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!

Spring weeding

Spring has definitely arrived in Holland - and the weeds & nettles are growing like crazy. We have a massive infestation of crabgrass and buttercups are running rampant. Keeping up with the weeding seems to be an impossible task!

Last year we spread out a *lot* of bark chips - about 4 inches deep - across the main flower beds. We didn't do any great amount of weeding and I expected to be having to do lots and lots and lots this year. Surprisingly, it's actually not been bad - and even nettles seem to have died back. I am wondering if this is going to be the magic organic solution I've been looking - using mulch layers to kill off the large amounts of weeds  we are still tackling. With 5 cubic square metres of bark chips, I might just make it around 2/3rds of the garden again. Definitely will make it onto the to-do plan. Sadly it didn't work on the buttercups - they have just come back ever more enthusiastically than before.


Today, I had a go at shifting the buttercups and crabgrass in the main beds - 6 loads of weeds out, 15 loads of bark chips in and things are starting to look quite pretty! I will need to add a lot more layers, but I don't think I can push any more wheelbarrow loads without collapsing in a heap today.  Trying to get every single buttercup root bulbs is remarkably hard with gloves but hopefully there's been a high hit rate and we won't have such a flourishing colony later in the year.

Luca had a wonderful day chasing the frisbee around the garden, in between weeding stints. He hasn't quite got the hang of 'give' but he definitely worked out 'fetch'!

Refurbishing a garden table & chair set - and a little more....

 We have a patio in front of the kitchen which is a suntrap in the spring and in the summer. It's lovely to grab coffee and breakfast whilst sitting in the sun watching the ducks and swans gliding around in the canal.  

Last year, we used a very ancient Ikea table, bench and two chairs which have sat out in the garden for the best part of 3 years - and it was pretty clear that they probably wouldn't make it through another winter if we didn't get some maintenance on them.  I bought them when I moved to the Netherlands and had a tiny garden which I kitted out with a cheap and cheerful set of garden furniture. At the time, I really didn't want to spend a lot of money on the garden, and I wasnt thinking for the longer term, so I bought the simplest furniture I could, and decided that if it needed throwing away in handful of years, I'd still have had value from them. The furniture is looking quite shabby now - the majority of the stain has peeled away, a main slat on the bench has broken away, and there is lichen growing all over them. 

With W itching to play with his new Festool sander, and a beautiful sunny spring day, it seemed like fate! First task was to sand down all the surfaces to make sure that there was no loose material that would discolor or disrupt the new coating. Most of the sanding was done with a fairly coarse grain pad - a 60 grit for the majority of the frames, and the table surface was given an extra smooth finish with a graduated sanding up to 120 grit.

A. had previously found some old wood that was a close match to the broken slat,trimmed it to size and attached it in the gap. W sanded the new bar back to make it fit in as much as possible with the original. Then over to me to wield paint brush and wood stain to get everything painted a cheerful rich green - including Luca who developed green zebra stripes due to incautious inquisitiveness. We ran out of paint half way through, so we had to do a quick run to the DIY store to get a top up.

A few hours drying in the sun and we have once again a lovely table & chairs set on the patio outside the kitchen to have breakfast in the sun. Here they are, ready to sit at and watch the world go by.

Looking forwards to the next weekend!

This weekend, though, I got into a bit of overdrive mode and decided to keep going with the sanding and painting. The side window in the stables has peeling paint - and the wooden frame is getting exposed to the elements. The new sander zipped through the task in no time at all, and I spent the dying light hour of the evening getting the first coat of paint over the newly prepared surface.

 I still need to do another coat so I haven't got a done photo yet, I'll update this page when complete.

Renovating the Mudroom : build phase 1

When we first stepped into this house, our first impression of the house's interior was the mudroom. It was a dark and scruffy room.   and smelled faintly of damp. The walls had random pipes and industrial style ventilation tubing which crisscrossed over the whole room. The only light came from a tiny side window and the glass upper door. We knew this room needed to be radically changed - but I don't think we realised just how much we would need to do to make it a beautiful room.


There was a strange velvet flocked brick pattern wallpaper which was peeling away - and appeared to be held onto the walls by dint of many tin-tacks in the corners of kid's paintings that were pinned to the walls. One side of the room was lined with old kitchen cabinets for storage of paints and random stuff . This was the third kitchen in the house - definitely well equipped on the kitchen front! On the opposite side of the room, an old doorway had been partially bricked up, but poorly done so that it was only flat on the other side, leaving a strange dip in the wall in the room.

Wall paper stripping can be quite soul destroying - but I always find it interesting to see the history of the house emerge - different paper layers, and different colors of paint, as you strip away the paper. It's almost a consolation for the hours you have to spend steaming and stripping stubborn patches of wallpaper, in order to prepare for your new colors. At some point in time, some previous owners had a love for candy pink walls with a dark burgundy lower trim in a hard gloss. It makes a dark and small room even smaller and darker - and definitely doesn't match the yellow and green wooden trim of the doors! At least the gloss paint helped with the removal of the wallpaper, but on the pink surfaces it was so thoroughly glued that we had to scrape inch by inch.

Preparation continued on all sides - we also ripped out the old kitchen units, and then started to knock out the shape of a new window next to the entrance door. The plan was to build a window frame and insert a double glazed window pane into the double barn doors that form the front of the room. Nothing ever goes smoothly though - and as we started to cut, we quickly realized that the wall/barn doors had not been properly secured as it started to collapse. IDD to the rescue : he had the team quickly refocused on replacing and re-pinning structural framework and supporting the floor above. Once it was all repaired, we could continue with our window work  and replacing and increasing the insulation in the wall. As the hole emerged it made the most amazing difference to the light in the room - definitely one of the best decisions we could have made!

Once we'd stripped all the paper and  all the preparation work was complete, it was clear that the walls were too damaged to redecorate without re-skinning with plaster - and D is a plaster guru. He corralled a team and the lads started to re-plaster the whole room. This last summer was gloriously warm and sunny  : both a blessing and a curse when you are doing so much work. Hard for the workers as it's hot, heavy, hard work, but good for drying out the plaster. That's a double edged sword as it dries so fast it's hard to finish smoothly, but D took it in his stride. A few tips we learned as we went along : if you are mixing a lot of plaster, having a mixing paddle with a power motor is a must. There are lots of different grades of plaster and they are not completely interchangeable. We also used a metal corner brace to shape the corners of the room - it's lovely for a while, but a Great Dane can knock the thin plaster layer off in seconds!

Plastering done, we started the clean up - and discovered that plaster gets EVERYWHERE. It's really nasty stuff for spreading all over the house, and we learned the hard way that you can't just hoover it up. It's so fine that it goes straight through all the filters you have on your hoover, unless it's an industrial grade builders hoover , coats the engine and the electrics, and burns it out. We were not planning on replacing our Dyson hoover, but after it died halfway through the build , we had to! The tiles on the floor are quite old, uneven and full of nooks and crannies that the plaster can hide in  - mopping just seemed to push the plaster around. At some point in the future I plan to replace them and to level the floor which is incredibly wobbly and uneven, but not just yet, so we had to get them clean. We hired a circular sanding machine  with a bristle brush attachment and used that to break through the majority of the plaster dust, but in the end, nothing beats getting down on hands and knees with a scrubbing brush and good old elbow grease!


After so much work just to reach blank canvas stage, painting seemed quick and easy - although incredibly expensive in paint. The fresh plaster drank the paint like a desert drinks rain - and we had to do multiple coats to get the color even and streak-free. I have always like coastal themed homes and this Design seed inspiration picture set the tone for the direction I wanted the room to have. I didn't find an exact match - but I chose a white with a hint of blue - and a light blue accent wall for this room.  The woodwork was all repainted in a light neutral shade that complimented the wall colour.

I had spent quite a lot of time on Pinterest in the run-up to the work session, and had a good idea of the type of furniture I wanted in the room - and this picture gives the closest idea of what I wanted to achieve.I want to be able hide away the jumble of daily life that collects in your entrance way in deep cupboards - and still to be able to hang coats, scarves and dog leads in a convenient and easy location. With so much land, it's also essential to be able to remove boots and muddy shoes quickly, before continuing into the rest of the house. It's called  a mudroom for a reason. It was also going to be the room where Luca slept and stayed when the house is empty. Of course, like all best laid plans, I'm a complete softie, and Luca gets to go where ever he wants, whenever he wants! With the inspiration images to hand, IDD & D spent a couple of evenings drawing out plans and designing what we could best fit into the space.

Once the plaster was dry, IDD got to work gluing and cutting a lovely pine board to build the basic frame of the furniture. I intend to whitewash the pine to give it a hint of white - but as we haven't yet completed the doors and the trim, it's still on the to-do list. Roll on Phase 2! We ended up with a shelved cupboard and two deep wardrobes for coats and winter clothes. We have a comfy seat along one wall that you can sit on whilst you change shoes, backed  with a set of high open hooks for wet coats and accessories to dry on, before being put away in the cupboard.

Like all the best plans, we ran out of time before we managed to get the doors fitted and W has been fully occupied on so many other things that we still have an open set up in the mudroom. I can't wait to get the doors and trim done, so that I can paint and finish the room, but I think I will need to be patient until it's warm enough to work outdoors again. There's a lot of gluing and cutting to be done to achieve it and the stable block where we do most of our DIY work set up has no heating. It's still a lot better than it was  and like every entrance, is full of miscellaneous items that mysteriously migrate there when you are not locking. We even have a small dog table for Luca to drink his water from - as a Great Dane, he is prone to bloat, and needs to have his food and water elevated to a comfortable height.

Kitchen makeover : a quick refresh in 2 days

Kitchens are the most important room in the house for me. I love cooking and a kitchen with insufficient work space is my worst nightmare. One of the oddities of homes in the Netherlands is that the majority of them have tiny kitchens - either they are small pokey galley kitchens, or the walls have been knocked down to make a large kitchen/diner/living area  with the result that the kitchen area is minimalist and sketchy. I think I may have mentioned previously that it took over a year and a half to find this house - the state of Dutch kitchens is a large part of the reason. Here are the pictures that were on the real estate website for the house : 

  

I love bright yellow kitchens and the pictures caught my eye pretty quickly - as did the fantastic Aga style range oven. It looked pleasant enough in real life, simply a little tired from loving use and in need of some sprucing up. 

We knew we didn't have time to replace the kitchen before everything arrived with the packers so it was always going to be a bit of a lick and promise with paint. I originally chose this Design seed color swatch as I thought it would be the best fit given the existing cabinet doors. 

I was quickly persuaded to paint the kitchen cabinets as well as the walls and ended up choosing a slightly richer warmer color for the wood.  Probably closer to this one - although I do think this is one of those times when all the planning in advance didn't match the end result. The color is slightly more peachy that either of these two design seeds would suggest. 

Lots of hands to paintbrushes and about 3 days later we had units in a lovely warm peachy cream, and fresh white walls. It took about 3 coats to cover the grey grim that had built up on the fibreglass paper on the walls, but we just didn't have time to strip back. A task for next time.

I love the stained glass windows between the kitchen and living room - they add an interesting quirk of character. Our neighbour Frank ( born and raised in the house until age 16)  told us that they used to be in the main conservatory so at some point an owner has clearly salvaged them and moved them to a new home. I love the little touch points and stories that a house of this age has!

I don't have any pictures of us replacing the fridge and the dishwasher but both were exciting little subprojects in their own right. I would not normally have built in units, its just too much hassle for minimal return in my view. But as they were already there, we had lots of 'fun' trying to get the panels to mount properly, and to fit back into the spaces when they came. 

We did have a few learnings : kitchen unit paint just isn't strong enough to withstand repeated wear in a constrained small area. We have rubbed away the new color around the fridge door handle and it's looking quite grubby and worn again. I am wondering about trying to varnish it or cover the high wear areas with a clear self-adhesive plastic  after repainting. If you've painted up a kitchen how did you deal with this? 

We also didn't have enough storage space - with no units along the upper wall because of all the windows letting light in,  we had suprisingly little space for cooking materials. We've pressed into action our old IKEA furniture, which doesn't quite match the picture I had in my head but they are functional for the present. Maybe I should paint them too? 

Here's the kitchen today - complete with olive trees sheltering from the winter frosts & Luca's own table.

Hope you like it just as much as we do!

Rae

This blog will also be shared at the The Charm of Home link party

Fitting new drains and gutterpipe : Holding back the flood part 4

Time to give you an update on the water situation! We've been beavering away in the back ground laying the new drains around the mudroom. In the last update, we'd just finished using a jackhammer to lift the concrete and with Christmas coming, we ended up taking a bit longer than we'd planned to complete the job .Over the next few days, W dug out the channel sufficiently deeply that we could arrange the drains with a downhill flow towards the canal. Once he had them arranged just right - and tested with a few buckets of water flowing through, we lifted and glued the plastic tubes together at the join points. Then, back into the channel, re-measure with a level and re-test with more buckets of water to make sure that we haven't disturbed the underlying soil and set the angles wrong. 

Yesterday we spent the day filling in the edges of the channel with bits of broken concrete and gravel to a level about an inch below the top of the drain. We knew we needed to seal the area with concrete again, but didn't want to have to invest in huge amounts when using some waste material as fill would give just as good a hold. 

Today we filled in and over the edges with concrete : W went first and did the rough fill, then I came along with a fine trowel and did the shaping and edging to ensure that the water drained down into the plastic pipes. I decided to give the finished work a little signature mosaic to add a bit of winter sunshine to the day! Luca tried hard to add his signature paw print to it as well, but we managed to fend him off long enough to complete the task. [update : he managed it - we have two prints for posterity!]

We still need to dig the channel down through the lawn to fit the pipe that runs down to the canal, and we still need to adapt the base of the downpipe from the roof-edge gutters so that it flows into the main grid. Both of the remaining jobs are quite quick and easy, so we will probably get to them tomorrow, once the concrete has had time to set. I'm super happy because already you can see that water drains down and away from house, instead of pooling at the base of the walls , and soaking into the wooden door. We've also stopped the cascade over the edge of the roof gutter and the wall is clearly drying out already. I've had a dehumidifier running in the mudroom for the last few weeks and whilst it would fill in a few short hours when this all started, now it takes a good couple of days before I have to empty the tank - a sure sign that the situation is getting better. 

We've also redone the window frame on the mudroom window, with new hardwood, and lots of industrial grade exterior construction sealant. It looks a lot nicer and the window sill is now dry, so I think we've even managed to stop all the leaks from that location. We may actually finish the year in a dry house!

Having a holiday - Boxing Day

We decided to take a day out of the DIY routine, and spend Boxing Day just chilling.

We took Luca to the beach which he loved - but he wasn't very well behaved and forgot all sense of recall, immediately!

So, beautiful walk, but grumpy Luca because he wanted to run with the wind and couldn't since he had to stay on the leash. And there was a *lot* of wind!

I did find lots of lovely seashells, and managed to fill my pockets with them. Now, I just need to get a spare half hour to do some crafting! Sadly, no driftwood - the North Sea doesn't seem to dump much wood on the Dutch coastline.

Mounting a flag pole - raising St George's Cross in a strange land.

Here in the Netherlands, so many houses have flag poles. It's not the odd one, or even one in 5 or 10, but nearly every single house. People fly flags all year around celebrating all sorts of different things. On King's day, the Dutch flag is flown proudly, often with an orange wimple. Here in the village, we have a local village flag and it's been flying all this year to celebrate the fact that this village has been here for 650 years ( exciting to know that our home has been here for a fair chunk of that time!). Last year when a missile fired from the Ukraine took down flight MH17 and the news broke - the nation mourned. As the news broke across the country every home had a flag at half mast in the most amazing national unspoken choreography.

Our home is missing a flag pole and it's been on the dream list for a long time. With so many things to get done, we didn't give it very high priority. But as we had to hire a drilling machine to drill holes for the gates, we took the opportunity to drill a meter down into the ground to mount our flagpole. We have very heavy clay, as we found out when digging for the fruit trees, and a meter is a long dig!

It's quite a simple mount : we embedded the base PVC pipe in a concrete mix. We used a dry mix as the ground was sodden from the rains the night before - just tipped a little extra water around to help it. I then spent 5-10 minutes with a leveller and a large tamping stick  alternately checking straightness, then compressing the concrete mix down hard.

A quick spin with the drill to mount the cleat on the side of the pole; threaded the halyard up the pole and  once the concrete had started to take we mounted the pole into the PVC holder.

And here it is : England's flag flies in a small corner of a foreign land. With an ex-RAF chappie alongside it!

Mounting a new post box : curb appeal

With our beautiful new gates, I couldn't leave the old rusted mailbox there. It had huge holes in the bottom that the slugs sneak in through and quietly chew on our post. Whilst it's accepted that the dog ate the homework, people look at you very strangely when you explain that the slugs ate their invoice and you want a new one as a result. I wanted something that was as beautiful as our home is going to be and reflected something of the stature of this amazing farmhouse. I found a great bargain on a Dutch shopping price comparison site, moved quickly and had it shipped over the next day. Its an upright post box that reminds me a great deal of the beautiful red pillar post boxes all over the UK, and is a lovely dark green to match the house. We tried standing it next to the new gates, but it just tilted in an alarming fashion towards the canal. I really don't want to lose my new post box into the murky depths!


We had a lot of off-cuts of wood left over from the gate building and lots of concrete scree from the drain building, so I came up with the idea of building a raised concrete stand for it. The Makita chop saw made easy work of turning 4 poles into stakes. The deWalt cordless screwdriver/drill waltz through screwing 8 panels together to make a lovely mould.

Some broken concrete lumps, some prepared mixed new concrete and we soon had a  fill in place. Remember to tamp down the concrete thoroughly - it makes sure that the gaps are all filled and that there aren't any air bubbles in the concrete. You can level the surface with a concrete trowel. but if you are unsure, using a stick to skim along the edges of the frame works well too. We let the concrete harden and pushed some long iron bolts into it to bolt the post box to it.

As the concrete hardened we decided to keep the wooden frame at a single plank, and had a bit of a quick fix to saw away the extra wood. It also saved on concrete as we'd have had to pour a lot more in! Now the concrete is set, it looks beautiful with the post box set square and centre in it. I still need to do a quick slap of green wood paint to weather proof the wood, and I'm planning a future project to mosaic the concrete surface to include house name and number. I'm thinking of a nice vine or floral/leaf design.....this needs a bit more cogitation I think! But for today - here it is, with me sneaking off to the stables to do a bit more work on window frames in the background......