the house today

Progress on the house has been slow, with weekends being taken up lately by Helfa Gelf rather than DIY. The changes have been small but significant, and mostly effected by the husband. The change that has brought the warmest glow of pride to his face has been putting new (old) doors on some of the rooms upstairs. The ledge and brace doors that we had felt too 'cottagey' for a house like this. Now we have some freshly hung Victorian four-panel doors instead and they look pretty marvellous compared to what came before. I'm sure no-one else will notice the alteration, but to us it seems dramatic.

These are pictures of our bedroom today. Remember it? We moved into this room nearly four months ago but it remains rather bare and semi-finished. There are a lot of things still wrong with it (crimson velvet hand-me-down curtains anyone?) and that rug I bought reeks rather horribly, but it is at least starting to feel more comfortable. The pictures show a reproduction vintage geological map of the UK (get it here), grey ticking stripe bed linen from The White Company, vintage Welsh blanket, bed from here, our new pair of bedside tables and a chest of drawers that were £40 from a local antiques shop. Slowly but surely, things are getting better.

In other news, I bought this antique Persian Tabriz rug from eBay for £66 yesterday. Doubtless it will smell pretty dubious too, but I am still happy. Whoop! 

office chairs

Sincere apologies for my absence, and the absence of any new work here lately. I have been preoccupied with studio preparations, namely the refurbishment of this beast of a work bench.


Thoughtlessly, I omitted to take photos of it in its original state. Here you can see I've planed off the dark, sticky goo that was deeply ingrained in its top surface. That job took days. I've just finished waxing the top now, and am prepping the base to be painted. It's been a tough job, but it will be such a useful piece of furniture once it's nice and clean!

The other thing that has been preoccupying me at least for the last twenty-four hours is the pursuit of a half-decent-looking office chair. It's a hard life I lead, I tell you. Now I hate most office chairs as a rule but I need something that is adjustable because I have such terrible posture and spend so much time at my desk that I am in danger of damaging myself. So what am I to do? They are so ugly! Of course I like the vintage printers' style chairs, but I wonder if they are any good for your back. I think I need something at least a little more modern.

There is one that I like: godfather of all modern office chairs, the Fred Scott designed Supporto task chair. It looks terribly ordinary in standard 'office' colours of black, grey, blue, but the coloured versions are a joy. I particularly like the low wide back version. Shame that they start at about £800 for a new one, and less for a battered vintage one. Deary me.


Twenty Twenty One, £990


eBay, starting bid £345


eBay, starting bid £125

Image from Supporto.

Image from Spaceist.

progress

We started off with a room that looked like Satan's boudoir, all black walls and gloom that rose into a cavernous ceiling.


Hours of stripping, wrecking, plastering and painting later:






Things have gotten a bit out of hand here. I will be briefed for another Honda ad this morning, then I'm off to the dentist for some unpleasantries. We've been trying our best to knock this place into a habitable kind of shape and, with a large group of friends landing on our doorstep on June 11th, we're going to have to make some serious progress quickly! Oh, and some furniture might be nice. It's all marvellous fun, though.

DIY lampshade

Remember this post, when we first found our house? I said in it that there appeared to be a George Nelson bubble lamp in the dusty loft. Well, there was not one, but two of them. Sadly, they were not the originals, just some cheapo copy with nasty gilt nipples on the bottom (instead of the chrome ring). They were torn and the wire had corroded inside, leaving a green stain on the plastic. I was loath to throw them away because I like their shape, so after a bit of dithering I decided to strip the plastic off and to find some new way of using them. I'm always advocating the acts of re-purposing and recycling, so to throw them away would have been wasteful.



Now I've stripped them and cleaned them up I'm wondering what to do. I will certainly spray paint them to cover the corroded parts - white is the colour of choice right now, but I also toyed with the idea of using a colour (Yellow? Blue? Industrial black?) and then simply hanging them like cages over some nice bulbs. But then I'm also wondering if maybe I could get a bit more creative with them - covering them in some way - paper or fabric, plain or patterned? I rather like shades like this one (below) from Gong, so I'm wondering, with the right fabric, whether I could make something similar with my frames? Maybe I could even design a fabric and get it printed onto silk by Spoonflower and use that? Now that would be properly bespoke.



Or maybe they can just be the base for something fantastical (by Hutch Studio) or fun.


What do you think? What would you do?

progress

Well, progress of a sort. Sometimes you've just got to rip the crap out of a place before you can put anything back. This will be our master bedroom. Remember how it was, with the black, patterned wallpaper? Not much has been done to it since we stripped it, but on Thursday we got a chap in to rip down the walls and ceiling for replastering. Now we have a very large hole that opens up into the roof space. I call this progress.




Did you all have a lovely weekend? We went for a rainy walk to Aber Falls with some friends, ate a lot of food and tried to keep the dust at bay at home. It's a hard life...

Lighting

The house is still in a state, but today I seem to be obsessing about lighting. In our old house it wasn't much of an issue because the ceilings were so low that, for the most part, only inset downlighting was possible. In our new place, there is a tall, if not terribly wide, space over the staircase and galleried study (photo above, ignore the loft ladder on the left) that is currently empty and could do with something dramatic to light it up. We also have a 12-foot-high ceiling in the black-papered master bedroom that has no light hanging from it either. Instead, in that room, there is a single, horrible wall lamp positioned in a useless spot. I have a horror of wall lamps, and of the UFO-type of lighting that fits tight against a ceiling. We have at least two of each of those in our new house and they make me feel a bit sick.


So I've been having a think about lighting, and wondering how we can have something fabulous in these spaces without bankrupting ourselves. One of my favourite lighting designers at the moment is Lindsey Adelman. I cannot get enough of these branching pendants: so simple and organic, I think they would work in almost any space. However, I would have to get another mortgage in order to be able to afford them, so I'm considering turning lighting designer and making my own. Lindsey's site has a DIY version of the branching pendant, in case you're a bit handy with electrical bits and bobs. I may rope the husband into this (PhD in electrical engineering? I think he will be useful).



I also spotted this rather delightful confection (above) by Winnie Lui at Rockett St George today. It costs a cool £13,148. I think I could make my own quite easily, don't you? A few trips to the charity shops and boot sales, a rummage in an electrical shop, some bits of fishing wire and hey presto... or maybe not.


In other news, this is the sitting room now. We are moving in next Friday. I get the feeling we will have to work our tits off to make this place even a little bit more ready to receive us!

Happy Friday

What are you up to this weekend? We have had chunks of our house hacked away this week for the damp course and tanking on the rear wall of the living room. The image above shows the old doorway that used to lead into the house that is attached to the rear of ours. It's a bit of a mess in there to say the least. Whilst the plasterers are finishing off, we will be continuing the difficult task of stripping the stairs. We are using a solvent-free, water based paint stripper that is good, but which is struggling against some paintwork that is probably more than a hundred years old, if not much older. Other than that, we'll be doing a bit of gardening and the rest of the wallpaper stripping. Hooray!