Hmm. Not a lot of interest in the sofa yet - one lady was quite excited for a while until she discovered it was a long discontinued model and she couldn't get a cover for it from Bemz. (The toddler car seat I put up at the same time has gone though, so a partial success!)

I do think it's a waste just to throw the sofa away, given that it's largely sound. It shocks me that so much ends up in landfill when it could be reused. I think proper re-upholstery isn't really an option, given the price, but I have sent enquiries off to a couple of loose cover companies to see what they might be able to do. It looks a lot cheaper ( around five hundred pounds for something plain and inoffensive) but I suspect the snag will be the odd design of the sofa. The seat cushions are fixed, even though they've been made to look as though they're loose. Hard to describe, and no doubt even harder to make a loose cover for.

I've done it successfully in the past - the off-white Habitat Jasper sofa in the small sitting room was bought for my first little flat in Brockley in 1996, in the dark green that I then thought was the height of sofa sophistication. I had two plain cotton canvas washable loose covers made for it when we had our first baby in 2002 and it's been fine ever since. Not the most exciting sofa in the world, but not a DFS-style bulbous monstrosity either. ( With apologies to anyone who has a DFS sofa - perhaps it's just me but I am always amazed by how huge and hideous they look on those pamphlets that seem to fall out of every weekend newspaper!)