cash + Raus) - DVDs in the cupboard, address book, candles, battery chargers in the drawers