Project: Dresser

Firstly I just wanted to say a massive thank you to Sarah, Suzy and Sølvi (ooh, I alliterated and didn't even realise it!) for stepping in with guest posts at incredibly short notice whilst I was away. I don't know about you but I loved every one of them. Thank you girls, I couldn't have asked for better posts!


So recently I took a road trip to pick up a dresser I'd bought with my friend, Scott, who came along as the muscle. The dresser was another one of my bargains off eBay, scored for £50. It wasn't until I'd painted it, re-attached the doors and added my new door knobs that I realised just why it was only fifty quid.

The dresser was advertised looking like this:

Blurry certainly didn't do it justice, neither did the over-crowded room it was stored in. Scottie and I heaved my new dresser over a bed and around a drum kit, past the piles of boxes and out to my Mum's RAV4 borrowed specially for the occasion (via Bridgend and a cup of tea with cake). Thankfully, it fit.

Driving very slowly, paranoid I was going to break the glass doors, I edged my way back home where Scott and I heaved it up the front steps, past the new-to-me eBayed front door (I don't think I've told you much about that yet) and past the dining room table to it's fireplace alcove. It was the perfect size.

My new-to-me dresser in its new-to-it home

Knowing my flash-in-the-pan attention span, I immediately took all the doors off, took down the top piece and began painting it. Two weeks later I finally finished painting it, I knew if I stopped it would just sit there half done forever but it was a mammoth effort in self-control just to get to the finish line. Here's the end result:

I discovered, when I put the doors back on, that everything was a little warped. Gaps around the bottom cupboard doors were hidden by the darkness of the wood, and highlighted once painted white. The glass doors also fit strangely and don't close properly. The holes for the handles have been drilled unevenly and the drawers are too thick for my new handles to fit through. It's a crude dresser, made from sub-standard pine that stank of cigarette smoke. And I love it ... well, apart from the smell.

I've shabbied up the paint work, exposing the blue undercoat I gave certain areas. I still need to finish dressing it, I have some mini-bunting planned and I'm going to paint the wooden box green, but overall I'm very very pleased with the result.

The glass cupboard holds all my patterns and my button jars, miscellaneous bits and pieces, and elastics. The drawers hold all my sewing paraphernalia that I don't want on display and the cupboards hold ... stuff. Deciding just what to put in it took a whole weekend, after three years of no storage in my dining room I was suddenly indecisive over just what I wanted to put away!

All in all, definitely worth the effort. Still, I hope it's a long time before I have to paint any furniture again!

Thanks for stopping by,

Vintage Kitchen Scales

I've mentioned before I'm using pinterest as inspiration for the different rooms in my house. One of the many pins I love is this one, the vintage scales are great and add a piece of colour and interest to the wall shelves.

{ Source: via Angie A on Pinterest }

So I set out to scour eBay for my own and found these! The label needs replacing, luckily for me I have a friend with a printing business, but in the meantime my shelves look much prettier and they go with my mixer and my Aga. The kitchen is still very much a work in progress but I love all the little steps like these that take you closer to the finished product.

Shelves, crockery, glasses and cake stand - Ikea

Scales - eBay

Birdie measuring cups - John Lewis

Poppy glass picture - local garden centre

Enamel coffee pot - a present

Vintage mixer - a present

Thanks for stopping by,

Style Isn't Just Fashion

Not only is there a personal ongoing quest for a fashion style happening, but my 100 year old plus house is also in need of renovation and I'm constantly on the look out for inspiration. I bought the house because I was heartily sick of magnolia painted walls in rented accommodation (and I wasn't allowed a wolf). Upon moving here just over two years ago, I have slowly begun work on the house starting with a new kitchen, and promptly painted the room neutral. This is obviously because I am a Moron.

Now, don't get me wrong, I like it but it's a very neutral room. In an attempt to liven up the kitchen with some additional colour and because I love the colour red, not to mention because I'm too poor to be able to afford tiles and too incompetent a grouter to tile myself, I hit up on a cheap plan to create a splash back. Wallpaper. And not that vinyl kitchen/ bathroom stuff that comes in only one or two decent prints and costs a fortune. Normal, everyday wallpaper. I know, genius, right?

I carefully picked out my wallpaper, ordered it and it arrived several months ago. Unfortunately, despite a number of people offering to help me put it up no one has actually followed through and the roll has been languishing on my window sill ever since. A broken finger, an attempted burglary, Christmas, a magic wand remote control and New Year have added extra distractions but, oh yes, yesterday was the day.

I carefully (okay, haphazardly) rolled out the wallpaper along each wall and marked a couple of inches more than I needed before returning to the dining room table to cut. Once all the pieces were cut I started clearing the work surfaces, removing lower shelves and taping along the edges of the surfaces to help protect the wood from the glue. I then covered my table with disposable tablecloths and got to glueing.

It transpires that I am as poor a wallpaperer as I am a grouter and choosing to wallpaper (by myself) for the first time since I was about 15 in an area fraught with plugs and screw holes was probably not the best plan. But so long as you don't look too carefully at the finished results then it's unnoticeable.

The original idea had been to mix up some PVA glue with water and waterproof the paper to ensure it would work as it was intended, as a splashback. And whilst I think the theory was sound I'm not sure the print I've chosen really works. It's possibly a little too busy. And old lady-ish. In fact, I'm beginning to think maybe I should have saved for some tiles instead, my grouting can only get better afterall. Thoughts, anyone?

And some accents I'd previously added to the kitchen, on the shelf above Gwenie.

Thanks for stopping by,

The Joys of Steam Power

I have had another slack tart episode and not posted in a while. Mostly this is because I haven't been doing any sewing but have been doing a lot of DIY ... or rather my Step Dad has and my Mother and I have been cheering (or heckling) from the sidelines whilst drinking tea.

I live in a hundred year old plus stone mid terrace house in an old mining village in South Wales, I may have mentioned this before. I mention it now because something that most people outside of mining villages either in South Wales or elsewhere probably won't know is that coal dust is everywhere. And when I say everywhere I do actually mean it in the literal sense. Despite the pit closing down in the late 1960's coal dust still remains. It was used for the garden, it was used in the plaster, it's in the bricks and the soil and the walls and the ceilings and the pointing and is 90% of the dust I collect in my now black but once yellow duster. This means DIY needs to be undertaken like a military operation.

Due to the age of my house I have fireplaces in every single room. Unfortunately due to the previous owners almost every single original feature has been ripped out of the house and thrown away. I have the bay window but the inside is 'updated' and lacks the pillars between windows and I have an ornate ceiling piece in the hallway along with original plaster coving.

The front room had been knocked into the back room, creating one long area that's still divided into two by the remains of the wall. The fireplace in the front room had been ripped out and bricked up and the one in the back room had been reduced in size and left open (although when I viewed the house there was a gas fire stuffed in the tiny hole).

My fabulous step-dad had already helped me knock out the original range fireplace in the old kitchen when I renovated that room and put the kitchen back in its original place, removing it from the terribly constructed back extension with no power, no ventilation and insecure roof and windows. We had to put in a new lintel as they had removed that too (!).

Once the kitchen was completed, my step-dad returned with the lump hammer and opened up the open fireplace in the back room (now dining room) to its original size, exposing the original arching lintel of bricks so definitive of the house's heyday.

And then, this past weekend, he returned again and heroically smacked at the wall to expose the hidden fireplace behind in the front room. Please note the coal dust all over the carpet, it's impossible to remove all traces of it and the area is now a grey-pinkish colour (Please also note that pink carpet is not my choice but until I get a job and/ or win the lottery new carpet is waaaaay down the list of things to replace).

My Mother and I then spent two days cleaning. The Entire House. From top to bottom. With a steamer. How awesome are they?! Mum gave me her old steamer some months ago and when I took it I remember thinking 'why on earth would I want one of these?!' Ha! Has that attitude changed!

You may notice that on the pictures of Gwenie, the black and white floor looks a little ... dirty. That is in fact grout from when I grouted the floor with no idea what I was doing. I'm proud of that floor, Mum and I laid that ourselves. I was not proud of the grouting because, frankly, it sucked. But with steam power that's all changed! My floor looks fantabulous!

See?

Unfortunately, what all this DIY and cleaning has meant is that I have done absolutely no sewing whatsoever and am feeling super guilty over this, not to mention a little panicky that I'm not going to complete all my sewing pledges.

I should really pull my finger out and just get on with it. After lunch. Promise. Shame the steamer can't help me with this one!

Thanks for stopping by,

Spotlight: Guenhwyvar { Domestic Goddess }

I'd like to introduce you to Guenhwyvar or Gwenie as she is known in my house.

Gwenie is a Domestic Goddess and fully deserves the capitalisation. She was named after Miss Pettigrew because, as Delysia says in the film, the woman can do anything. The spelling of her name is the Welsh spelling, as to be expected for a fab Goddess who lived on the Welsh border.

Gwenie came into being circa 1940's, no one's entirely sure when as all records about her have been lost but for an oldie she sure is pretty and you'd never guess by looking at her just how old she is.

Here's some pictures of Gwenie in action:

This is Gwenie when she first arrived. As you can see the trip made her go to pieces and it was a little while before she pulled herself together. Marigold (a butch, hairy biker type chap) was instrumental in putting her back together.

Since then we haven't looked back!

This is Gwenie, all done up and in her new home. Isn't she pretty? You'd never guess how old she was.

Gwenie originally ran on coal but the Aga Shop in Twyford fiddled about with her insides and now she runs on mains gas.

Aga's are on constantly, you don't turn them up or down or off ... well, you can turn them up but it can take an hour or so for them to reach temperature. Instead, you run them constantly at about 220°C and if you want it colder you put a sheet of food grade stainless steel in the oven which will absorb the heat you don't want.

Gwenie's currently running at about 180°C, I say 'at about' because there is no thermometer attached to the Aga, there's only a gauge to indicate how much stored heat she's got in her so most of the time I'm cooking with a lot of guesswork and frequent checks inside the ovens as she doesn't release any cooking smells (they go up the flue instead). This is Unfortunate as it means I burn a lot of stuff unless I'm really paying attention.

Gwenie's of the two oven variety. The top door on the right is her roasting oven, this is Very Hot Indeed. Inside there are various places you put things to make them cook at different temperatures. By placing a roasting tin on the floor of the oven and putting a shelf in it I can simulate a BBQ. Betcha didn't know that about Aga's didya?

The bottom door on the right is her Simmering Oven. Aga's work in the opposite way to normal ovens, most of the cooking you do with Gwenie will be done inside her rather than on the top. If I want to boil carrots for example, I would bring them to the boil on the Boiling Plate (the left plate on the top) and then put them in the Simmering Oven to finish off. If I wanted to I could put them on the Simmering Plate (right plate on the top) but the point of the Aga is to keep as much heat in as possible so opening the top lids to expose the plates is only done when necessary as it releases a lot of the stored heat.

In order to retain that heat Gwenie is stuffed with insulation. She's made of cast iron plates, enamelled a beautiful cream colour and then filled with loft insulation of the roll and pebble type (see big bags in first picture). She runs off a pilot light that just tops up her heat as required, a lot like an immersion heater. This means that, hopefully, she's not costing me a lot in gas (I've yet to have my first bill). This might sound a little expensive but I have no need for an electric kettle, toaster, toastie maker, slow oven, microwave or tumble dryer as she covers all those bases with the heat she's already got stored. Win, win I say!

Gwenie is excellent at multi-tasking:

Gwenie drying the washing and keeping Bear's butt warm

Drying the washing and boiling the kettle and keeping the wolf's butt warm

(see I told you she could do anything!)

Drying my clothes and making spaghetti bolognese

And finally, boiling the kettle and some potatoes whilst looking pretty

The weird metal round thing that kind of looks like a cross between a tennis racket and a snow shoe hanging from the shelf above Gwenie is what I use to make toast. I only recently discovered how to make perfect toast with Gwenie and promptly ate 8 slices of toast for lunch and tea. Roasts are divine with Gwenie because all the moisture is sealed in (the ovens are just big metal boxes after all). And don't even get me started on American Pancakes ... mmmmmmmmm.

Surprisingly the wolf loves her too, given how much fur he has I thought she'd run too warm for him but if I'm in the kitchen then so is he and inevitably he's curled up in front of Gwenie. 

Dear Gwenie, I don't know how I lived without you!

Thanks for stopping by,