DJ Iain Lee: A home for everything

Records, DVDs, video games, books... for the comedian and DJ Iain Lee, more is definitely more – as long as he can fit it all into his north London flat

While I was presenting the 11 O'Clock Show on Channel 4 I lived with my friend Mackenzie Crook. We originally met when we were both doing stand -up. It was great fun living with him and we still see a lot of each other – he lives just along the road now, in a house that was formerly owned by Peter Sellers, funnily enough.

I bought this flat in Muswell Hill seven years ago. I love Muswell Hill in no small part because it doesn't have a tube station, which makes it feel a little more isolated and less busy than everywhere else in London. But if you need to get into the centre of town quickly, you can still get into Oxford Street in about 25 minutes by bus and train.

There are lots of interesting restaurants here, and some decent bars. You also have a good sense of space as it is quite high up – the views over London can be amazing. I was brought up in a small semi-detached house on a council estate in Slough. I have some really fond memories of that place, but I do also remember I was beaten up a lot of the time for being posh.

When I studied performing arts at Middlesex University I lived in a two-bedroom flat with three other students. It was pretty hideous as we had to turn the living room into a bedroom – but when you're 20, things like that seem exciting. After that I lived in series of rented flats in north London – I moved from Oakwood to Cockfosters.

London has long been my base – I have been offered jobs that would have involved moving to other places but the thought of leaving London has always scared the hell out of me so I turned them down. Although I have thought recently about moving to Japan and living in Tokyo for a year. That's still a possibility, and I've started learning Japanese. I wanted to do something different that was completely unrelated to work.

When we moved into this house it had lain empty for a few years so there was a lot that needed to be done. We ripped out the old kitchen from what is now the sitting-room and installed quite a sleek Moben one in the room next door, which completely altered the shape of the house.

I adore old windows, so I restored the wooden sashes at the front of the house, and double glazed them too. They're beautiful and I couldn't imagine replacing them with uPVC. I have an office at the back of the flat which looks on to the garden. It took me six months to decorate everything because I was doing it on my own – and it was the first bit of decorating I have ever done. It will certainly be the last. Since then, I've always got a bloke in to do those things.

I am not that great at deciding on colours and decorations, and chose everything in rather a panic. I had booked the decorators and kept putting off choosing the colours. Eventually, the day before they came, I just rushed out and bought some samples and they seemed to work.

We have two bedrooms, an en suite one on the second floor, where my girlfriend and I sleep and a spare bedroom on the first floor that is stacked full of old computers. They are vital for playing the original computer games, like Pac-Man.

I have a Commodore 64, a Spectrum and a Dragon 32. I also have a very old Technics portable black-and-white television which you need to connect them to. I am a bit of a geek – my ideal day would probably involve being at home playing computer games all day long and not having to speak to that many people.

I bought a flat-screen plasma TV a few months ago – I'm terrible at making big purchases, I get very nervous. Although I love gadgets, I hummed and hawed as to whether I could justify such an expensive television – but I did finally succumb.

Now I've got heavily into watching Lost, The Sopranos, Curb your Enthusiasm and my favourite films, which are Japanese horrors. I have every book by Kurt Vonnegut, I think he's a fantastic writer, and I cried when he died last year. I like Haruki Murakami a lot, and biographies. I have a huge collection of vinyl, CDs and DVDs – probably over 1,000 CDs and 500 records. In my job as a DJ I need to have lot of music. I'm a big fan of Syd Barrett, Inspiral Carpets, The Monkees and The Cardigans.

At the moment we don't have a great deal of artworks on the wall, but I have just invested in an old Pentax film camera and the plan is to get into black-and-white photography and then frame the results.

I've got one of those iPhones, so I'm always checking Facebook and all that nonsense. It's like crack – I'll be on a bus or something, and I think "Oh, I'll just have a quick look" and I can never stop. I adore cooking, too, and I recently acquired a breadmaker – which makes Italian ciabatta like a dream.

Although there hasn't been that much work done to the flat it has taken rather a long time (around five-and-half years to complete). Now at last everything has been finished. I got rather demotivated halfway through and I lived in a terrible mess for a long time. But it is such a relief now everything is complete and I am very happy to be here.

Television and radio presenter Iain Lee is 34. He lives with his girlfriend in Muswell Hill. His Sunday Wireless Show is on Virgin radio from 10pm-1am every Sunday