Restoring a grand old table, part 1

We have inherited the most beautiful picnic table you've ever seen.

It's huge, it's so heavy that four of us can't move it, and it's top is made out of a single complete slice of a very large, very mature tree. You can see the growth rings so clearly, marking every year that this giant stood and watched over the earth.  Sadly, now that it is a table, it has had very little love and care over the last few years, and the top is cracking badly, the edges of the table are crumbling away and there is mould and lichen and rot building up in the crevices.

With all the work that W has been doing with wood, he's been falling more and more in love with the beauty of wood when it's loved and cared for - and this restoration has been high on his priorities. With spring here, and summer barbeques coming, we both really want this baby back at its full beauty.

We spent a lot of time researching how to best rescue it and had advice from many different sources. Many people suggested powerwashing it - but the surface is so broken, we are both quite worried that power washing will degrade it further. It also won't address the way that the surface is flaking in a consistent and gentle way.

We decided to start by sanding it sufficiently to remove the rotten and broken layers, and I will be spending a lot of time clearing out the crevices with a dental pick and a craft knife. W started  on the side that was most rotten and you can see just how much difference it's made already.

After a day of hard work we now have  the top and sides rough sanded. Here it is, halfway through. We still need to do the legs and the base, and I have to get to work clearing out all the crevices .I've started work on it, and I think I will need to use my trusty crafting dremel on some of the larger ones but many are so narrow and deep that we probably won't be able to do much beyond removing surface material. I really want the table to have a chance to dry out before we treat it with oils & wax to stop the rain from damaging it further. We are toying with a plan to put a frame around the table with waterproof covers so that the table can breath and dry out a little before we move  - or maybe we will just pitch a large tent over it. Either way it needs to be easily removable so that it doesn't add to the problem by creating an even moister environment that it sits in over extended periods, and it can be easily shifted on sunny days.

Here she is sanded roughly at the day's end - can't wait to continue! If any of you have done a project of this sort, - restoring old timber like this -  do let us know in the comments of what you think would be the best approach. I want this beauty to last another few decades yet - or longer!

Fabric design in a mudroom

After finishing the curtains for the craft room, I have started work on the mudroom curtains. I have 2 windows and a door in the mudroom to cover - and the mudroom door is a huge heat loss area. This is despite having put draft sealant around it and all the work we did with insulation during the rebuild. As the paint colors are inspired by the same design see as  as the craft room, I was hoping to use the same fabric. Thwarted  by fate apparently - it's limited edition and the fabric shop had sold out. There weren't many options in terms of fabric and I took a punt on a blue 1970's style diamond design. It's a reversible pattern with one side in shades of  blue and  one in shades of grey - and completely Austin Powers and swinging 60's London - Yeah Baby!

Lots of fun sewing - with Livia now deciding to attack the iron and ironing board instead of the sewing machine. I'm not really happy with the end results though (even less happy with the photo - it is impossible to get an image without massive amounts of white out). My blogs are normally happy blogs of success but I think this one is really a blog of 'must try harder'. I've run out of fabric before I got the third window done, but even so , I don't think I was going to win even with a full fabric haul.  The colors just don't work  at all in the room. They might blend with the paint colors, but they really don't work with the old tiles on the floor. They also don't work with the pine wood work - although that might change when the doors are on and I whitewash the wood. 

I am also not happy with the look of the window/door combination . I've been spending time trying to work out why not - and the only thing I can think of is that it's something to do with fact they are both on the same hanger rail. The rail is quite close to the top of the window and the door - but that's the way I have always hung curtains in the past, and it's never been a problem before. In this room, however, it really truncates the room - and the curtains look squat and ugly. I think I might raise the curtain pole to closer to the ceiling so that the curtains have a longer fall before I try my next attempt. What do you guys think? Help needed here,  I think!

How to make a window seat cushion and cover for a cat

rI just finished making the curtains for the craft room and had about a metre or so of fabric left over. I love the new look of the windows, but one thing still really bugged me, You can see it here in this picture taken just after the windows were dressed.

Miss Lumikki loves sleeping on the window sill, above the radiator. She has a bright pink fleece blanket that she loves which my sister's children brought off one of their long haul flights home. Sadly, florescent pink doesn't really suit my color scheme. Lumikki is mostly Maine Coon, so she's quite a substantial young lady and tends to overlap most pillows that we give her.

Luckily I had a bright idea! With left over fabric, and some of the offcuts of foam from making the dining room chair, I had the makings of a perfect kitty cushion for a Maine Coon princess.

First I measured up the windowsill to get the right depth & width. I had two different types of offcut foam - one which was quite tightly compressed, and was used for the top covering over the chair seat, and a more fuzzy filler which is generally used for quilting. I used the more compressed foam for the core and the quilting filler as the surrounding shaping and glued them loosely together using a hot glue gun.

I measured up enough fabric to cover the cushion all over, allowed for seam allowance, and started by sewing all the seams. I pinned the fabric so that it joined in the middle of the base then sewed the ends together with the fabric inside out. I then inverted the material back to the right way round and hand sewed the edges of the join together on both edges to reduce the size of the entrance hole. A couple of hooks and eyes later, filling the cover with the cushion pad that I made and we have a new cat cushion for Lumikki to stretch out in comfort on.

Lastly : I promise I didn't pose her for either shot : she just loves hanging a paw out in the rising warmth of the radiator!

Sewing 101 : How to make curtains

January has been very slow for doing more work on the house, with a mix of work-tiredness and just january blues making me very slothful and disinclined to do much more than curl up and chill with what little free time I have. This weekend has been the first time that I seem to have found that extra gear and stepped back up to the house renovation work again.

With cold winter weather and an old, poorly insulated house, putting up curtain rails was a real priority back in December. We have a range of old & secondhand curtains that didn't go with the decor which got called into use as soon as the rods were mounted to block the cold cascading from windows and doors. None of them match the decor very well, and all of them are mismatched and variable in terms of size & attachment type(hooks, hoops, rings etc.). Curtain are incredibly easy to make and very expensive to have made to your own design/style choice so I decided to find a fabric store and make my own. I hope that by the end of this blog, you will feel comfortable doing the same.

So what do you need ?

A sewing machine or a passion for handsewing.

I have an ancient Toyota sewing machine which I bought in 1993. It is incredibly basic and simple, but refuses to keel over and die, and sews pretty much every fabric I ask it to, leather included. . I keep eyeing up the lovely new machines with embroidery setting and all sorts of fancy stitching, but I can't justify the expenditure given that this machine does everything I need. For curtains, you really only need a single straight stitch setting.

Some fabric.

Choose your fabric based on what you want as the primary effect. I chose a thick linen striped fabric with lots of weight to keep the cold out, but for light summer use, a fine cotton or even a gauze is enough. Think about machine washability, particularly for areas like kitchens where the curtains can collect a lot of dirt. If it is machine washable, it's recommended to wash and iron the fabric before you get going.

To decide the length of the curtain, measure the height from the curtain rod to the point you want the curtains to finish, and add extra for hems. I usually do a 1 inch wide hem all around, with the fabric turned over twice. I  leave the base hemming until after the curtains have been hung for the first time , then pin in situ and remove to hem on the machine. I also leave a little extra for shrinkage after washing, after a few months. It's always easier to move hems, than to start from scratch again.

The width is dependent on what sort of attachment or header you chose. The average width calculation is between 1.5  to 3 times the distance you want the curtain to cover. Pencil pleat is the most common style with a general fabric guidance of 1.8 times the width.

Depending on the width of your fabric you may have to join multiple sheets together - if you have a repeating pattern or a pattern that needs to be linked up properly, make sure you have enough extra  fabric to be able to do it.

Header tape.

The header tape is used to form the gathers at the top of the curtain. In the Netherlands there is a basic tape which is used with hooks to create different widths of gathers. I personally prefer the tape that has threads running through it to pull to shape, and the hooks are solely for suspension. There are a wide range of styles, ranging from pencil, to single/double/triple pleated, to goblet style. You need as much tape as the width of the fabric.

Sharp scissors.
Thread to match your fabric
Pins
Iron & Ironing board
Measuring tape.

Once you have all your materials, it's time to measure up and start cutting. I can't recommend enough measuring at least twice before you start to chop into your fabric. I tend to triple check, panic about my base measurements, revisit, measure again and then cut. It's better than getting it wrong and having to buy new fabric. At this point, make sure you have your iron and ironing board on standby and ready.

I usually start by fitting together sufficient fabric lengths to make the width needed, pinning and sewing. Although I've been told that if you pin horizontally you can sew over the pins, I tend to pin vertically, and remove them on approach as I sew. I've had more than one needle hit a pin and break the tip off - and I have no wish to be hit by flying shards of metal. Once you've sown the first vertical seam, iron down the seam, separating the two edges to opposite sides. I then pin the two side hems - I usually fold over twice to ensure that there are no fraying edges visible, with each fold being a fingers width wide. After pinning, I always iron - it makes it a piece of cake to sew. The hem at the top, I usually make a bit deeper - closer to two inches to give some weight and form to the pleats - and something solid to attach the header tape to, as it holds the full weight of the curtains. Once all the side hems are done, the top hemmed and header tape attached, it's a case of hanging the curtains and pinning up the bottom hem. I often let them hang for a couple of days to 'settle' into their favoured shape, but it's not really necessary. If the fabric is really light, I'll sew a weight into the corners of the base to keep the curtains from flying around too much in the winds.


This time around, I had lots of company in my sewing journey - Livia decided that she'd give me a helping hand. She finally fell asleep in the middle of the curtain, which truncated the sewing bee for a while.It's finally all done and I'm super happy with the results : it has given the room a real boost of energy and brings together the blue tones in the room.

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Curb Appeal : building new wooden gates part 1

Wow it's been a busy weekend! - So tired I can barely type, and yes, I know it's Monday and not the weekend, I took an extra day. And here's why :

We have two gates - a large double set of farm gates at the main car entrance, and a small single garden gate at the front of the house. Each of the gates is on the edge of the canals that surround the house, and have fences that slope down to the water. They  are  ( were!) cast iron that has seen better days. They have rotted through in so many places that the last owner strapped chicken wire to them to hold them together. That works if your hound is a spaniel, but with Luca now 6 months old and rising, the day he decides to challenge the gates they will collapse in a shower of rusty shards. We had a quote for having new gates made and fitted, but despite being trying very very hard to choose a simple and plain design,  the quote was quite terrifying. W decided it was time to put his skills to the test, and suggested that he would make our new gates - out of wood. Well, you can't turn down an offer like that, can you?

I've been scouting around for designs on Pinterest and found these images :

This main gate is made in a talented woodworking shop in the US, so unlikely that I could get it over here in Holland commercially, without lots of taxes and delivery charges. But I completely loved the style so I tagged the image.

I also loved the idea of having a rose arbor over the front gate - I have a lot of extra climbing roses from our last plant shopping spree and it's been a dream of mine for years and years. These images inspired a look for the front of the house.

The final piece of the puzzle was for the fencing along the sides  and this picture gave me the last inspiration 

Saturday dawned  and was a rainy and blustery day so we ran around town on a final 'buy everything we need' trip. Of course, it never works out that way, but we made progress in our aspiration of reducing the number of DIY shopping trips whilst executing a project. Sunday has been equally windy and cold so  W & IDD wrapped up warmly and headed out to the stables to get started. I honestly didn't expect a lot of progress on the first day and stuck my nose in around noon to see this : 

The frame of the first gate was up! This was super exciting for me - I have to admit to a tiny little bit of nerves beforehand but seeing this on the table was like an electric jolt of happiness. 

The boys worked through the day and got both the main driveway gates cut and ready for glueing by the end of the day. They glued one, before the light faded so much they had to leave it for the night. 

Here it is in the morning once the glue had had time to set : 

You will notice that the shape isn't quite the same as the one in the picture  : I relented on having curves on the gate since it's W's first big project. And, I am really happy with how it looks anyway - it's much nicer than your normal plain farm gate, that's really only designed to trap sheep and cows, not exploratory Great Danes!

Today, they finished glueing the second main gate and started on the gate for the front entrance. We did some design changes on the fly - I really wanted to carry the diamond theme across so that we would have consistency around the house, and hence more curb appeal. 

They measured and sawed and domino'd and cuss'd a little as the day went and as darkness locked in this is what we have for our front entrance : 

It's a little hard to see from the angle of the picture - they managed to keep a little bit of a curve at the top of the gate to give it a little bit of extra character. It's setting overnight and tomorrow they start on building the trellis and pagoda for the roses to grow over.

I'll leave you with a picture of the boys tucking into a nice cup of hot soup - more to come as the work progresses.

Organizing paint

When you set out to paint a whole house in a very short space of time with a large and changing number of people, organisation is pretty key. I'm not the world's most organised person  - I describe myself as chaotically tidy, in that I've a passion for a clean and tidy house, but I have never mastered the art of replacing everything immediately in its home location the second it is finished with. I have done project management for many years as a trade though, so I know that planning is key to success.

In an earlier post, I talked about the importance of having an idea of the character you want to build in a home, and what colors you plan to choose. I spent a lot of time in Pinterest looking for design ideas, created my own boards, used Design Seeds for color palette selection and used Evernote for co-ordination.

Having the color palette and design ideas early, meant that we could take advantage of flash sales on paint in DIY stores  and start to build stock up before we had people on the ground. It was also pretty vital to have a good stock of paints early : regular runs to the DIY stores are fun, but highly time consuming and definitely eat into your action run rate. We didn't avoid them completely - far from it, but we definitely improved on our ratio from the summer before at the old house. However this left us with a small mountain of paint tins, generally in exactly the same design bar a small printed sticker from the color mix machine.

I came up with the idea of making a couple of small binders  with room colors and instructions. Each page had one room :  the primary areas called out (ceiling, walls, wood, accent wall) and matched with the paint color details - and a swatch from the paint chips in the store taped to it. These were stored at strategic locations ( the kitchen, near the kettle & tea, near the coffee maker) so that people could check what their next color or task would be. It's a little battered now from being well thumbed, but it is still super useful for reminding myself of exact colors for touch ups and fixing small boo-boos that appear over time. So far, I haven't run out of paint, but in previous homes it has enabled me to go and get new pots long after I would otherwise have completely forgotten my choices. Each paint tin was marked with an outsized strip of masking tape on both the side AND the top, with a clear statement of room name, and what area it was intended for. Initially it was in big bold black, but as we ran through tins, and had to relabel, it was what ever writing implement we could find. It's important to have it on both side and top : they do get stacked and having to lift off 3 other pots to see if it's the right one at the bottom is a nuisance, having it on top makes it much more eye catching. Having a a common nomenclature for rooms and paint areas helped a great deal, although we still ran into the odd hiccup - mostly when I changed the room name on the fly!

 Paint brushes and trays were the next organisation hurdle. With a couple of professional decorators in the team, we took on board their advice that since we had colors that would span multiple rooms, and multiple coats of the same color, we shouldn't clean out the equipment at the end of each painting session, but instead to wrap in airtight plastic bags until the next use point. It saved us a great deal of time (and wasted paint) in clean up but we learned a few lessons along the way :

• Don't forget to label the plastic bags with the color. They get moved around and it's super hard to identify the different tint shades the next day if you paint in shades of white as I do. And realizing you are on the wrong color halfway across a wall is super frustrating!
• Do plan to have a lot more brushes, rollers and trays than you originally thought neccessary. I had assumed that one per person would be enough with a few spares, but with people painting multiple colors in a day, that number rocketed up. 
• Do have a clear plan to decommission and clean up trays for paint colors which are complete : we had quite a few trays that could have been cleared up earlier hanging around, and since we ran out people would wander around grabbing bags that looked out of service in order to equipment themselves with the expected infuriated result when the original painter came back off tea break. 

Masking tape is important for stopping paint from travelling too much, and we used a lot of reels on windows and doors. But there is always a little bit of travel and clean up. I tried again to do accent walls in much darker colors, but I still can't get straight clean lines down the edges. I've tried all sorts of tiny thin brushes, and even masking off areas, but so far it's still smudgy. I've just heard that there is a new decorators masking tape by Frog, which stops the paint from running underneath it - maybe I'll try to do some touch up with that. How do you get straight lines in paint? What is your tip for success?

First things first : planning the project & creepie crawlies

As I've been in the new place a while, I am going to play catchup for a bit in my posts - we've done a lot since we moved in and I would love to share the full journey!

With roots in project management, the first step in kicking off a renovation project had to be planning ahead  - working out what we want to do, choosing a style and color palette, setting a budget & booking the workforce. I started with good intent, but reality and time caught up remarkably fast - and many decisions needed to be made on the fly. 

To ensure that I didn't forget or lose information as the project happened, I ensured that the project team leaders (W, Ian) were all signed up to Evernote - it helped to structure lots of pieces of information into useful findable buckets. I loved the  mobile capabilities of the Premium subscription, as well as the ability to capture documents & business cards with just one click .

Pinterest  was valuable in finding inspirational pictures . With friends and family in different countries and timezone, it was a wonderful way of being creative together and stretching boundaries. A goodly number of pins from friends made their way into the project and I'm super happy with the end results.

Choosing colors ahead of time was critical : I  had a very short window to do a lot of  'base level' renovation & redecoration work in before the movers arrived with all the furniture & belongings. There's nothing to stop me doing more, but it gets ever so much harder when you are moving things around as you paint! Each room had it's own paint chip, and I tried to blend the color change through the house, with relaxing and soft greens in the main living areas, cool active blues in thinking rooms, warm pinks in cozy sleeping rooms. I spent hours on Design Seeds browsing through the color chips finding just the right blend of shades for each room. It even encouraged me to be far more adventurous in my color selections than normal as it was so easy to find a set of beautifully matched colors to work with. 

Finally the most challenging part of the preparation was expanding my slim dutch vocabulary exponentatially with many complex building/diy/technical words as I struggled with contractors with quotations for work that I didn't feel up to doing myself. Whilst W was happy to help in the majority, he has a strong belief that he shouldn't have to make all the calls  - and anyway, all Dutchies speak English, honest! I believe I've disproved that many times now, but the rule still stands - I have to at least try. 

With the house frame and structure being entirely wooden, a must have was a survey for insects and rot. The first company to come in was quite terrifying, leaving behind the impression that the entire building was about to collapse entirely with the next breeze unless they were paid lots of money immediately as the house was thoroughly infested with 'houtworm' (woodworm) and 'boktor' (deathwatch beetle). Thankfully, a web search rapidly identified them as being at the  more 'cowboy' end of the building world, and with a little help from colleagues, I got into touch with Van Lierop - a far more reputable company who confirmed the presence of both denizens, but that it was a new and very mild infestation, easily treatable with a very good spraying! So, all booked, all planned ready for key day!