IKEA have been making Klippan sofas for 25 years. At under 150 quid they're ideal for the relatively skint furniture buyer, and 2 years ago, emboldened by the receipt of a miniscule tax rebate, I bought one. Up until that point I'd been spending relaxed evenings on a two-seater red vinyl sofa which looked quite beautiful, but had borne the brunt of my pendulous bottom for 5 years and had had to be reinforced with a plank of wood. It was all held together with sellotape and string. It almost looked panic-stricken every time I approached it. It had to go.

Sadly, the range of covers that IKEA sell for their Klippan sofa is to be found wanting. They've gone most of the way around the snooker table – blue, green, pink, red, white and black – but have stopped short of brown, which is what I was particularly keen on in order to beautifully compliment my kindergarten colour scheme: yellow walls, red carpet. (Yes, I know.) Jenny had a good idea: buy a white one, and dye it. Woolworths sell packs of DYLON, powdered dye which you sling in the washing machine with a quantity of salt, alllowing you to radically transform all manner of fabrics at the push of a button. Two packets were bought, a quantity sufficient for “curtains”, and I got dyeing. But it was a miserable failure. The dye failed to penetrate a significant surface area of the sofa cover, giving an unpleasant camouflage look which is totally inappropriate for a living room – what's the point of a sofa if you can't even find it?* Rolling my eyes and tutting, I shoved the ruined cover in a cupboard and decided to come back to it another day.

Sunday was that day. I intended to show the Klippan sofa cover who was boss, and bought three packets of DYLON and a kilo and a half of salt, which I dumped in my Bosch Classixx 1000 washing machine, setting the dial to a 60º wash. All seemed to be going well, but after an hour the machine started making a noise which suggested mechanical failure. It ground to a halt, with a single red light flashing. No attempt to revive the machine using standard methods (mouth to mouth, heart massage) made any difference, and I started to get cross, as I immediately imagined I'd have to buy a new one. Jenny suggested that I get it repaired instead. Brilliant. An Eastern European gentleman from a company called Domex turned up yesterday afternoon. He fixed it in 3 minutes for the standard £48+VAT call-out charge, which is an hourly rate I aspire to. He advised me not to try and wash items along with 1.5kg of cooking salt in the future; it's a piece of advice I intend to follow as closely as I possibly can.

The sofa cover is now almost completely a uniform brown colour, but not quite. Just stopping short of satisfactory. Excellent.

*This “joke” stems from a gig that the Kenny Process Team and Gag did at Havil Hall, Camberwell, in 1994. It was a disastrous gig which ended up with me arguing with the man who provided the PA, but that's not relevant right now. Suffice to say, he was something of a dick, and had set up two large PA stacks which came in army camouflage-style casing. Matt, KPT's bass player, walked in for the soundcheck and looked around the room. “Has anyone seen the PA?” he asked.