bobble

… written on VOX that it won’t let me cross-post due to all the links.

The post where I talk about Etsy and the wonderful things it does

The post where I talk about restoring my antique desk and my poor shredded fingers

The post where I get excited about all the lovely furniture that has arrived from eBay

The post where we have our first houseguest at Bobble Towers

The post where I decide what colours to paint my house

What a lots of lovely posts.

M has been investigating what watts we’ve been using.

Illuminating stuff.

I wrote a lovely long and witty post then my mac ate it. Pish.

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.

On Friday we are getting our sitting room chimney swept. Of course I have visions of consumptive Victorian urchins in rags shinning up my chimney stack but in reality it will probably be a corpulent balding man in blue overalls with a hoover.

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.

Well I have been glued to the Olympics in HD. You can see every wrinkle in the presenters faces and every bead of sweat, marvellous! As for ’stro-mo’ in the gymnastics, it’s a revelation.

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.