A slight detour now… one of the doors from the hallway leads
into the under stairs cupboard. This is only the second house we have owned
with such a space, and I must admit it is quite generous. It is also further
evidence of how the house layout has been tweaked. The door entering the
cupboard seems to be a later addition, as once inside you can see that part of
the wall is just plasterboard and there is another doorway which was the
original entrance to a much smaller cupboard space. (sorry about the quality of the images, it is quite
difficult to take photos in such a limited area). The original space is seen on
the left of the image above.
The previous owners used the newer addition (seen above) as an office and
had a computer and chair in here! We use it to store everything from a bike,
typewriter (of course), printer, wine, paint, tools, wellies, ironing pile and
much, much more! It is also home to the ironing board – which recently survived
an 8 hour spell of the iron being left on accidently – I can certainly vouch
for its fire-proofness!
I tend to iron in the kitchen, and the process itself is
quite ritualistic – I always start with the easy items such as pillowcases,
napkins and hankies, then progress to clothing, always leaving awkward items
such as shirts until last. I never iron sheets or duvet covers. (but sadly I do
iron tea towels). D only wears t-shirts, and sees ironing as totally
unnecessary. His mother however was an obsessive ironer – she usually did it late
at night whilst watching television – she had one on those ironing boards with a
seat attached! it would not be unusual for her to still be ironing well after
midnight, (they were a family of six). She ironed everything – including
underwear and socks!
For me, ironing is done on an ad-hoc basis, I’ll sometimes iron
just one item that I want to wear; or if the pile starts to teeter I will
usually do something about it; (occasionally I arrive home to find that my Mum
has popped in and decided to tackle the ironing pile for me – fantastic!).
