Painting and crafting

I’m not lost in Spain somewhere! We came home at the end of October, and whilst the weather had been good here for most of the month (our housesitter got to enjoy the pool for most of her time here), it changed as soon as we got home. I hate November with a vengeance, so after ploughing through the holiday laundry and emptying the Moho, I decided to get stuck into something that I would enjoy so as not to get the winter blues. So I headed down to the basement guest room and painted the wardrobe the same as I’d done the chest of drawers next to it a couple of years ago. 

Obviously it hasn’t taken me all of this time 😄 but there’s a lot to do with two coats of paint, two coats of clear wax, dark wax in the nooks and crannies, and buffing in between.  I then decided to paint the inside of the doors and do something interesting for when you open the doors. So that meant most of those coats again! 

Here’s a reminder of what they originally looked like. I hate wooden drawer knobs like that!

Ok, time for the reveal……

Here’s what I did with the interior (and ignore all the stuff in there, I have to find space for Moho things during winter). This isn’t an interiors blog, so I don’t have to ‘stage’ perfectly. 😁😁😁

It’s Annie Sloan’s ‘Meadow Flowers’ stencil, which fits this space perfectly. I’ve been waiting to use it on something for a while now!

Then I came across decoupaged baubles, coincidentally in two different places at about the same time, Pinterest and a blog I follow. We have some old red baubles which I never use, as red is not a colour I like as a Xmas decoration - it’s all blue and gold here to go with my decor. So I was interested to have a bash, though it’s taken longer than I thought as painting then decoupaging on brittle round things is jolly hard - I have to do half or a third then wait for it to dry before carrying on.

I am now running out of time before my brother comes on Monday, as I’m having a week full of medical/dental appointments, plus we went out birding on Tues afternoon (Black-shouldered Kites! I’ll tell you about them after Christmas). I need to finish cleaning the guest room and then get the decs up. Then baking next week! Anyhow, this year we bought a real tree for a change, so I’m looking forward to seeing these baubles on the tree along with the other ones. I’ll post a photo when the tree is done.

Here’s the baubles just needing a final coat of glossy varnish:

I’ll get back to butterflies and birds from our travels this year during the new year, and catch up with your posts too. When I’m not in the mood for blogging, I tend to forget about looking at other peoples’ blogs too. Receiving them in my inbox is an easier way to follow them, to be honest.

I think I need to catch up a bit

Truth be told, I haven't really been in a blogging mood and I've spent most of the last couple of months redecorating anyway. I'll show you my before, during and afters of our bedroom as it's been a bloody nightmare, but - phew - it's finished now!

We have been out a number of times with Birding Languedoc. Back in February on a freezing day we saw our very first Lammergeier, also known as the Bearded Vulture. Not only was this amazing, but at our second stop, we saw another perched atop a ridge eating something. It flew off, then was joined by another. All of a sudden, over the top of the ridge a Golden Eagle appeared, and soared around the thermals with the Lammergeiers. What an experience! Keith did get some photos but even with his long lens you wouldn't know what they were without being told, so it's not worth sharing. He reckons we saw a Golden Eagle in Greece back in 2000, but I didn't really see it so I'm counting it as a lifer for me too. 😁

On our next trip I finally got to see a Bluethroat really properly, instead of vague partial glimpses which have been very frustrating! Just recently we saw our first Greater Short Toed Lark, but it was distant and in flight. Much better was a view of a Spotted Crake! I hadn't realised there were Crakes which live around marshy areas, as the only Crake I've heard of is the Corncrake, a grassland bird, but our bird guide told me there are three Crakes which we might see around wetland areas - all looking not unlike the Water Rail, as they are all part of the same family (which Moorhens belong to). Keith did get some decent photos even though it didn't stay around for long. So quite a few lifers already this year!

Photo credit: Keith Allen

Photo credit: Keith Allen

Spring has been a bit late coming but the garden is looking good and I've caught up with most garden jobs now - it's such a delight to have a small manageable garden! As usual the lawn is full of orchids - Early Spider, Sombre Bee and just the other day I discovered some Yellow Bee Orchids which was exciting, as we had had one solitary plant our first year but nothing since, and now there are four plants! There are some Lady Orchids flowering on the bank of next door's garden too. I saw a Dingy Skipper which landed in my Nectar Bar right in front of me just for a moment, but apart from flitting whites and something brown I haven't seen a lot of variety here yet (not that I have spent a lot of time outside, being indoors painting etc).

I did see some lovely butterflies a few days ago on an organised wildflower/orchid day out, also with Birding Languedoc, but that will be a separate post as I have loads of photos. 

Our dry weather continues although it is much worse nearer the coast than here. The crops in the fields round here are coming up well as there has been enough rain to keep the soil moist beneath the surface, but on many of our outings it has been dry as a bone on the garrigues and more rocky, free draining areas. So much for April showers, whatever became of them? So this summer is looking really worrying from a water shortage point of view. Many areas already have drought restrictions.

We have a holiday sorted for the last week of June/first week of July with my brother, in the Moho of course. We are heading to Provence to see the lavender fields and explore some more. Provence is a huge area and includes a lot of mountainous areas so we are heading up into some of the higher national parks for a look around. We also have a two night 'jolly' booked with Birding Languedoc in mid June, up into the mountains of the Pyrenees Orientale department to look for wildflowers, butterflies and birds, whatever takes our fancy. We are staying half board in a small guest house and it sounds like a lot of fun! Our October housesitter is booked for both these trips which is great as the cats like her and vice versa. We may go away in the autumn again, possibly to Spain again, but who knows. I need to do a bit more research into the Provence trip first!

Okeydokey, let's have a look at the bedroom then! You can scroll through the photos to look at the after pics if you find these boring, but I wanted to put these pics here for the record.

There were already some cracks, both on the wall and on the ceiling, but after last summer's drought they opened up to 2mm wide! After finally getting rain in Nov and Dec the cracks closed up to around 1mm but the ceiling looked a right mess, and where I had already painted dark red behind the bed had white cracks showing through. I didn't like the wallpaper that was already there on one wall which was peeling off in places and had a jaggedy crack all the way down it, so the plan was to remove that, repair the walls and ceiling, then repaint the wallpapered wall with the same colour, duck egg blue. I'd already bought the paint at the same time as I got the dark red paint. Both paints were matched up with cushion covers I took into the shop.

I love wallpaper removing with my steamer, but I don't like having to wash off the glue afterwards. I remember this from our bedroom in Brittany which was wallpapered all over, but this was a lot worse. I spent three afternoons washing this one wall. I tried sugar soap and washing up liquid and eventually ended up scrubbing the wall with a green brillo pad!

I then had to deal with the cracks which wasn't fun - I have no idea how this room was constructed but there seemed to be so many layers of materials which were all flaking around the cracks which I had to remove. On the walls it seems like they had put some weird coating on top of the plaster which was blown in places so that was why the wallpaper was coming off in places. To get at the ceiling I covered the bed in dustsheets (old duvet covers) then used old planks to stand on. So every time I had to do a layer of filler on the ceiling (some of the cracks were very deep) I had to put all this lot on the bed, then take it all off again as we had to sleep there! Just my luck the crack was over the bed. And no, it couldn't be moved, it is too heavy.

Below is looking up at the ceiling, with wall cracks visible as well.

Sanding was a nightmare as I wasn't as high up as on my stepladders so my arms were absolutely shrieking in agony. 😀 This was my first time using plasterboard tape, which I thought I did correctly until I covered the tape over with a thin skim coat the next day and saw bubbles. I thought I had smoothed it well enough against the plaster underneath but somehow air had got in. Cutting the tape didn't help as it just bubbled again when I added more plaster. Aaargh! In the end I cut out the tape in the worst places and filled in with more plaster! There are still some small bubbles visible on the ceiling but I don't care any more! It really got to that stage. It is not perfect by a long shot but I'm the only person who is really going to care, and it already looks 100% better than it did.

Ceiling finished and painted over - though I only bothered painting over the bits that I repaired.

As there was so much plaster filler on the wall, I even put a coat of undercoat on the wall before painting, something I don't usually do. Then it was time to paint. I thought I was nearly there........... 

until I opened the tin of paint, which looked a bit of an odd colour. Which it was. I have no idea how Keith and I could have colour matched this cushion cover to a paint colour like this. We had loads of colour charts in the paint shop which we matched up to and got the red colour 100% perfect. Maybe the shop made a mistake? The green was really horrible and there was no way I was going to leave that on the wall! In the photo it doesn't look the real colour - the cushion is duck egg blue and the wall is a sort of horrible hospital/school green. 

We weren't going back to the same shop an hour away so I ordered some Annie Sloan wall paint online, as I used her wall paint in the spare bedroom last year. I ordered Pemberley Blue which is a duck egg at the blue end of the scale. I'm really happy with the colour - a blue grey with green undertones. I didn't have enough for a second coat though so I had to water the paint down a bit and only just managed the second coat!

The ordeal wasn't quite over as when Keith put the picture hooks back in the wall, my woven baskets kept falling off! He tried some other picture hooks, but the same thing happened. So the heavy duty hooks with rawl plugs had to come out, and with our rock hard walls so did the heavy duty drill bit. We don't seem to have plasterboard here, more like walls of steel!

Anyway, it's all over now (until the wall and ceiling crack again, but hey, I have enough paint left over to fill in the cracks so it doesn't show until it gets really bad....). Phew!

I haven't forgotten the after photos of the office, but we only just got my new artwork hung on the wall (finally some of my own images!), so I haven't taken the photos yet. I'll do it soon. 😀

Back to the decorating....

A Happy New Year, somewhat belatedly, to everyone!

I haven't been near my desktop since Christmas and I shall soon be unable to get near it at all, as I will be decorating our office. I completed one corner and wall before Christmas, as we had a new unit to install, so I needed to paint that wall and wax the parquet under it. There had been a hideous 1970s G-Plan corner unit there for maybe the whole 15 years the previous owners were here, plus our three years, so it was rather dirty and horrible behind/underneath! We had inherited this unit but whilst it was handy for places to display photos and nicknacks, it didn't have enough actual storage and I wanted a unit where we could keep all our photography gear together, in some semblance of order! So I bought a unit from Ikea (of course). 😀

G-Plan is probably very trendy at the moment with this fixation on Mid Century Modern style, but having lived through that era and the pass me down furniture from it, to me the whole look is ugly and old fashioned. So shock, horror, the old unit is in pieces, a cupboard part of it is in the garage and the rest is being used as either spare bits of wood or going to the tip!

I now have to move desks and other bits of furniture around whilst painting the rest of the walls, which is going to be fun. Especially the tall cupboard full of our files which will weight a ton so will have to be emptied..... all this is the not so fun side of decorating.

I forgot to take a photo of the G-Plan unit but I'm sure most of you can imagine a horrible teak coloured 1970s wooden corner unit. 😀😀😀 

Here's the after shot for this corner now:

The wall paint is light blue, and I am going to paint white the cupboard in the next photo that you can just see with a 'wooden' front, because it has really silly handles which are too high up and difficult to grab hold of, so as I need to fill in the holes to install new, better handles, it will have to be painted to cover the filled in bits. It has black sides anyway which I don't like. The brown built in cupboards will stay like that as I like them and there are identical cupboards in the room next door to this, plus they match most of the internal doors in the house.

The rest of the 'before' shot:

I might even tidy up my desk, which is always a mess! By the way, the shelves above my desk were bought for a new kitchen we installed in 2003, two houses ago, which were never used in the end as they stuck out too much for the place I had planned to put them. So they had sat in the garage, forgotten about (by me anyway) until K mentioned them and hey presto - I think they work perfectly there!

Going back to Christmas, I didn't get around to posting my home made twig decorations, which I did once before, though I can't remember if it was last year or a few years back. I think these branches came from the same tree (I don't actually know what species!) but I'll have to leave it a couple of years to grow again as we took most of the young branches that K could reach even with a pole to grab them. 

I have lights in there too though they don't show up well in daylight. I love making home made decorations and I bought another little living table top tree from Lidl and changed their red decorations for lights and gold decorations, although they had some lovely white wooden stars which I kept on it. Hopefully I can use the tree for a few more years. 

Browsing in a shop at Xmas decorations last year I was pleased to see so many wooden decorations and no tinsel at all! I bought more pine cones and painted them white, gold and copper to go with the rest I had done last year with cones I'd gathered in the wild and displayed them in a blue glass bowl. 

In fact I have only just taken my decorations down as I've become more and more 'French' over the years, who don't follow the 12th Night rule at all, and take decorations down 'some time' in January, when it suits them. I put decorations up very late compared to most people but love having all the lights on in the evenings so I'm happy to wait until mid January until I take them down.

Well that's it for now, we have some day trips coming up with our birding group and I am starting to plan our summer holiday to Provence (timed to see the lavender fields over there) and we may be going on a two day trip up to the mountains for wild flowers, butterflies and birds with Birding Languedoc, in mid June. I have still to finish posting October's holiday photos so I will try to do that once my office is accessible again!

Before and after chalk painted furniture and guest room

I think I've just about finished redecorating for this winter and now I'm going to get out and start tidying the flower and herb beds! I've been out for precisely one walk this year on a non windy, sunny day, so I'm rather itchy to get out more. I have been exercising once a week in the little gym at my physios, which I think is starting to help a teeny bit. I saw a pain doctor last week and he wants me to start doing balneotherapie (amongst a large list of other things which I doubt they do at my physios, like having mud treatment!). However, they do have a mini pool for that kind of exercise at the physios, but whether they can fit me in for 3 sessions a week I rather doubt it, as they are run off their feet and seem to be seeing multiple patients at the same time. Whatever, in the summer at least I can do those exercises at home. Yes, I still have pain, both from the mesh from the hernia repair and from an on and off over the years tendonitis problem in my thigh, which the pain doctor declared was sciatica; I don't agree but he wasn't the kind of person who listens and liked to talk and shout a lot.

This wasn't meant to be a health update, just to show some piccies of my furniture and guest room now that they are finished! So let's get on with it....

The Before of the pine chest of drawers in the guest room:

After:

I have to say I'm rather chuffed with it - the headboard and then this chest were the first pieces of furniture that I have painted with chalk paint - up to now I've just been practicing on things like picture frames, plant pots and lamp shades. I finished the painted chest in clear wax, then put dark wax in the few nooks and crannies to give an aged look. It doesn't show up so well in my phone photos indoors, but I'm sure you get the picture. 😀

Here's a picture of the wall that I painted, with the furniture mostly back in place. I'm just leaving the mattress out from the headboard until the wax is fully cured, which can take up to a month. This isn't the bed that goes with the bedhead, ours is much higher and once the pillows are in place it will be more or less hidden, but I wanted it painted. I also painted the picture frame above. That is the picture which inspired the autumnal colouring I chose in our last few bedrooms. It's of a ripe wheatfield with wild flowers including poppies in it. Actually I wish it were a bit bigger now as it looks a bit lost here, but heck, it's a guest room and I don't have to look at it every day. 😁

I also painted the lamp shades a few years ago and decorated the bases with thick sisal string. The one thing that is not going to be painted are our cherry coloured bedside tables, which we've had since we lived in London and I love them just as they are. But I think the mix of dark and painted wood looks rather nice. There is a chest at the end of the bed which I'm thinking of painting the same as the other furniture, but sanding back the lid and restaining/varnishing in a cherry wood tint.

Now we're going upstairs to my dressing room. Yes, I have my own dressing room. It was my dream, and we really don't need two guest bedrooms any more, so I chose the smallest bedroom and it was furnished with Ikea's Pax system. Pax is absolutely brilliant as they have so many different choices for the interior organisation, from glass fronted drawers, to pull out shoe racks, to pull out jewellery tray organisers. However I had an old very dark brown chest of drawers in there which came from my mum (when I say old, I mean from the 80s, not antique!!) and whilst I liked it as it was, I also wanted to paint it. I already had a few things in duck egg blue in there and that's the colour I wanted to paint it. Here's a really crappy before pic with a very blurry black cat as well.

And now:

I dry brushed over the Duck Egg with Svenska Blue, which is a very similar colour, and as I didn't have any white wax I did the same effect as with the beige chest of drawers but using Old White paint, watered down, then wiped back so it stuck into the crevices just like wax does. It's not supposed to be all neat and perfect, the look is rustic. Well, that's what I am calling it. 😀 The top didn't look right with the dry brushing though so I just repainted over in Duck Egg. All Annie Sloan Chalk Paints.

The dressing room: I have loads of clothes because my clothing size has changed so many times since having cancer and I'm not throwing anything away! I had to buy more small clothes after having bought large ones and throwing the small ones away (to charity), what with moving and all that. So now I'm banned from getting rid of any clothes anyway 😀 so I need this space!

I took some slightly better photos today, as when I took the ones above the light was too bright coming through the window to get the top without it being totally blown out. I put the light on for these ones and the paint looks a bit more like the colour that it is.

It's not 'staged' 😀 because I want the top to cure before I put the mirror and plant etc back on top, and I left it up on blocks for a few days whilst it was curing.

Spring has definitely sprung here with the wild almond blossom out all over the countryside and K reports the wood anemones are flowering down in a sheltered spot in a valley where he goes for his long walks. I have daffies flowering on the terrace and in fact have had to water all my large pots around the pool terrace as we hardly had any rain in February! I saw a Small Tortoiseshell butterfly about two weeks ago, K saw some on his walk on Sunday and I saw a little blue one in our garden a few days ago. Aaah, I do love my flutterbies and look forward to them finding my nectar bar this year. 💜

Redecorating, home grown citrus and garden birds

Hi everyone! I’ve been quiet of late as I have been down in the basement painting in my spare bedroom. I wanted to brighten up the boring cream walled room, and do something with some of the dull brown pine furniture. 

We inherited a bed head, a tall chest of drawers and a wardrobe from the previous owners, which with the addition of some of our own wooden furniture meant there was a right mix of different wood colours. I decided to start on the bed head and the chest of drawers as they were the most boring pine pieces. But first, I painted the wall behind the bed in Annie Sloan’s new wall paint in ‘Riad Terracotta’. The reason for the bright colour was because all the accessories in this room are lovely autumnal colours from our last bedroom (as we have gone for a completely different colour scheme in our new bedroom for a change).

I had ordered some lovely brass knobs for the furniture as I loathe the basic pine knobs that were on the chest of drawers. But when they arrived, I discovered something surprising. The current knobs weren’t screwed in, but had been glued in from the outside! Cue my wonderful husband to the rescue, who managed to carefully saw them off, then chisel down any remaining bits down flat, then drill holes for my new knobs. The base of the new knobs was smaller and didn’t cover all the marks from sawing the old ones off, but as I was painting the chest of drawers, it didn’t matter. However I am leaving the pine knobs on the wardrobe for now, as I don’t plan on painting that at the moment, if at all. (It has two drawers under the wardrobe part).

The wall behind the bed painted in Annie Sloan 'Riad Terracotta' wall paint: I have been using her chalk paint the last two years but the wall paint is a new product and it went on over a pale wall in three coats. The dark red wall behind the bed in our room took four coats of regular paint (Leroy Merlin's own brand wall paint, Luxens)! I have bought some new paint for the rest of the walls (light cream) but I am in no rush to paint them yet. 

The bedhead has been painted in Annie Sloan chalk paint in 'Versailles', which is a beige with a khaki hint. It was then covered in her clear wax, then distressed with dark wax in the crevices, then another coat of clear wax for added protection. You do have to spend some time buffing it all up when the wax has dried overnight, but when it has dried and cured after a few weeks, it has a lovely feel to it.

You can see some of the shine on the bedhead below, and the darker bits to imitate dirt over the years. 😀

This is two coats of 'Versailles' on the chest of drawers, but since I took this photo I have also distressed it with dark wax, but there aren't too many nooks and crannies on this chest - they are mostly on the side really. I am waxing it with Annie Sloan clear wax to protect it.

It's a good thing the bedroom is big (long and thin) because there isn't much room to move with all the drawers around, not to mention all the Moho bedding which lives in here during the winter!

The Meyer lemon has done really well this year and I am chuffed to have a harvest (especially in the middle of winter!) that I have watched from beautiful perfumed blossom being pollinated by the large dark blue Carpenter Bees, to forming little fruit, to now. There were 11 lemons - we've had one so far. I had a recipe that put grated lemon zest on top of home made veggie soup when serving and it was really good, especially with the interesting taste of Meyer lemon. They are a cross of mandarin with regular lemon, so less acidic, and just, well, different!

Bertie came through the cat flap to see what I was up to.....

... had a sniff, decided it was boring and wandered off. 😀

The stencils on the outdoor pots (see blue pot behind the lemon) have held up fine so far, after two years outside (though under cover during the first winter). I covered them in exterior grade varnish and they seem good as new. I haven’t even brought the pots under cover this winter as the Bidens is still alive so this may be saving us £$€ this summer, not to mention the work planting up! I’ve got the same geraniums in the covered patio as last winter, a bit tatty but still flowering. My potted bulbs from last year are appearing and the crocuses are starting to flower. Spring is on the way. 😁👍

The garden chairs and table were left here for us too, but the chairs are getting a bit old, and my brother went through the fabric of one when he was sitting on it - I just wish I could have seen that! 😃

Keith took some lovely photos of this Coal Tit which appeared around the bird feeders recently, along with another one, and have stayed around since. About time we had some new birds on the feeders!

Photo credit: Keith Allen

Photo credit: Keith Allen

Also this picture of a Great Tit with a sunflower seed in its mouth.

Photo credit: Keith Allen

Well, back to the painting and waxing until we get a nice (and hopefully warmer) day, then we'll get out and do something interesting outdoors. Thank goodness January is over though! 👍

 

N.B. In case you don't know, with Annie Sloan's chalk paint, you don't need to sand or prime furniture (or anything else) before painting! It sticks to just about everything, old paint, wood, metal, plastic, fabric and more. It's expensive, but it is so worth the extra expense. Here's the link to her website:  https://www.anniesloan.com/