Creative Signe: Sofa-bed-sofa

The first creative item on this blog is our sofa, which I recently completed and was the reason I began this blog. You need some background information to understand this project:

- I am 39 years old and a student and so we are, let’s face it, poor.

- We have lived the past 6 years in Australia, until June 2011 in Brisbane, now in Cairns, but we still do not have permanent residency in Australia. At some other time, I will blog about what that does to a person, but let’s leave it for now. Relevant to this blog-post it means that we have still not shipped our home from overseas to here.

- The combination of the above means we have borrowed furniture from (beautiful, amazing, friendly) Australians while we have been in the country. When we moved to Cairns, we gave it back to the people in Brisbane and thus arrived with.... nothing.

The first priority of a new home is not a sofa and the monster floater we ended up with was created to cover two needs in one: 1. we needed a place to chill which was not the bed 2. visitors from overseas or other will need a place to sleep. A sofa-bed you would say, ours is probably more of a bed-sofa.

First stop was lifeline where we bought a queen size ensemble. It was the only ensemble we could find in any second-hand shop anywhere in Cairns; otherwise I would have settled for something smaller. We paid $100 – thank you Lifeline.

Then we went to Spotlight as they happened to have furniture fabric on sale. It was my husband who had exclusive rights to decide on the fabric, as he is the fashion police at our house (another blog, another time). I was given the choice between an orange corduroy which left nothing on a 1970s disco/bordello or a yellow fabric I was thrilled with; also thrilled by the price: $6 a meter, we got 8 meters, total $48. We also got some cheap cotton to make cushions of: $16.

For the cushions we needed pillows. K-mart is the place to go as they have pillows for sleeping at $3.50 each. For this project we needed 20: total of $70. At K-mart I also bought a roll of nylon rope 3mm wide to use as edges for the pillows. 30 meters cost me $3. At spotlight it would have cost me $2 a meter. Who cares if it is an ugly orange colour, no one sees it anyways.