I get a living room

Although I live in a large old traditional Queensland house with 9 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms I don't use all of it myself. I have lived in quite limited accommodation for most of my life so, although I like large houses, I don't really know what to do with them. Filling them with kids was great fun at one stage of my life but that period is now long gone. So I normally let out my unused bedrooms to overseas students -- mostly from India.

Even so, I have for my own use 2 bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom, dining room, library, anteroom and verandah. So I thought I was treating myself fairly well. Anne has however told me often that I also need a living room so I have just converted one of the larger bedrooms that had become vacant into a new living room.

It is a largish room of about 4 meters square with a big East-facing window that gets the morning sunlight so is basically quite pleasant. It did however have an old carpet down so I bit the bullet, ripped the carpet up and had the timber floor underneath sanded and coated. The floor needed a bit of rehabilitation before the sandman came but at least no boards needed replacing. Anne and I just had to get all the staples, tacks, nails etc. out. I have done that sort of work on floors often over the years so it was not intrinsically difficult but was a bit onerous for an old guy like me.

Anyway, the sandman came on Thursday and for $440 I now have a gleamingly beautiful timber floor of slash pine. They used good timber for floors in the old days when my house was built.

I am furnishing it a bit sparingly. I have bought a brown velvet futon (sofa-bed) to sit on and also have a good single TV chair. Other than that I intend to have in the room only a TV, a coffee table and a computer desk. I am also on the lookout for an attractive traditional oriental rug ("Persian carpet") for the floor but I may get a Belgian cotton (machine-made) version rather than a hand-woven one. It will depend on what I see that I like. The Belgian ones are so cheap that it is embarrassing so I think I will look first at the Asian ones.