Steel Kitten

Dispatches from the bedroom and sick room

The lowest point of the bedroom makeover for me - dodgy electrics, terrible plumbing above the floorboards instead of under, blown paster and rubble everywhere.

Well hello there. It's a bit of a misreable wet morning here and instead of lying in on one of the two days I'm not in the office I was up at 6am bleary-eyed supping tea.

The last few days of my life has only been about two topics - the impending wallpapering session due to commence in the back bedroom and Georgia-belle being hideously unwell again.

Let's talk about the nice stuff first.

Rather than do a load of freelance work over the next four days I have decided to get as much done on the back bedroom as I can. A couple of days ago I found six rolls of Graham and Brown Wall Doctor lining paper (specifically for walls that have minor plaster issues) stuffed in the back of a cupboard. I don't even remember buying it, but it must have been over five years ago as that was the last time we were wallpapering anything! I worked out the dimensions of the room and amazingly it needs 6.3 rolls. Now, I didn't bother subtracting the area of paper that covers the window and door, just factored in straight drops, so I may not have to buy any paper at all. If I do, it will be just the one roll. Wall Doctor paper is paste the wall, so that will speed up everything, and it's paintable.So a bit of a win for me.

All I have to do today is give the ceiling its second coat of paint, take off two more small pieces of skirting, knock holes in the plasterwork to recess the two plug sockets and I'm ready for papering.

Result!

I've decided that I'm going to buy a Farrow and Ball estate emulsion for the room, probably Parma Grey, in the hope that the chalky finish will help disguise any areas of imperfect plaster that the lining paper does not.

Source: Farrow and Ball

Now granted, it doesn't look like the most exciting colour in the world, but because I will be having red and green in the room I don't want a strong colour on the walls.

So that's where we are so far. I still have to source a curtain pole, the overbed lights, and the flooring, and do a makeover on a pine wardrobe, chest of drawers and blanket box for the end of the bed, but I'm really liking the way this is starting to come together. I can now see clearly how all that hard work, which seemed so thankless and boring over the last year, will produce a room that will look fantastic.

And which I will want to transfer to sleep in immediately!

Now, the chickens. I mentioned sickness again. This time Infectious Bronchitis. The chickens have managed to pick up Infectious Bronchitis (IB), presumably from wild birds as now new chickens have been added to my flock, and have gone off the lay. Georgia-belle in particular has suffered badly. She's swollen up to enormous proportions, possible from peritonitis or perhaps cysts on her oviducts, and has swung from having an impacted crop due to a huge volume of body fluid preventing anything going through her digestive system, to sour crop which is now poisening her.

IB is a virus that just has to sort of work it's way out, but in the meantime it can cause secondary infections so the chickens have had antibiotic injections all week to make sure. While Geogia has had hers - and a lot more than the others - she was quite far gone when we realised and went downhill quickly. However, she was still very bright, peeping a lot and showing interest. After a week in my bathroom on medication, the swollen abdomen is recceding but she's come down with sour crop. She's so sick, very weak, eyes closed all the time and is battling horribly.

I'm keeping her warm, getting as much of the fluid and rubbish out of her crop as possible without distressing her too much and getting some anti-fungal medication and nutrient solution into her. It's all I can do until she either recovers or it's clear I have to step in and stop the pain and euthanise her.

What lovely snuffles for an (almost) overhauled bedroom!

A double mid-green bedspread and double faux fur double throw!

It's been a good week for snuffles. I haven't had much chance lately, what with work and very strict financial budgets, but all work and no play makes Steel a dull girl so on the way home Thursday afternoon I dropped in on two charity shops.

And am I glad I did!

You know I'm doing this back bedroom up? Yes, I know still! Well the three snuffles I found fit with the colour scheme we've decided on so I was well chuffed.

First off, a double mid-green bedspread and a double faux fur throw, the fur throw being NEW! Obviously the latter is a massive cat magnet but I'll have to deal with that when the time comes. So out of one charity shop I struggled, with the two heavy large bedspreads shoved in the world's smallest bags, and into the next charity shop to discover this:

Yes, a brand new ceiling light for £6, so out of that shop I staggered with another huge bag to add to the previous two and my handbag. Amazingly straight across the road was my mind-reading husband who had a fancy what shop I'd be in and had parked across the way.

Anyway, the light is still in stock at the retailer, so I've tracked down the matching overbed lights now, and at the same time I found the curtains for the room half price in their sale!

In fact, apart from the overbed lights, some lining paper, a curtain pole and the carpet, everything else I've either bargain hunted for, re-used, been given or intend to refurbish.

Now you might remember originally I had grand plans for the decoration in the room. I think I posted before about planning to do the room in a masculine hotel chic style:

That hasn't quite worked out!

I sat down with Martin and went through all the different magazine features I've saved over the last eight years to see what appealed to him. I was fairly confident being a man he would appreciate hotel chic.I couldn't have been more wrong.

He gave all the various styles of bedrooms a score out of ten - and the one above only got five. Most got six, a few seven, but only one got eight, and it wasn't at all what I expected. It was this one:

This is a picture of the bedroom of natural paint retailer Georgina Barrow, which I saved from an Ideal Home magazine from September 2004. He loved the combination of colours - the red, green and pale blue with touches of brown in the furniture and cushions. Once I looked at it more closely, I started to really like it too, not just for the colours but for the vintage style it had. It's a vey forgiving style too - nothing too formal or matched, which in reality works well for us as nothing we own has ever matched anyway!

So that's why the curtains I bought are red, the bedspread green and a faux fur throw brown. It's why I'm buying thick grade plain lining paper to paint pale blue and stripping back the varnish on some modern pine furniture we have in the loft so it looks softer and less jarring on the eye. The floorboards are in appalling condition and even painting them won't hide the problems, so carpet will have to be laid.

It's why I've spent evenings and weekend getting the bedroom doors looking like this:

60+ years of paint on both the doors and metal surrounds...

...not to mention the rim locks and handles

....to this...

The doors stripped, sanded and matt varnished to give them a deeper colour. The metal frames stripped and painted with Farrow and Ball paint leftover from doing the cupboards in the ktichen.

Stripped and polished, the rim locks and handles turn out to be brass (or perhaps bronze?) and copper, well worn on the handles

Who knew the house was hiding such great doors and door furniture? We didn't until we decided to strip them and see if they could be saved rather than turf them out as everyone has done before.

Suddenly the house has begun to acquire a personality.

Isn't it odd how the tiniest details can suddenly do that and bring everything together?

 

 

The driveway gets done

We're almost done now on the driveway! Six years I've been waiting for this. 

I wanted to tell you all about it sooner but it has been dragging on a bit. We're about two weeks out on the timings for getting it done due to cock-ups and mistakes, and now we're at a natural lull while the post concrete sets. We still have a massive gatepost to set in place and half a fence panel, then we can paint the panels and posts, and roll back the aggregate around them. So another couple days tops. But it's close enough for me. 

The driveway being scraped eight days ago

It's been an odd, but very satisfying feeling to have saved up for this project and paid cash for it. Just like the Fiat 500, we were determined not to take a loan out for it and saved up the money. 

Martin was quite nervous watching everything being ripped up.

When it's your own hard cold cash being handed over it makes you a lot more apprenhensive.

We laid the membrane down two days ago in the very early morning...

Getting something on credit can sometimes feel like you're removed from the whole thing. I've felt more personally invested in the things we've paid cash for than I ever remember feeling about things we've bought with loans. It somehow seemed less real with credit. 

 

...ready to take delivery of 10 tonnes of Shierglas Silver granite at lunchtime

With credit you don't have the weight of those thousands of personal moneysaving decisions to remember. The takeaways you went without. The holidays done on the dirt cheap, if done at all. The broken dishwasher you decided not to replace just yet so you could save the money instead. 

The work begins to barrow and rake the aggregate over the drive

Then there's all the comments from people who couldn't understand how we could put up with it for so long. "Just get a loan!" You'd be surprised how often we've heard that over the last couple of years, despite the recession. We even had one person who said they coudln't stand the sight of the drive and so didn't want to visit us anymore, as if to emotionally blackmail us into getting a loan to do the drive. It didn't work. We simply told them "Fair enough. Goodbye." We're no worse off without them as it turns out. 

90% of the fencing completed yesterday. The gatepost and half panel will go in shortly.

To celebrate what is a massive event for us, we went round to our local garden centre and ordered a huge winter hanging basket to be made up that will last until next June. When that turns up in two weeks, the driveway will be completely finished.

What a great feeling!

Revamping an office chair

After

Before

You see before you what was a most sorry looking office chair this morning. 

It cost me a small fortune a few years ago when I set up freelance, but it was worth it because it has all sorts of nifty ergonomic little tricks, including a pump up lumbar support and spring loaded arms that extend so you can hover right above the keyboard and still be supported. 

Anyway, expensive and ergonomic it may be, but it's also looking decidedly shabby and not in a chic way.

So the order of this morning was an attempt to recover it with some of the Amy Butler fabric I found a few months ago. It started well for the seat but then descended into chaos for the back rest. The seat came off fine but I just couldn't get the back off, even with a long screwdriver, pliers, tyre iron and a frenzy of swearing, so settled for pulling back the plastic frame, stapling it to the side against the wooden base of the back rest and tucking the excess out of sight. 

I don't think it looks too bad. I still have the neck rest to do, but I'll do that next weekend.

What do you think? 

Telecomms

The cupboard alcove two days ago.In the end we had to prise off the piece of wood holding the electrics in place and carefully lay it down on the floor so I could carry on taking out the bricks. 

Well, I'm slowing down on the bedroom this week. I have a little more to do today and then I have to leave it until the plumber and electrician turn up to do the pipework and wiring. We went window shopping yesterday and decided on the paper, flooring, wardrobes and bed that will be going in the room so we know what the bill for that will be and roughly when we will need to go and buy it. 

To fill the impending gap in that project until the plumber turns up, we switched our attention across to the driveway and have been touching base with all the contractors who will be helping us overhaul it as well as choosing what aggregate and fencing we want. As usual there are some snags, which as I've said before are par for the course with this house and to be expected. We have to have a 20% contingency fund for our projects instead of the usual 10% people recommend precisely for this reason. This time one of the snags is a combination of telephone lines compounded by the dishonesty of the previous owners.

The top wire on each side are ours.

We have two phone lines attached to the house; one at the front that comes in through the living room and the other that stretches right the way around the side and the back of the house and comes in through the back bedroom, which was put in for a lodger about 10 years ago. When he left, the previous owners cut the line coming in to the living room and kept the phone line at the back of the house. We later found out they owed a lot of money back to people for building jobs they never completed so we assume to stop the phonecalls about it all they had the main phone line cut. So for the last six years we've had a phoneline extension that stretches across the floor of the back bedroom, down under the floorboards, into the next bedroom, down through a hole in the ceiling of the living room and across that room to the main bay window where it connects to the phone.

Now, to have the 20 tonnes of aggregate delivered that will cover our driveway, we have to have a tipper truck. A 20-tonne tipper truck will not be able to tip onto our driveway because of the active telephone line stretching across the driveway, so we've been getting quotes for two 10-tonne tipper trucks. 

Twenty tonnes of the aggregate we want on a 20-tonne tipper truck will cost £160 to be delivered. Twenty tonnes of aggregate on two 10-tonne tipper trucks will cost £500 delivery. Yep you read that right. £500. I've shopped around. I've taken names. I've kicked butt. It's about £500 wherever I go. 

So I have to have the innactive phone line at the front taken away and the active phoneline that is in the truck's way taken from the back of the house and fed into the place where the innactive one was at the front.

Are you still with me?

So I'll be spending about £150 on a telecomms engineer to save nearly £200 in delivery costs.

However, that money saving pleasure is short-lived. The previous owners built up the drain by the front door for some reason we cannot fathom apart from it seems a strange desire to stick a foot thick of concrete around it. We now have to smash through that concrete and pay a builder to lower the drain shaft by about two courses of bricks so it doesn't stick up above the aggregate.

The builder is coming this afternoon to give us a quote for doing it.

How much do you want to bet it will be about £200. 

This is why I enjoy smashing walls down.

The year of stone

Two men with a van turned up on our driveway this morning. Two hours later our driveway is clear and they're starting work on getting the rest round from the garden by wheelbarrow. 

All that stone we rescued last year is going to a good home. A property developer knocked on our door earlier in the week and asked us if we would part with it. In our hearts we knew we were not going to use it so we let it go. The stone is being taken around to a small farm development within the village and used to repair a section of old wall around its boundary. 

We put in days sorting out that stuff but decided in the end not to use it for a wall. It was far too expensive to have done and we never seemed to able to find a good quote and a good waller. It was always one but not the other, and eventually the dream faded and we decided not to do it. It was too much expense for an uncertain outcome. 

I've sat here thinking about it for a few days and the only conclusions I can come to for what has happened over the last 11 months are these:

• We were meant to rescue that stone. I was in the right place at the right time and it was the right thing to do. One hundred and fifty year old stone should not be smashed up and used under roadways. It's a piece of history. 
• We were meant to be custodians - not owners - of it until a worthwhile project came along. We've looked after it for 11 months, sorted and graded it, and learnt a lot about it. Now we pass it on to someone else to crete something from it. 
• It's supposed to be a wall. All of its energy for the last one hundred and fifty years has been in being a wall. Now it will be again. In the end we had decided to use it for a rockery and landscaping projects but really that's not a fitting use for it. 

It goes to a good home. I'm missing it already. Yes it made our driveway a mess, but there was always something new to look at when you picked up a stone. It was quarried off the side of a cliff and you can see the shells and fossils in it. Some pieces has stratification lines through it denoting a period millions of years ago when the original plant matter was laid down and compressed over time. The stone made you look history in the face and try to make sense of what you saw. It spoke to me in a way that modern brick never can. 

I've kept a few interesting pieces and some of the body busters are being left to make our new front door step.

That way we have something tangible to remind us of our year as custodians of history. 

Just 10 days - not

A masculine hotel chic style

I'm on holiday this week to decorate the second bedroom using the image above for inspiration. I had planned to strip the woodchip wallpaper, remove the existing jerry-built fitted wardrobes, make good the plaster, sand and paint the woodwork and put down some new flooring. Nothing complicated - ten days max. 

As usual, what started as a simple job has morphed into something much, much more complicated. All was going swimmingly. I found a great product that really helped get the woodchip off quickly and two walls were done in record time. Then came cupboard removal.

I hadn't looked in the cupboards for years, not since Martin took over the room for his planes. Martin cleared out the floor to ceiling clutter this morning and then I got a good look. "Oops," said Martin. My heart stopped. 

To one side there was severely blown plaster. Above it a suspicious wet patch. Martin's betting on the guttering, I'm betting on a poor roofing job when the previous owners took out the top of an old range chimney and covered it over with tiles - the old chimney lines up too perfectly with the water damage for it to be coincidence.  I've laid money down that they failed to put a roofing membrane up over the gap before they put the roof tiles on. 

At the bottom of the cupboard a spaghetti junction of water pipes, some in use, some redundant. All ABOVE the  floorboards not below, which would stop any fitted wardrobes being put into place. 

To the right electric wires are just casually strung along a piece of wood. Shoehorned poorly into a threeway junction are the electrics for the attic lights, the shaver point in the next door bathroom and both lead up and off from the boiler electrics through a redundant water heater box. Oh and see that dark circular area about a foot down from the wires on the back wall? Yeh...two wires sticking out of the wall. Not sure of they're live or not at this point. There's a reason why people are not allowed to do their own electrics. Because they make a pig's ear of it and end up killing someone. 

So in the space of five minutes three things became apparent:

1) I needed a plumber

2) I needed an electrician

3) I needed a stiff drink, but all I had to hand was a cup of tea so I drank that in record time instead

The room will not be done in 10 days.

The plumber that I trust to do all of our work cannot make it until the 13th April to make an assessment of what needs to be done. But he's so good at what he does I'm willing to wait. I still need to find an competent electrician. 

So this week all I can do is make sure as much of the cupboards are out as possible without disturbing the electrics, make the walls and ceiling good to go by filling and repairing where I need to, and then coat them both in a layer of flexible basecoat to help fill some of the fine plaster cracks. I'll strip, sand and paint the room door, frame and windowsill. But that I'm afraid is that until the plumbing and electrics are done. 

Foiled by the house once again. 

Sometimes on a still night you can hear it laughing...

Is this the spring clean fever upon me?

After a hectic first half of Saturday rushing around helping Martin with car stuff that took us out to a scrap yard in Wantage, Oxford, I spent the later afternoon, evening and all of today getting utterly immersed in cleaning. Must be the influence of the spring equinox. 

I didn't mean to. I don't like cleaning. I object to spending the time on it. But what began as an attempt to sort out all the jars in the top half of the fridge morphed into:

• A full fridge clean, including all tops of jars and bottles wiped clean.
• A full counter clean and rearrange to create more space for books and for me to prepare food up at the top of the kitchen. 

• A kitchen cupboard rearrange to get as much off the counters as possible.
• The winter curtains being taken down and washed.
• The floors in the bottom half of the house scrubbed with salt and very hot water.
• A full deep clean of the utility area, which led to a partial paint and makeover.

The latter was definitely not planned at all this year, but the area had become too cluttered, dirty and untidy for it to carry on as it was. Even Martin made a spontaneous comment on the state of it about a week ago so it must have been bad! He never normally notices things like that. So we decided that the back of the house had to change into something that was easy to keep clean and tidy. 

But I needed inspiration. 

After a search online I found a lovely stock of utility rooms images to take inspiration from. All the pictures below are from www.housetohome.co.uk

All the cleaning detergents are decanted into interesting shaped bottles and stored in a cupboard.

 

I like the idea of a small wall-mounted clothes airer.

Excellent idea to hang the ironing board up and out of the way.

 

Love the ironing board cover and the curtains add a nice burst of colour

 

The gingham material is a nice touch

So far it looks like this, which is a better and cleaner but a bit big and bare and still some way to go before it is completed (note the thermometer at the back to keep track of how cold it gets in winter so we can warm it up before the water in the washing machine pipes freeze). 

 

A bit bare - needs a cupboard or a shelf

So, I undertook an online shopping expedition to purchase new cleaning and laundry equipment that I've been putting off for months:

• An over door iron and ironing board dock for the back room door (to the right of the washing machine).
• A new ironing board cover covered in little bubblecars and vespas to replace my existing one that has holes (oh the shame)!

  

• A pure bristle wood broom to replace my kitchen broom which has no bristles on front of it and lumps of hard plaster in the middle (the plasterer used my broom to sweep up the fallen wet plaster!), which means I miss more than I sweep up.
• A general household brush, again wood and pure bristle, to get into corners that my stiff dustpan brush cannot. 
• 10 wooden seed trays, which will be fitted with small casters and used as storage underneath the kitchen cupboards

• A Simplehuman bin which will fit inside my sink cupboard and hold carrier bags as well as providing a place to store them. No more hanging carrier bags of rubbish off my Rangemaster's knobs!

• Booked someone to come in and eco-clean my range. The poor thing is past the point where my paltry efforts even scratch the surface.

It felt good to get things in order this weekend. For someone who dislikes shopping it also felt strangely relaxing to do it. Perhaps it's not so bad when it's getting things you need to be organised and will make your environment work better and more efficiently. 

I still can't do clothes shopping though. Hate it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scene from my bus: little

 

A lazy weekend

The end of this week has not so much been a wind down from work more an escape by the skin of my teeth.

I've really overdone it the last few weeks and the chickens came home to roost yesterday. A combination of too many very long days and disturbed sleep for the last three weeks meant my body had enough and I was woken up by a migraine just after midnight Friday morning. One side of my face had dropped and I felt like I was lying on hard concrete block. I kept touching my pillows thinking somehow they had fallen off the bed and a big book was in their place, but I didn't remember putting it there. When I felt them they were soft to my fingers but like concrete to my face. I was spacey and nauseous on and off all Friday, culminating in me completing forgetting what my home postcode was when someone asked. It was a total blank spot in my mind and someone had to look at my personnel records to find out what it was. 

That's when I realised that my plans for this weekend has to be cancelled. I was supposed to be accompanying Martin to Warwickshire for a retro car 'bring and buy' today and then tomorrow I was out all day at an auction. I cancelled, then Martin had a think and he admitted he was knackered and cancelled too! 

Last night, still with headache, Martin gave my neck and left shoulder a really hard massage to try and force the bunched muscles to just relax and let go of the nerves they were pinching. For the first time in weeks I slept right through the night and woke up at 8am without a headache, just a bit of stiffness in my shoulder. 

So now we have the weekend to ourselves! 

And finally I can show you what's been going on over here. 

Garden - the shed is up and the chicken coop built off it. 

Just after putting up, and before its spring paint job. Still a few trim pieces to put up.

Both need a coat of wood preservative and paint still. We actually put it on one Sunday during the most ridiculous windy conditions. Once we had put the base down, we decided to go for it and spend another hour getting the shed panels up, an ingenious feat when battling gusts of high wind. But with rock, battens and me hanging on to corners for dear life, eventually it went up. The shed will have a water butt on each side, one for the chickens and to water the troughs of tomatoes and spinach that will be hung off the sides of the shed, and the other to provide water to the garden in general. 

Forest garden - A mulberry and plum tree are now in the ground, along with some daffodil and allium bulbs, comfrey and mint. 

The mulberry and plum in the conservatory a couple of weeks ago waiting for planting 

Half of the goodies waiting to be planted. the other half were by the washing machine.

There's a few fruit bushes - blackcurrants, redcurrants, white currants and a goji berry - which will be underplanted by a few insect attractors - different mints, verbena, lemon balm - plus of course the obligatory comfrey, which will provide lots of mulch and nutrients, and jerusalem artichokes, which to be honest I'm growing for mulch reasons alone (their legendary wind generating properties are not required in this house!). I also bought this season's potatoes (first earlies Arran Pilot and main crop Maris Piper) and onions, red and white.

And of course my birthday willow is in! I've had to advance my plans though and plant it in two spots due to the sheer amount I had. I still have more in the fridge! Both areas are forming a privacy screen and windbreak for the first couple of years and then later we will coppice them for fuel and living willow structures of basketry. 

Willow area one, a combination of Chinese Willow, Q83 - Salic Triandra x Viminalis and Salix Viminalis 'Cane Osier'. The first two are good for fuel, the last is good for rough basketry. 

A close up of the willow, 3 inches above ground, 9 inches below.

Conservatory - managed to get a light blue spotty oilcloth from John Lewis and Union Jack placemats so now I'm beginning to see how I need to tie in the replacement blinds.

I've found some fabric which is mostly white with thin red and light blue stripes and these should tone in with the table so I just have to measure up how much I need to replace the existing blind fabric and find the fabric stiffener. 

Crafts - I haven't touched crafts lately or really thought about them until I was suddenly grabbed by this Amy Butler fabric in John Lewis.

 

 

Clematis has always been a favourite fabric of mine and I found it for £5 a metre instead of £11 so I pounced on it and bought the rest on the roll, about 5.5 metres. I've always wanted to do her wide-legged lounge pants so now I'm inspired.

InStitches, Amy Butler

It will definitely have to wait until after all this year's plants are in the ground, maybe the end of April or beginning of May, unless I'm particularly inspired and I knock up a pair one evening.

By the way, a massive thank you from me goes out to 38 Degrees who yet again have bought pressure to bear and produced a result. That disgusting Nocton mega-dairy has been declined planning permission for the second time. Thank goodness for that.