Regal hens

Things are very posh in the Bath. Even our eggs have crowns:

They have most likely come from the Queen's hens. Mmhmm.

I made three of the royal eggs into these awesome brownies:

My kitchen could be more photogenic. Next house -> pretty kitchen!

They are particularly awesome because they are both delicious and low in  fat. They achieve their low-fat status by being made with mayo and not butter. Husband was enjoying his brownie until I informed him of this. He continued to eat it but I could tell his heart wasn't in it.

You know I said I made some muffins the other day? Well, they were inadvertently low fat as well. About 48 hours after I baked them, I opened the microwave and found a bowl of melted-and-re-hardened butter. They turned out ok though, I really don't know why anyone needs butter when we have mayonnaise, or simply microwaves to abandon it in..

Muffin man

We were looking at our bank accounts last night and realised that it's pretty easy to spend upwards of £30 a month on muffins. Yes, muffins. If one of you in your relationship (naming no names) has a penchant for muffins, 'usually the chocolate one, but sometimes the white choc and raspberry one' and visits a certain green and white high street coffee shop every weekday to gaze at and potentially purchase one, 20x-at-least-£1.50 = at-least-£30.

£30 = dinner at a nice Bathothian restaurant! So, we went here in the virtual life and we went to Sainsburys in the real life and then made 36 muffins (half white choc and blueberry and half apple and cinnamon (made the recipe up for the latter). Unfortunately I had forgotten that most muffin recipes fail to put enough sugar in so they all taste a bit like bread. We now have 35 bready muffins in the freezer for one of us to take to work every day and chomp their way thorough. Total cost = about £5. Brilliant! Hopefully.

Finished the chest of drawers!

Lifesize wooden cat for scale. Hehe. Not really.

What do you think? I am v pleased with how it turned out. As well as the exterior renovation, we cleaned the whole thing, polished it and lined the drawers with some pretty wallpaper samples. Our linen now has a fantastic, solid, clean new home! So very pleasing. We ummed and ahhed about what type of handles to use and in the end, budget decided it for us. We went for the cheapest vaguely matching ones, amusingly named 'granny knobs'. We might switch them out for some old-looking brass ones to match the original knobs that are on the middle drawers when we get rich though. Swanky.

As a reminder, this is what it looked like before:

You can read more about the happy transformation here

I am very proud of it. And it provided a welcome distraction from the uncertanties of flat-selling. It also made me think twice about buying a house that needs lots of renovating in the form of sanding down woodwork. I am not sure my attention span would take it.

In other news, I have been busy in the kitchen:

Not the most photogenic of things I know!

They were meant to be watercress quiches but I accidentally bought bags of mixed peppery leaves instead of watercress, so they were sort of salad quiches.. sounds gross but was nice. One was for cakey Vicky's birthday and the other was for the nourishment of Husband.

Tonight I am off to see the nice lady who I sew cushions for (I can sew one for you too if you like, for your chair or bed or campervan or garden or child or anything else that is not soft or pretty* enough!), and on Friday we might go and see War Horse or The Artist. Might. Then off to Swinners at the weekend to say goodbye to some of our good friends who are departing this life for one on the other side of the world, which makes me sad and I don't want to think about it! Next weekend is the Bath birthday celebration of Dingleby, my aunt, which is VERY EXCITING so that is nice! I will tell you all about it.

*excluding children

Sew Kindley

I made this Kindle case for husband when we got married.

Nice handmade Kindle case :)

It was fairly straightforward to make; just a long quilted rectangle which you then double back on itself to make the pouch, leaving a flap for the 'lid'. A good button is essential in these situations and I chose a wooden one for husband because when he met he was rather, hmm, backward when it came to technology and insisted he did not want a mobile phone because they were made of plastic and were not available in more quality materials (which apparently included wood). Unfortunately his moral stance has since eroded and he now has an impressive Apple habit, but I thought he might appreciate the sentiment.

I used a nice bit of binding tape to join the two fabrics I used. Birds featured quite a bit at our wedding so this was a nice way to tie in the weddingy theme without being overly girly.

He seems to like it. The Kindle lives in there, in any case. Hehehe!

Happy Friday everyone!!

Chillier and chillier

Just wanted to drop in to say how much I love my new chopping board:



Don't mind the weird caulk by the cooker. The gas man prised out the old cooker and then fitted a smaller one and filled in the broken edges with bath sealer. I stood there in horror feeling pleased that it was not my house. If it WAS my house, this kitchen would be in the bin!!





It's really brightened my chopping experience. Not a time of day that I have ever really contemplated as being particularly important before, but it is nice to make as many things cheery as possible, isn't it?!

I was making a chilli. I found five cans of different types of beans for £2 at Sainsbo's:

Yes, I also found a glass of red wine.

The chilli recipe came from my friend Vicky. I usually make it to my mum's recipe, but thought I'd try something new. Paprika featured heavily. It was great - nicer than it looks in the picture!!

Prime time

Today I am continuing the story of the wedding chest of drawers! For the previous installment, see here.

Sanding the chest of drawers was quite rewarding - the chipped dark varnish came off fairly easily and soon we could see the grain of the wood. We mostly used the electric sander, and then sanded the edges and curvy bits by hand. We used a coarse sandpaper and then a finer one. Some of the wood came up better than the rest. Below is the top of the chest, mid-sand:

And here is the front of one of the three little drawers:

 We thought these looked quite nice. No obvious bashes, and the wood (which we think is oak) was a nice colour. Same with the sides of the chest. The drawer fronts, however, were a different matter. They were a very thin laminate and we couldn't sand all of the varnish off without being worried that the laminate would split.

Remember I said that originally I wanted to paint the whole thing? Well, once we saw the lovely oak, I wasn't so sure. It seemed such a shame to cover it up again. But the big drawer fronts were definately not nice enough to remain uncovered. Dilemma. We decided to paint only the big drawer fronts, and see what it looked like with a kind of mixed-up wood-and-paint effect. I originally bought a can of white paint for this, but looking at the colour of the rest of the chest, we thought a creamier colour might be better.

Very happily, our landlord has left a whole shed full of what he terms 'household items', which we can use. Mostly they are not things that we would much want to use - massive bag of fishing rods and some mouldy camping chairs, anyone? Also in there however are many, many cans of paint. He must've loved painting. I rummaged around and found a few cans of satin (semi gloss) paint which I thought might be good. They were all Farrow & Ball. We are possibly paying too much rent!

After a few test patches, I decided to use one that was rather misleadingly named 'daffodil'. It was sort of yellowy white. I found the primer I had bought from Homebase, painted the fronts of two big drawers, watched as the primer ran down the sides of the drawers, felt silly, found some masking tape, masked the edges of the other two drawers, and primed them too. Then I painted on a couple of coats of the Farrow & Ball. Here we go:

Primed big drawers!

Apologies for my rubbash iphone pictures. I really must sort that out. The colour is terrible.

I am making this painting thing sound a lot more straightforward than it really was. The reality was, we were doing this in November in the UK, in a house with no garage. The room-of-many-uses was too small to hold the drawers and it was dark and rainy outside, so we were painting in our dining room. Rented house plus cans of paint plus wooden floorboards plus busy clumsy people = a bit terrifying! We were pirouetting around dustsheets and drying drawers for days, trying not to knock over paint cans or get stripes of drying drawer edges on our trousers. Finally, success! We put the drawers back into the chest! Then we looked at it. For quite a while. Should we paint the whole thing? Is it better like this? Do we think it's better like this because we can't face painting the whole thing and continuing the dance of terror with paint pots in the dining room?! This is what it looked like. What do you think?!

A nice warm thing

Just wanted to drop in to show you this. I thought it might happy things up a bit as it is nice and pretty, unlike the ongoing chest of drawers story, which is currently ugly and dusty..

In my previous post, you can see a picture of some drawers on the floor, with a set of double doors behind them. The drawers are in our dining room, and lead through into the room with no name.. or more accurately the room with many names.. the utility room/ garden shed/ laundry / sledge storage / toolshed/ workshop / mud room / garage. This room is invaluable but also inhumanly cold in winter, as it is single-glazed and has no heating. Those double doors that you can see have a finger-sized gap at the bottom of them, so in winter a wind blows through into the dining room as if from a sort of Bathothian tundra.

One day, feeling in a crafty mood, I decided I would EXCLUDE that draft from our lives. Hooray! I got lots of fabric scraps that I had left over from our wedding decorations, and a few other projects, and cut out some rectangles using my cutty mat, big massive ruler and rotary cutter (if you do anything with fabric you NEED to own these excellent things, they make the boring bits much better!):



Note essential hedgehog pincushion (from my bridesmaids) and sewing-box house (see here!)

 I then sewed the big rectangles together, chopped them horizontally into three, flipped the middle bit over, and sewed it back together so I had a long, thinnish bit of patchwork. I sewed some extra bits of fabric with hearts on it just to make it a bit more pretty. And to appeal to husband. Haha! Then I just hemmed the ends and sewed the long ends together to make a tube. I threaded ribbon through the ends and pulled one end tight to close it.

Next, I looked around for something to stuff it with. I generally save all my fabric scraps so thought I might use those, but I wanted to be able to wash this as it will spend its time being kicked around on the floor and couldn't bear the idea of either making a liner or emptying all the scraps out to wash it. Then I had a stroke of genius. GENIUS! Remember I told you we got some lovely new bedlinen when we got married? Well, we were overrun with old bobbled duvet covers. I took one of them, folded it into three, rolled it up and hey presto! Perfect. Here is the finished thing.. so proud!

Sand man

We had left off at the point where we were about to visit one of my favourite places. I am not sure why Homebase is one of my favourite places really. We regularly go there, mill around and then leave at least £50 lighter with stretchy massive carrier bags full of rather dull house things. I'm fairly sure we could have got a lot of nice clothes/shoes/spa breaks/cars/houses with the money we have spent there. The thing is though, a trip to a DIY shop really does seem to make your house nicer, even if it does involve buying for example overpriced yet morally acceptable light bulbs, and perhaps some wood filler.

This particular homebase trip was v exciting because for once we would be spending money on things that were for US, rather than things to fix our rented house. More specifically, the things we were buying were for our new family member here:

Yep, he was in for the works. New skin (ooch), new clothes and new accessories and even new um, drawer-y liners! Woohoo! A facelift for the child from the fifties!

First stop was the sanding aisle. I had in mind to paint the entire thing, drawers and body and all. First step to painting furniture like this (ie lacquered veneered / solid wood) is to sand it sand it sand it. This takes the shine off, smooths out any dings from the sixty years of faithful service, and roughs up the surface for the paint to stick to. Seeing as there is a whole lotta wood here, we thought we'd 'invest' in an electric sander. After much deliberation, we bought a Bosch one. I think it's cos I like saying the name, and it sounds a bit Germanic, like husband. Also, the only other brand-name sander that was in our budget was called 'the mouse', had terrible reviews, was smaller than my palm, looked more like a clothes iron than anything to do with DIY, and the shop demo version was broken. No dice, mousey.

Then we picked up some primer and some satin-finish paint, a squillion brushes, face masks for the sanding and some spare sanding sheets. We went to the till and left, £50 lighter with stretchy massive carrier bags full of marginally-less-dull-than-usual things. Got home, and used the electric screwdriver (my favourite power tool!) to remove all the brass hardware from the drawers. We kept it all with the screws etc in little bags in case we fancied reattaching it later. We then got some polyfiller (wood filler would have been better but it had vanished in abyss cupboard) and filled in the holes where the handles had been:

Drawers out, handles off, holes filled!

 Next job: sanding! This was very exciting. We knew that once the lacquer was off, we would be able to see his true colours! Would he be a beauty or a beast???

Our spacious, purpose-built, dedicated workshop. Ahem!

Drawing up a plan

So where were we? Hmm. I think we were talking about places to put sheets. Not perhaps the most exciting start to a novel, but ok for a blog I think... and the story involves power tools. :)

We were given some money for our wedding, along with some lovely new sheets and towels. We decided to spend the money on a new chest of drawers. Problem was, after perusing ebay, second hand shops, argos, pine shops, department stores all chest of drawers we found that all chests of drawers are either rubbish, ugly or very expensive. We have long been fans of IKEA for affordable, functional furniture but to be honest after having moved house with it so many times the functionality of our furniture has become somewhat limited. It's all kind of rickety and drunkenly leaning on the nearest wall.

We wanted something solid, ie that you could sit on if you were so inclined, with wooden drawer bases that wouldn't plummet into the drawer below. Buying rubbish furniture seemed futile, and expensive furniture seemed silly whilst this:

Can you tell I love this picture? NO LONGER ON THE MARKET!!! BECAUSE IT'S SOLD!! :D:D

was in our lives. So, we went on a hunt for a loveable, strong, yet UGLY chest of drawers. It had to be local, it had to be mostly wood, it had to be big and it had to fit in the back of our 2003 Yaris. Well, a few hours of ebay stalking later, he was ours!

You can't tell too well from the above picture, but he was pretty beat up when we got him home. I think he'd lived near a basin at some point as a lot of the varnish was sort of chipping off. There was a very sticky patch where a little hook had been stuck on the side - maybe for a towel? I love that he came from a Georgian Bathothian residence. We picked him up from a flat which had just been bought by a girl, and he'd come with the flat when she bought it from an old lady. So he is a long-established Bath resident.

So, we were left with a slightly grubby, chipped and frankly a bit ugly chest of drawers in our dining room, and £40 in the chest of drawers budget. Off we went to Homebase! One of my favourite daytime places!!

Possessions...

Hello again. So while we were waiting for this to sell:

..we spent a lot of time on the phone to estate agents and solicitors. And an awful lot of time waiting around for estate agents and solicitors to be on the phone to us. We were fairly convinced that the sale was going to fall through every second of every day (we hadn't had much luck with selling it in the past..) and were totally full of nervous energy. This manifested itself in many ways, mostly (to bf's dismay) by increasing my instinct to organise and 'rationalise' our possessions.

We have a LOT of stuff. We are not sure how this can be. Neither of us ever buys anything really. The only new things that we brought into our house last year arrived in grocery bags. And no, they weren't X-boxes and shoes and clothes and CDs cunningly disguised as carrots. They were in fact carrots. So, the only explanation is that the stuff is a) old, b) coming in through the letterbox, or c) carrots.

Carrots are easy enough to dispose of and I don't think they are contributing to the majority of our clutter. The stuff coming though the letterbox is however a real problem. Torrents of it. Every day. Pretty much all of it is for bf (husband now!) and therefore requires Husband to sort it. Husband is always at work, or wishing to drink tea, go out and do something fun, or do laundry (aww!). No time to sort piles of paper. Problem was, the piles of paper were exacerbated at the time by the flat selling. It was rather depressing to file all these bits of paper which claimed that the flat was going to be sold when we were sitting there convinced that every phone call that didn't happen meant that the buyer had vanished. So we put them all in piles in the spare room and shut the door. Problem (temporarily) sorted!

The final category of stuff (if you've been keeping up here..!) is... category A, "old". I think a side-effect of not really buying anything new is a reluctance to throw out anything old. So we had kept all the housey things that we both had at uni. They were all coming up for ten years old and really, how many old towels do two people need? With the VERY EXCITING arrival of John Lewis wedding list presents imminent, we decided to sort out the Old. We started with linen. This was PARTICULARLY exciting for husband. Mehe! I decided we needed more storage. Up to this point, our at-least-ten-year-old linen (some of which was actually wedding presents given to my parents - quality!!) was stored in the landlord's old IKEA baby changing unit. It was not ideal as it was completely falling to bits. I got on ebay and started the Hunt. It was full of suspense but it has turned out brilliantly.

TBC!

Back in the game, again!!

I know I am always saying I've been busy. But this time, I really WAS very busy. Three weeks after my last post, we were busy doing this:

Best. Day. Ever.

Then, we went off on a lovely honeymoon. We went with an animal theme. A week in Turkey, a week in Wales. Nice and diverse! And very relaxing. Purrfect. 

Cocktails and a swim..

..topped off with a little bit of Lake Vyrnwy :)

Then, just before Xmas, we were terribly busy running around like mad people selling this:

No longer on the market indeed!!

The flat that we still owned in London that was creating a bit of hot water for us in Bath! Second. Best. Thing. Ever! 

I have lots of exciting plans for 2012, many involving machines. Bicycling machines, typing machines, sewing machines, rowing machines! It's great to think that perhaps we will have a bit of time to relax, do some things that we love, see people who live near and far, and enjoy being in the Bath! 

Lots of love and see you soon!