The previous owners had painted the small room in a colour which Mr.P described as 'dried blood'. Now, I like a nice dark red, but this was too much for 4 walls in a small room, it was really oppressive and left you feeling all jangly. Luckily a paint job and some wonderful finds in the garage (also gutted the garage so the car can go in now) transformed it into a light, bright spacious feeling room, well on it's way towards the French Rustic style she loves.
Out went the thin metal shelving units, in came the painted wooden ones. Out when the piles of papers on every surface, in came the old faded plastic and painted wooden seed trays to hold it all. I took the metal shelving down to the garage and managed to accommodate most of what had been filling the place, what a bonus. We cleared so much space she could get the car in. It was deeply satisfying.
Even more satisfying was finding the 4 boxes that all the plants pots and garden equipment were in. The looked pretty mucky but I knew they were gems. Turned out they were ancient ammunition boxes (about 1 x 1 x 4ft long, with great handles) and when I cleaned and painted them white they looked amazing. They went upstairs to the spare room and were stacked up on their side to make a gorgeous bookcase for the really old books with lovely spines on them. It looked so good I could seriously have pinched them for myself. I'm always dragging wooden boxes, crates and trunks from skips to paint white for my house.
Anyway this went on for 3 days almost non-stop (I was grabbing 4-5hrs sleep) and if I hadn't been crampy I doubt I'd have stopped at all. It's by no means finished, there just wasn't enough time, but we got a lot done and even inadvertently managed to almost clear the second spare room that was full of things from the house move, as well as creating a but of French rustic in the first spare room ad sorting out some nice displays of her pottery collection in the dining room.
It's so nice to work with someone who has a warm home and nice things, there is so much potential to get a really good transformation happening. I think she was pretty pleased with it, especially her study which is now a room you would want to go into, instead of one you would want to get out of. I felt a bit bad that I never had time to do the last coat of paint in her downstairs loo (which is tiny with not much daylight, yet they had painted it a really dark dark blue).
It was such a full on weekend but I loved every minute, sadly I was so rushed I never got any photo's! In fact, I was so rushed, I never even unpacked my bags!!! I was in the same manky clothes all weekend, covered in mud, dust, slug pellets, paint... you get the idea. And my hair, I cannot wait to see how much dirt comes out my hair. I can't wash it there, they have hard water in that part of England and it does dreadful damage to 3ft long fine hair, as I learned at great cost the first time I stayed with her years ago. Ah, lovely soft Scottish water, I never realised we were so lucky.
Well, I'm exhausted now and I reckon I may not blog much this week as I really need to recover (and I'm off cat sitting quite a bit) so here are some of those buttons I promised to post...
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