Tuesday 29 June 2010

House Hunting and New Wool

I'm back after a couple of weeks away, house hunting. We had an offer accepted on a house, and I'd even started packing boxes, maybe a bit too prematurely. The survey came back and was bad: new electrics required, plumbing very old and a bit suspect, damp in the bathroom, floorboards and joists rotted though, and worst of all, the deal breaker: a new roof required. Problem was that it was already at the top of our budget.

Oh well! Start again.

In the meantime, I've got some new wool, a white synthetic, bought for £1 a ball at the pound shop. Yuk! Yuk! I can hear you thinking. And I have to admit, I wasn't convinced at first, but it is crocheting up really nicely: all white vintage stripe, except there aren't any stripes.

Worst of all, I've lost the charger for my camera, and cannot take any pictures at the moment, which has put me off blogging.

Back soon with some white stripe pictures, and some pictures of the newly finished, and not at all bad, crochet vest top.

Tuesday 1 June 2010

Sunday: No Cost Conservatory Makeover

On Sunday, we interspersed playing in the garden in the heat, with a no-cost makeover of my mum's conservatory using things we found in the house and shed.

Previously it contained heavy, flowery, rather dated 1980's style curtains, green painted furniture, and a lot of boot room/porch junk, like scarves, hats, coats, vases, etc. Although it is on the side of the house, my mum's house like lots of Scottish houses faces its back to the wind and rain, and you have to go round the back to get in the front door, if you know what I mean. So people tend to come in the side conservatory, and leave their coats and things there.
So, here's what we did: "Mum?", I said tactfully, "Do those curtains have white linings? Maybe they'd be nice hung up on their own. They'd look like white cotton curtains". And after bleaching, they seem to be quite nice. Here they are:

Just outside the window, sheltering from the inevitable rain we had later, in the woodpile, you can spy a little white chair. These were previously green. I painted them with some white paint, and I think they look nice now. The old pine in the picture is a bench at the table, which is actually an old church pew.

Here are the chairs perched out in the woodpile. I had to paint them with gloss, because that is all that was available, and it is quite a smelly paint, so we left the chairs outside for a couple of days.

Then, while the paint was drying and the curtains were bleaching, we took some photos around the garden:



and put them in old clip frames to hang on the conservatory wall

above an old blue plant pot, waiting for a new plant to fill it,


above an old cupboard, that used to belong to my gran. She probably bought it in the 1930's. It wasn't an expensive piece of furniture, so we painted it a nice soft cream, using emulsion. It will need an eggshell top coat eventually, but we were 30 miles from the nearest paint shop, and trying not to spend any money. The little cupboard now contains all the hats, scarves etc that were lying around.
The little label is a wooden sign of my mum's saying something like "leave room for the angels to dance in your garden".