A new, bigger rug - eventually

Just after Christmas MOH answered the door for a delivery and returned to announce he’d bought the house a present. Those words alone were enough to fill me with fear, but hoping I was wrong I braved it. My fears heightened when I saw it was a rug - MOH and I have quite different taste, and he proudly admitted that he’d copied the decor in his flat (which I liked) from one of the paint catalogues - fair dos and all that. Usually I opt for more modern styles than he does, but that’s not always the case. But seeing the package, the fear was real.

He was keen for opening it and showing me, but I’m wise to this now and instead he showed me a picture from his email confirmation. He knew from the look on my face, which clearly I didn’t hide very well, that I wasn’t keen. In fact I was so not keen that it didn’t make it out of the packaging, and spent all its time with us propped up next to the front door. He tried the ‘I don’t know how to send it back’ trick, but as he’d shared the confirmation email with me, I could help there and printed off the return label for him. He’s ever the optimist and left it to the last possible day before making arrangements for its return, and still it never made it out of the packaging, or out of our very small porch. I’m not sharing where its from, or the style/design because I’m still scarred.

NOT THIS RUG

I know his intentions were good, and his reasoning was pretty solid too - but even so, not that one, not ever.

Having broached the subject of a replacement rug in quite a unique way, we started conversations about replacing the one that was already there. It was cream-based and past its best, by a long way, I knew that and even a shampoo didn’t really help it. It was time to replace it - we were agreed - but I still really wasn’t keen on his tactics, or the actual rug. But anyway, there wasn’t going to be a new rug in the house until the offending one left, never to return.

And it went. And stayed went.

I’d been browsing websites looking at many, many rugs. He wanted a rug that didn’t show the dirt, I wanted one that wasn’t too dark and would lift the space. We looked, and became experts on the many, many rug sizes; measuring the floor to see where it might go - and finally we settled on this distressed Kamran Cayenne Red Rug from Ruggable. So while it’s lighter than MOH wanted, and the most traditional style I’ve ever chosen - the fact that it is washable is in its favour.

It’s a two part system - the top that you can see, which is light and flexible and a sturdier ‘under rug’ pad - which really acts like a large piece of velcro. There’s a knack to pairing them, and the video makes it look simple - it took me longer than I thought it would, and while I’m particularly fussy it took me a couple of attempts to get it matched with the overhang even - or at least with the pad not showing.

And before you make the same comment as MOH, yes it’s distressed and yes it’s meant to look like that. I know that I’m in for this conversation many times over with MOH, but you know it never gets old…

It’s a much bigger rug than we’ve had in this space before, and MOH is pleased he can put his feet on the rug, rather than on the wooden floor. He said walking on it feels ‘crunchy’ and that may settle down I guess. He’s already identified a potential downside of having a larger rug, and that’s it could be easier to spill things on - just as well it’s washable, hey?!

It looks pretty good, I think - and MOH agrees, which is just as well as I’m hoping we’ll get many years use out of this rug - and hopefully our next rug purchase, whenever that might be, will be less traumatic all round.

Giving the HF500 a dusty test drive

This post contains items gifted by HooverDirect.co.uk for the purposes of this review.  All views and opinions are my own.

I’m very much a fan of household items that are functional, fulfil their purpose and which don’t dominate your living space.  So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that when I was offered a H-FREE 500 Twin Battery 3 in 1 Cordless Stick Vacuum Cleaner (this is the top of the range from this series) to review I was keen to see if a compact hoover could deliver great performance (spoiler – it can).  When it arrived, I was surprised at just how compact it was.

As you can see from the picture below, it’s not a usual sized vacuum cleaner box – it’s just a bit more than half way over the height of the radiator.  And in that box, there’s a lot of vacuum cleaner.

It’s also really well packaged.  The items are separated by cardboard with each piece in its place, getting so much into the space available is a pretty mean feat.  Add to that, that for my area, all bar two bits of the packaging are recyclable in our kerbside bin, and that’s also good news.

In the box, along with the unassembled cordless H-Free 500 is a crevice tool, pet brush, additional filter, two battery packs, a dusting and upholstery tool (which is stored on the handheld), a bag for the accessories and the quick start guide and manuals, as well as a wall mount and screws (not shown). 

The instruction manual shows clearly how to assemble the cleaner, but it’s really intuitive and so you’ll not be surprised that I went ahead without referring to the manual, looking at it to check that I was on track.  When it’s fully assembled (see the picture below) it’s a fully sized cordless vacuum cleaner, which I was keen to put to the test. 

I expected to need to charge it though before I could get started, so it was a pleasant surprise to discover it already had some power, but more on that in a moment.  First let me show you the cordless hoover in its compacted form – it was easy to switch into this mode – and you can see it’s clearly reduced in height, which will make it easy to store.  It’s also pretty sturdy standing alone in both set-ups, another plus in my view.

What’s equally impressive is the dual battery – that allows you to have the second battery charged and ready to go, I can see that being a real advantage.  On the Hoover Direct website, it says that ‘each battery pack gives up to 40 minutes of power in auto mode, 25 minutes in standard mode, or 8 minutes in turbo mode’.  The other thing to note about charging the HF500 is that it can be plugged in anywhere, so there’s none of this ‘returning to base’ for a charge which gives it even more flexibility which would have come in really useful for my MIL’s house move at the start of the year.

But back to giving it a test drive. 

As you know I’ve been working from home in my ‘top’ office for a while now, it’s a room that I’m using so much more than in all the time we’ve lived here.  That’s true for MOH and our spare room too though to be fair.  What we’re finding is that our house gets way more dusty than we noticed when we were out at the office each day (or maybe it doesn’t and we’re just noticing it more, who knows!)

My ‘top’ office also doubles as my yoga space, and recently it was when I was supposed to be emptying my mind that I noticed just how dusty part of the floor was.  Embarrassingly so, but in my defence it’s where our washing dries and at this time of year it’s put to good use  – yet another use for my ‘top’ office, which despite the picture I’m painting really is a nice spot to work in.  For a start it’s not the kitchen table and it gets the warmth of the sun from being at the front of the house – but back to the dust.

What the HF500 does really well is switch easily between carpet and non-carpet.  The LED lights really do help you find the hidden – or in my case, not so hidden – dust.  And reassuringly it’s definitely much cleaner now – my yoga sessions can go back to being much more relaxing.

I also want to share more about the dusting tool – and once again my home office set-up provided the perfect place to test the handheld mode.  Removing the pink tube – I forgot to mention how much that made me smile when I opened the box – and fixing the dusting tool in place, I was off – there was no stopping me – skirting boards, radiator pipes and my ‘borrowed from the office during lockdown’ footrest.  It’s amazing how much the HF500 picked up from these areas alone – and clearly I’m going to claim that it was my plan all along to have somewhere where the difference is obvious… ahem.  But I’ve also tested its pick-up power in much higher traffic areas – and therefore more often cleaned areas - of our home, and even there it’s making our space much cleaner, and that’s no bad thing, especially when it’s easy to achieve too.

So it’s a big thumbs up from me, and I know MOH is itching to get his hands on it too to give it his own test drive, and well, who am I to argue with that? 

View this product on Hoover Direct.

*  With thanks to Hoover Direct for providing the Hoover H-FREE 500 Twin Battery 3 in 1 Cordless Stick Vacuum Cleaner for the purposes of this review.

Lifted lead, two tiles and a zig-zag fence

I hope you’ve not suffered too much damage from the recent storms, here Storm Eunice - with a red weather warning - was here on Friday, and she definitely left her mark. My home office is in the top of our house and I could definitely hear the wind. My working day involved several more looks out the window to see what was going on, at both the front and back of the house. MOH’s home office is on the floor below and he had a birds eye view of our neighbour’s fence, which was definitely blowing in the wind and looking more zig-zagged than straight.

Just down the road the O2 was also suffering and I’m sure you’ve seen its news that part of the roof blew off. For us, it was thankfully less dramatic, though there’s some more repair work needed so I’m hoping as I’m writing this that Storm Franklin isn’t as bad.

Next door’s zig-zag fence

It doesn’t look any better at ground level. They’re not having a good time of it at the moment as they’ve also had a bathroom leak into the basement flat.

There’s lots of twigs down in our garden, and while we haven’t checked all of the garden carefully it’s easy to see from the house that one of our sycamore has a broken branch. It’s still up there, and lodged in the other branches, and I’m hoping it manages to stay there. Ironically these trees were supposed to have been pollarded, but the tree man has done missing. We’ve three trees that need work and our neighbours have two further trees, and so it’s not a small project between us, so it’s strange for there to be lots of interest and then nothing. Neither our neighbour our MOH can make contact, so it’s probably time to start looking for someone else.

A broken branch, lodged among other branches - let’s hope it stays there!

Our roof at the front of the house wasn’t quite so fortunate. We saw on Saturday morning that the lead had lifted and two tiles had gone. We weren’t sure where, but were grateful that it wasn’t onto any of the parked cars in the drive. We hoped that they had simply dropped down into the gutter which goes around the house - and we were half right, that’s exactly where one of the tiles had gone. MOH was able to reach that earlier today by leaning out of the window.

The other tile was found by our neighbour, on the roof. And bless him, he was up on our roof on Saturday afternoon (when the weather still wasn’t that great) retrieving it for us. Before covid he added a roof terrace giving his flat some outside space - as part of that it’s relatively easy for him to get onto his roof, and therefore our roof. He’s always very generously said that if we needed to access our roof then we are welcome to do this via his roof space.

What he also did while he was retrieving the tile was push the lead back down, and so giving our roof more protection from the rain we’ve had since then, and more which is forecast too. What a superstar neighbour - we’re incredibly grateful for this interim fix.

You really can’t beat good neighbours can you?