Hallway updates

Well, as promised, here are some photos of the new addition to the hallway. We got this guy off ebay for £150 + £40 delivery, so not exactly the deal of the century, but to be honest it was a bit spur of the moment.  I was tired of our hallway looking like Selfridges on Boxing Day. Here is it after I've tidied up:

And, here is the guy we bought, sitting in the stairwell. He looked so good out there I was tempted to leave him.  We really, really need to paint our walls white.

The ebay sellers were brilliant, helping GG get up the stairs, and even giving us a 2 hour delivery window on a Sunday. I love that kind of service.  You can also see here, his brother, the double width version in his native habitat:

Actually this photo is scary, its a little too kitsch for me, and GG and I are both not 100% sure that he's the right solution to our problem yet.
Nevertheless, we moved him inside and loaded him up with shoes.  I sorted through all the boxes, picked 4 nice ones to keep since not everything would fit inside the cabinet, selected 5 pairs of too-pointy heels leftover from 2003 (that I stupidly lugged all the way from Melbourne and haven't worn since) for Good Sammys.  Detour: For those of you who don't know - 'Good Sammys', short for 'Good Samaritan', is the nickname that Australians give to all charity shops in Perth (of any organisation), mostly because it has this cute and memorable seal on the shopsigns:

And, voila! Shoes under control, ideal dumping ground for keys, wallet, phone - and some space to display random stuff including an utterly pretentious selection of books. Yay!

We're still getting used to walking in the room and BAM! seeing a hulking great piece of furniture sitting in there. Not sure how long this guy will live in our house for (probably forever if we take as long to address this situation as we are the bathroom).
We might end up going for something simpler, more modern, and less space hungry (probably less practical too, but that's never been my strong point) - such as this long bench from Ikea:

 

When we eventually have a real wardrobe, most of the shoes can go in there, and we could get a 1 or 2 square baskets to slide under the bench for shoes we wear every day.  It also leaves space for coat hooks above, and all in all would look a lot better. Sorry g plan.