Turning a house into a home

Our apartment is slowly taking shape… We no longer have a heap of shoes in front of the door, but now (try to) neatly store our footwear in a shoe cabinet, which took four hours to assemble on a cold winter evening (not sure our neighbours enjoyed the hammering, but it was definitely a bonding experience as a couple). We have a custom-made sideboard (made by Andre’s dad!) packed with papers I never get round to sorting. The kitchen now has an oven cloth hook and several matching fruit baskets (sounds silly, but makes the counter look very organised). And… we ordered a new sofa: a huge leather U-shaped 6-seater with chaise longue, which should be delivered in August (I would like to highlight “should” here, because you never know, the Italy-Malta trip could take up to six months as well, considering the waves and all that…).

Malta’s not the ideal place to buy furniture. The selection is very limited (everyone ends up with the same stuff, in different colours if one's lucky) and delivery times are atrociously long. And since everything needs to be shipped, there’s the occasional shipping damage. One of our kitchen cabinets was damaged on its voyage from il bel paese and took weeks to be replaced, delaying the counter top delivery and leaving us with a piece of chipboard as makeshift counter for months. Not a tragedy since my cooking skills are very limited, but not aesthetically pleasing either.

And then there’s my plants… In the past, I never had a thing for plants. I did have a cactus on my PC tower as a teenager, but that’s as far as it went: tiny and low-maintenance. Now I have a lemon tree on the balcony, a ficus benjamina in a stylish grey pot, a spider plant, a yucca palm tree and lots of unnamed plants (not because they’re new species, but simply because I don’t remember what they’re called). I think plants brighten up a room and add that touch of class. Unless your dog chews off all the leaves that is.

We’ve still got a long way to go as far as furnishing and decorating is concerned. And a lot depends on – once again – the centre of our universe: the little hairy one. If and when Gizmo learns to behave, we can finally buy a nice carpet (at the moment the black devil is into running off with the kitchen carpet), put our plant pots on the floor (instead of finding a spot for them on every cabinet, which may one day even collapse under the weight) and sit on soft, high-quality chairs (thankfully we didn’t spend a fortune on our current chairs, because last year Gizmo chewed one of them, which I managed to replace, although it took great effort because production had been discontinued).

In short, turning a house into a home doesn’t happen overnight. Especially when you live in Malta with a furry destroyer lab…