Illuminating stuff.

You’ll have to do with bullet points instead.

1. I am sanding a desk. Knobbly, swirly scrolly bits are hard. It also has ‘grunge’ in the corners. Did our forefathers keep earwax and snuff in the joints for extra rigidity or something? It will look lovely when I am finished though. I’ve changed the knobs to nice sparkly ones which M said reminded him of ‘The Crystal Maze’ and I shall be inserting some of my smelly lining paper to rid it off ‘Eau de Attic’. More lovely secondhand furniture is coming this Friday. Chic and hopefully unique.

2. Weird seaside weather here - grey, cold, hot, sunny and then grey all in the space of an hour.

3. I have some pretty calling cards from Etsy (seller Enfin La Volia.) All the cool kids have calling cards dontcha know.

4. I had a very nice Sunday roast at our local yesterday with M and M’s mother. Piles of organic chicken smothered in thick glistening gravy. Mmmmm hmmmmm. I also discovered while there that we have a local indie night, observe!

5. I bought an old apothercary bottle at the flea market yesterday with TINCT. NUC. VOM. on it. Apparently this tincture contained strychnine and was used to treat morning drunkenness, nervous affectations and loss of periods amongst other things - lawks. I shall use it to store my washing up liquid in. Or possibly gin.

6. Since having our chimney swept we have a black rain of toot coming down the sitting room chimney. Clean chimney = lots of stuff can come down it. M and I shall be pleased when we have a proper hearth and grate. We are now thinking of getting a wood burning stove. Efficient and real flames. Toasty. Also less dependence on imported Russian gas - up yours Medvedev!

7. My tummy is rumbling at an epic volume.

8. Our upstairs neighbour who is is moving to the US for four years (won’t someone nice that I know come rent his flat and be a darling neighbour to us? Please). Last night at midnight FFS he dropped something incredibly heavy which caused all our electrics to go blinkety blink. Mmmm if I see him today I shall scowl.

9. I answered the door to what I thought was the postman this morning only to discover Jehovahs Witnesses. A motherly type with her seventeen year old son in tow. The seventeen year old was rather disturbingly hot (for a god bothering youth). Is this a new tactic by the JWs? Any how it turned out she wanted to talk about global warming and my trump card of “Oh but I am Roman Catholic!” was not needed. Apparently Jesus is upset with us for ruining the earth and will smite all excessive carbon emitters. Something to think about eh? She tried to quote something relevant from the Book of Revelation but alas could not find it. I felt smug and a little sorry for her. I wished them a cheery good day though.

Right I must away our little local hardware shop and select the appropriate grade of sandpaper. The glamour.

The chimney is also being surveyed to see what state our flue is in so we can look to having a proper fire again. We need a new mantle, hearth and fireback too as the originals are long gone. The mantle is original - we think - but covered in many years of paint, it’s also wood and I’m hankering after something more robust. We also have restrictions around here about solid fuel so we’re looking at gas stoves that look like Scandinavian wood burning affairs with glass doors. They are so convincing you wouldn’t know that they were gas unless you poked around inside them. I have high hopes of being toasty this winter.

When I was on hold for the chimney sweep on Saturday I had to laugh - their hold music was ‘Chim Chim Cher-ee’ sung by Dick Van Dyke - lovely.

These lovely posters arrived today. They are produced by graduates of Falmouth University to pass on advice to first year students. They are from a project called “Advice to Sink in Slowly.” Beautifully printed and a wonderful concept. Go here to see the whole range and buy prints.

Going back to normal telly after watching something in HD looks weird, kind of fuzzy. Then you realise that is normal. God knows what watching non-HD TV is like in the US (NTSC opposed to our PAL transmissions). Blur-o-rama I guess.

Well the flat is coming along at a cracking pace. We’ve appointed a carpenter and he is coming around tonight for a final meaure-up of our sashes. Task one for him is restoring and refurbishing the ginormous windows so they are sound and toasty come wintertime. Only half of one sash needs replacing due to it being rotten so all good there. The same week as he comes round the electrician arrives to rewire and hang our lovely lights.

The shutter man from ‘Shuttely Fabulous’ was indeed fabulous and we have appointed him to make our shutters. We should have them sometime at the end of September. I shall kind of miss having to wear a hat indoors as it is so bright but it will make using a laptop so much easier, no squinting here madam.

We have asked for a design like this:

We were walking around Seven Dials in Brighton when I spotted the perfect set of Victorian shutters so I wiped out my cameraphone. Pictures by me and good drawings by M have made it very easy communicating what we want to various tradesmen.

We got all the quotes back for our built in furniture and have decided to scale back on it. One, it’s expensive getting built in furniture made by it’s very nature and two it is going to be very hard to get it to match the existing lovely panelling, architrave and skirting. M and I discussed it at length and decided that the last thing we wanted was a pastiche of the original style that was neither one thing nor the other. After all who has heard of an Victorian TV cupboard? The bespoke furniture we are still commisioning is what I grandly refer to as “the library”. Or what our carpenter refers to as “bookshelves on the mezzanine”.

We’ve been stalking items on eBay and measuring to the last millimetre all the spaces we have to fill. One warbrobe had perfect aged wood but was an inch (why do all furniture sellers put the measurements in inches for heavens sake?) too wide. One chest had lovely tuned legs but was bright orange. You get the picture. However, we’ve been dilligent and canny. For less than the price of our bespoke TV cupboard was going to cost we’ve bought: a desk, a wardrobe, a very sweet chest of drawers and a dresser base (with exactly the same pattern as our panelling funnily enough) for the TV and associated tech. Today I also won a lovely skinny armoire (which matches the wardrobe) for our coats and hanging clothes.

Soon we can get rid of the last piece of IKEA furniture and get our clothes off the floor. Hurrah! I am going to have so much fun changing handles, painting and lining the little treasures. Lining. It’s an underated pleasure lining paper. I ordered some on sale over the internets and it arrived over the weekend. Sweetly smelling and beautifully patterned. I was worried that some of my second hand purchases might niff of mothballs or attics so I now have the perfect counter to that:

It’s gorgeous and smells of vanilla and pears.

Over the weekend we partook of our new membership of the City Car Club - of which I cannot say enough good things about - to go to Kent*. We went to very posh Tunbridge Wells to look at painted kitchens and Tenterden to look at old salvaged radiators. Very very exciting. We ended up buying some linen sheets too but that is another matter.

The radiators were all gorgeous and I wanted them all. We ordered two for our bedroom as they are going to be “on show” the most. They will be right in front of the original features we like the best (the panelling and the fireplaces) so we didn’t want some modern ones taking anything ‘away’ from them.

One of the ones we bought was a chubby one. Has a radiator ever been so lovely?

They also had a truck load of ones that had just been ripped out of an office in Whitehall. Why do people throw such lovely things away?

In other news I’ve had a bad neck for a week and I am getting cheesed off with it now.

*We also went to the dump to get rid of all the crap our vendors kindly left us - bits of wood and many half-full cans of paint. We’d of never managed it without a car.

He said “We’d just need to know maximum sizes of radiators and BTU/kW needed for the room. We can mock it up in SketchUp tonight? We need to mock up room layouts to sanity check radiator sizes anyway.”

What man would offer, and indeed like doing mock room layouts? He is a prince among men!

Well this next picture may test peoples opinion on my supposed good taste. Our latest (about twenty minutes ago) eBay win:

Lookit those elegant spindly turned legs and those kneehole drawers. I feel the need to write my morning letters at it on lavender scented note paper. We need somewhere to put our macs (and our old desk was left behind as it was built in) as M’s iMac is currently taking up the dining table and we’d really like somewhere to eat again. Also every bit of important paper seems to have gravitated to said table to be worked on. Lawks, I want to drink my tea at the dining table!

The desk will be living in our main bedroom so it needed to be pretty and have that whole posh ladies dressing table aesthetic going on. We’ll see how ‘orange’ the ash desk is when it arrives as to whether we make any changes to it. I may put some adorable little ceramic and brass Victorian castors on it for added flexibility and line the drawers with pretty flock wallpaper. If the handles are chipped in any way I might swap them for round china or glass ones.

The boiler installer was brilliant though and asked lots of questions about which floorboard I’d prefer him to cut and was the carpet tacked down enough etc. etc. If anyone needs a plumbing company in East Sussex I can recommend them a good one.

The three old lead crystal chandeliers are back from rewiring and look marvellous. It’s a pity our Electrician can’t hang them for another three weeks as he is booked up but I am already imagining scenes such as the one below occurring in our drawing room:

We couldn’t find energy saving light bulbs that were pretty enough for the chandeliers so we have gone old school and bought clear incandescent bulbs in a flame shape. They are the most gorgeous light bulbs I have ever seen. To offset them not being energy saving we’ve bought dimmer switches for the rooms they’ll be in. We’ve also got some very pretty ‘dolly switch’ toggle light switches for the rest of our rooms. They make a very satisfying clunk when you switch them on and off.

Today I am expecting a visit from ‘Shutterly Fabulous’ to measure our huge windows for some shutters. The quotes we have had so far cost the same as a small car so hopefully this one will be a tad more reasonable. Unlike most people I want solid panelled shutters like the house would of had originally not plantation or louvre shutters. I think I have a phobia about louvres shutters on Victorian houses… but that could just be me.

So one month in: a new boiler - check.

This month: getting the sashes restored, a new consumer unit, some new wiring, new down-lighters and the chandeliers being hung.

Did I tell you about my teapot? It’s like this:

I think I may have to change my surname to Morland or Dashwood.

Apparently when they converted the building in flats way back when they didn’t run an appropriate size diameter gas pipe from where it enters the house to our flat. Our gas supply isn’t sufficient. It wasn’t even really sufficient for the old boiler hence the shower problem.

On Monday the plumbers return for another wodge of money to fix it. Fixing it entails a new big pipe from the back bedroom out into the communal hall along the corridor and into the front wall of our flat. Then under the hall and kitchen floorboards and so on until it reaches the boiler. New boilers are arse aren’t they?

I am slightly worried at the moment that our neighbours will hate us. Doing anything to the communal parts of the building requires the say so of the other freeholders. They are all very laid back and nice (and have even offered us the use of their showers until Monday) but I still feel uneasy. I don’t want to alienate them.

Next week the electrician is supposed to to be coming. I hope our electrical supply is sufficient from the hall into our flat for the new kitchen appliances. We’re changing from a gas to a ceramic hob so that’s a bit extra on the loading. Hmmm, you just know it won’t be, right? Oh well.

Today the two chandeliers I bought for the kitchen and bedroom are due to arrive.

I need tea.

And they are turning the radiators on later too, joy.

The positive side of the new boiler is that:

a) We will save on fuel bills as the new boiler is 92% efficient as opposed to our old one which was about 55%.
b) It’s better for the environment
c) It’s smaller and very plain
d) Our shower will now work properly
e) It will be quieter

The negatives are:

a) We now have a hole in our kitchen wall to the outside world where the old monstrosity came out. A hole makes me nervous. Apparently we have Victorian flint walls which are very crumbly.
b) We will need to get some replastering done.
c) The fitters arrived an hour and a quarter early this morning and I was in my dressing gown.

Hopefully our neighbours will forgive us all the noise.

We had approximately half of the time away under serene blaring hot blue skies, half under some of the worst storms Northern Italy has seen for years. Maltempo indeed. So, erm mixed.

We drove up and down many ace passes and managed to do the two big hikes we couldn’t do last year because of the snow (yes, we had snow last year in the Dolomites in July. Guess what, we had it this year too.) I now have Catinaccio and the Tre Cime hikes done. We even did some bouldering. I ate canederli (dumplings), deer, rabbit, speck, lard, bream, bass and sole. M even ate some meat, get in.

But the mother of all passes, the pass that ‘Top Gear’ made even more famous, the biggie: Stelvio. It was bloody shut. Yes, shut for a whole week to “protect workmen”. We drove to the other side of the region, up to a vertical weeny no horse village in the rain (to a hotel that didn’t have Italian TV despite being in Italy, only German and Austrian) only to find out it was shut. Was a teensy bit pissed off? Yes.

Oh well, there is always another year… We decamped from no horse village and scarpered back to the Lakes and booked in at one of my favourite hotels in Torri and indulged. Cocktails and lounging by the water while lotharios in speedboats tried to pull women half their age. It was good.

I took about 300 pictures and have looked at none of them. Busy y’see.

My laptop died. That was a nice surprise when I got back from Italy. My macbook isn’t even a year old and it was kaput. I got it back today (thank you warranty) and it was the hard drive. So they popped a new one in. Unfortunately I lost all my data. Fortunately clever clogs M backed it up before we went away so I’ve only lost the newest stuff. Bah. Thanks heavens really as I have two lots of wedding photographs to process (again). It could be worse. Apologies for not replying to emails, fakebook etc etc. I know I have heaps to do.

I have also been buying lighting and entertaining workmen. After looking at a hundred seemingly identical modern acrylic chandeliers I’d given up hope of finding something nice. So we bit the bullet and bought antiques ones at ouchy prices but by god they are lovely. They are being rewired at the moment so we should have them next week.

We are totally sticking to the mantra “if we don’t love it it doesn’t cross the threshold” with this flat. We have to absolutely love it to buy it. We’d rather save up or sacrifice on other things than buy something twice. We also are trying to buy all ‘old’. Reuse, reduce, repair and recycle at its finest. The Independent only had an article on it last Thursday. Next on the list is a Georgian-a-like ladies battered writing desk for the macs.

I discovered today a brand new shop near me on Blatchington Road in Hove (near ‘Ethels Kitchen’) that I have totally fallen for. It’s a little shop that sells beautifully girlie secondhand china, unusual stationery and handprinted bags and homewears called ‘Bird & Rose’. It’s run by a lovely lady called Sophie. I came a cropper in there today… some of my haul below:

I can now make a very posh afternoon tea in a Jane Austen stylee if anyone pops down from London.

We’ve had plumbers, electricians and carpenters ’round nearly every day to quote for the grand project. The local plumbers are ace and we’ve already been entertained by Jeremy the project manager and Richard the chap who installed the washing machine and dishwasher (thus bringing us into the 21st century.) If the guy who comes tomorrow to install the boiler is called James I shall laugh my head off. They managed to fit us in at short notice for the boiler refit due to a cancellation. I am very happy as it means from Friday I can have a shower without it being hot-tepid-cold-hot-tepid-cold all the sodding time.

We’re also looking at wallpaper and old school chunky style radiators to replace the hideous 70s ones we have currently. For the vaguely interested here is the wallpaper we’ve chosen:

I never thought I’d have wallpaper in any house I lived in. Just goes to show how you change.

Ooh that looks a bit steep doesn’t it? (Sadly, we won’t be doing it in a Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera ala ‘Top Gear’.)

See you on the other side.