Author Archives: B

Today me and the small person set off down winding country lanes to a beautiful (rain soaked) hamlet to pick up a new toy. Luckily my latest eBay purchase squeezed into the boot of my little car.

Sold as seen. £18. The answer to my windows-too-large-for-off-the-peg-curtains dilemma. If it works, that is. And if I can teach myself to sew…

Me and Wickes tile and melamine primer have been spending a lot of time together

Good grief.  I know that everybody on DIY forums goes on about how boring kitchen cupboard painting is, but it is PROPER boring.  And rather hard on the back.  It doesn’t help that I’m doing it in brief snatches when small person is asleep (i.e. Sunday afternoon and school day evenings).  But I’m getting there (except for the doors, which will be sprayed by a French polisher when he returns from his holiday).

What started as a battered, mouldy in places and yellow pine/fake pine laminate car crash is slowly taking shape.  The plan was to go for Farrow and Ball Pavillion Gray (why the American Spelling, F&B?), but now that it’s covered in white primer I’m seriously contemplating going for a white finish.  This is in no small way related to the fact that the Artex wall finish is a bugger to ‘cut in’ around neatly.  I also suspect I will need fewer top coats if I go white.  And when it is inevitably chipped the white primer won’t show through.  Hmm…

In other news, the decorators have finished, the builder’s coming on Thursday to complete his snagging list and the carpets are being fitted next Wednesday and Thursday.  The removals people are also coming next Thursday afternoon to MOVE US IN!  There is a small chance that the carpet fitters will still be working as the removal van arrives.  But I’m sure it will all be fine (she said, smiling somewhat maniacally).

As I finished tonight’s painting session I needed a little lift, so I fitted the paper shade in the  sitting room.  I absolutely love it, particularly as it was the last one and reduced to £6.  Yes, £6!  I probably should have waited until we had carpet.   But I did enjoy ten minutes’ day dreaming under it before I locked up for the night.

Bargain paper lamp shade from Next

Those poor blokes are still painting!  I am so grateful that we don’t have to do it as there is a tremendous amount of work there.  Every day I return to the house to check progress and love what I see, but I’ve been thinking, am I respecting its past?  Reading the Victorian Society’s pamphlets on caring for a Victorian home I’m not too sure.

Victorian Society pamphlets: you too can live in a museum*

We’re in the process of having it painted pure brilliant white from top to bottom.   We will end up with a blank canvas as opposed to the tired, multicoloured place we started with.  The Victorians didn’t have access to bright whites: 19th century chemistry didn’t provide the pigments.   I don’t want to live in a museum, and I strongly believe that homes must be adaptable as times change (outside toilet anyone?)  The dingy reds, browns and greens of the 1800s did a great job at concealing soot stains but I’m not sure I could live with them (nor the cluttered, ostentatious styling).  But is painting the house white and filling it with brightly coloured modern textures and images as wrong as the artex and swirly carpets of which I am so critical?  I guess it’s more reversible.  Here are some examples of that epitomise the white-and-bright-and-grey look I love…

Laeticia Lazerges' home via Design*Sponge - that tablecloth fabric is discontinued and I was green with envy when I saw it!

Luke White for Living Etc

EST Magazine via Design*Sponge

Let’s see what I can conjure with 60 litres of trade matt emulsion, two legendary tradesmen and a bit of imagination…

*I love the Victorian Society but feel like a naughty schoolchild for using ‘modern’ paints, fitted carpets and lusting after a side return extension: all no-nos to them!

Bert (the worst cockney ever)

House work (as opposed to housework) is gathering pace.  Yesterday I met with the stained glass lady from a local craft centre who is hopefully going to restore the stained glass front door.  Unfortunately she informed me that the glass was installed in the 1980s.  It’s still beautiful and I’m treating it as a piece of art, even if it’s not original.  And yes, I did just refer to a piece of 80s restoration as ‘art’.  More on that when the quote comes through.

I also met our friendly local chimney sweep.  He did a lovely job and reassured me that both main reception room chimneys are in full working order.  Contrary to my romantic notions of sweeps, he wore a baseball cap and used a giant vacuum, but he did have lovely brushes and cover everything with dust sheets like my childhood favourite Bert.  I was left slightly aghast by the speed at which the ‘smoke test’ whooshed up the chimney.  Having been used to a log burner (80-90% efficient) it’s going to take a while to get used to open fires (80% heat lost up the chimney).  For now I will pop chimney balloons up all fireplaces in the house to keep the drafts at bay until the burning season.  And then weep as most of the heat from our fuel disappears up the chimney.  One day we will get inset wood burning stoves that sit snug in the existing fireplace, like this:

 

insert wood burner

The only snag with the chimneys (there’s always something isn’t there?) was the lack of chimney pot for the sitting room that means the weather has unbridled access to the interior brickwork.  When the priority jobs are done I will have to get hunting for a replacement at architectural salvage yards.  Let’s not think about how much that will cost for the moment.

We’ve been in 2 weeks and have had a few really lucky period features finds.  First, the hall floor…

We always suspected there may have been a lovely minton tiled floor undereath the hideous blue carpet.  On completion day, once I had run around from top to bottom like an excited toddler, I set straight to tearing up a corner of carpet.  Here’s what I found (excuse the dodgy photography):

Today I returned while things were quiet to remove the carpet gripper rods that had been nail-gunned into the tiles :(.  There wasn’t too much damage, and when the budget allows, we’ll get a proper restoration job.  While I was grubbing around the skirting boards with a chisel I thought I’d explore the lino that someone had laid over the last two feet of hallway.  By explore, I mean take a chisel to it – it was rather exciting and about as far as I’ll get to an Indiana Jones-style archeological dig.  I half expected to find concrete or worse, but can you believe somebody laid linoleum over this beauty?!

It seems the Victorians were into chevrons too.

Coming up, a minging bathtub, a concealed fireplace full of bird poo, and a kitchen cupboard full of mould.  Yum.

Okay, so I didn’t get round to taking some aesthetically pleasing pictures of the house before I started packing it into boxes.  Most of these are the pictures I took for the estate agent with my unmodified and unprofessional iPhone camera (and therefore are more about fitting as much into one shot and making it look as large as possible).  But before I start posting pictures of artex, lilac bathrooms and peeling wallpaper in our new home here’s a few snaps of what we’ve left behind.

Front reception room: hall, dining room and study all rolled into one

Middle reception (with baby gate for extra glamour!)

Postage stamp kitchen (with exposed pipework from 11th hour boiler replacement)

Master (if you can call it that) bedroom

Second bedroom

Our replace-the-taps-and-live-with-it bathroom

And a little garden

The new place is terrifyingly more substantial.  But hopefully it should keep me in ‘projects’ for the next decade so perhaps that’s no bad thing.

We’re up to our eyes in boxes here.  And official-looking correspondence.  And scary-looking surveyor’s reports.  After 6 years in our lilliputian house and 15 years living in the middle of a big city we’re off to a new place in market town suburbia. Call it entry-level countryside for soft townies, if you will.

This little house has seen us through a lot, but we’ve only been its custodians for a small part of its 111 year lifetime.  Oh, to take a tour, ghost-of-Christmas-past-style, of what this house has seen, and how it was used.  Tin baths, cast iron ranges, front parlours and kids crammed into every available drawer.  Followed later by gas fires and meat and two veg.  Now wireless radio has become wireless internet.  The phone box on the corner has been rendered redundant by the iPhone in the pocket.  But the trains still chug quietly at the bottom of the embankment, the church bells still ring on a Sunday, and the twit-twoo of owls can still be heard at night as they hunt for city rats on the train line.

We hope we’ve served you well.  You are now a laminate-free zone.  And your chimney is warmed by real flames again.  Your clean but crooked angles are no longer sullied by cheap yellowing pine.  However, I must apologise for not sorting the anaglypta.  If it’s any consolation I hate it as much as you do.

We will miss you little house.