Housewarming Date

My final bit of homework for this week was to choose a date for a housewarming party. As I only plan to have one room finished in this eight week period (although the rest of the house should be vastly improved, too), I have decided to plan to have just one or two friends over for afternoon tea. This will really suit my plans for the sitting room and, although it sounds like a minor thing, it’s not something I’ve ever done in this house. So, the date I have chosen is Sunday, 14th January. I’d better get cracking…

New Sofa

Our new sofa has arrived and I’m thrilled with it. I think it must be from the 1930s, and still has its orginal red brocade, bun feet and castors. It has been very badly clawed by cats on the arms and sides, but I spent a few hours this morning giving it a haircut with a pair of dressmaking scissors and now it looks fine. Originally, I was looking for a sofa to reupholster, but this one is just perfect as it is. I like the faded grandeur of the ever-so-slightly tatty upholstery.

It is missing its seat cushions, but I have ordered some duck feather floor cushion pads, which I’m going to cut down to size and cover with a harmonising fabric. I’m thinking vintage velvet at the moment, but I’ll have to see what I can find. The main thing is that the frame is very sturdy (I peeked under the hessian underneath and everything seems to be in order, apart from a couple of bits of broken webbing which I can deal with at a later date). The seat is very well sprung, and even without the cushions you just sink down into it in a relaxed heap and it also has a drop arm at one end for afernoon naps. Perfect.

Even more perfect is that it (and the cushion pads I have ordered) only came to £100 with delivery. I had budgeted £250 for the sofa, which I was worried was a little on the low side, so this has been an absolute bargain.

Week 2 Progress

I’m nearly at the end of Week Two of the Apartment Therapy cure, and I’ve made great progress. I have finished my wardrobe, which is now bright shiny white inside with shelves for shoes and a compartment at the back for out of season clothes.

Yesterday, the plasterer came to mend the wall in the sitting room, so as soon as the plaster dries I can start building my first alcove cupboard. We also took the old sofa to the tip yesterday, and I am waiting right now for the Edwardian drop-arm sofa I bought at the weekend to be delivered. No sign of it yet, though.

While Andy was busy with the plastering and doing a bit of repointing on the brickwork outside, I attacked the kitchen and cleared out all the cupboards, cleaned the fridge and defrosted the freezer. I have filled up my Outbox with unwanted tupperware and kicthen bits and bobs, and filled a whole bin liner with out of date food and rubbish. I’ve also offered a couple of paintings from the sitting room to my brother. It feels good to get rid of this clutter.

How to antique shiny brass

Over the weekend, I have been working on getting my wardrobe finished. This used to be the boiler cupboard on the landing. For years, the only thing that made it a wardrobe was a sagging wooden rail that I had fixed inside - shoes and bags were just jumbled up on the floor. So I built shelves, built a new door, installed a proper metal clothes rail and, this weekend, finally got round to painting it.

When it came to fitting the reclaimed latch I had bought for the door, I realised I didn’t have any screws to match. Luckily, I have learned a clever trick this year - vinegar fumes make polished brass look antique. This only works with polished brass (not coated or lacquered). When I bought the knob below it was super-shiny, but after 48 hours suspended in muslin over some vinegar in a sealed container, it matches the rest of my reclaimed fittings very well.

I used the same trick for the screws this weekend. I only gave them 12 hours in the vinegar fumes, but that was enough to dull them a bit. Time will take care of the rest.

Sitting Room layout

One of my tasks for the sitting room this week is to decide what activities I want in the room and where they will go. My list is as follows:

Reading and knitting - I want a cosy little reading corner with a lamp and a comfy wing-back chair and a handy surface of some sort to hold a cup of tea, notebook, etc.

Watching television - We’ll want to sit on a sofa and be able to watch TV comfortably.

Talking – at the moment, the sitting room isn’t really set up for good visits with guests. We only have a small sofa and one chair, and at least one of those seats is usually occupied by a cat.

Landing strip – as our front door opens right into the sitting room, our landing strip needs to be in here, too. This will include a place for shoes, post, keys, umbrellas, etc.

Following on from that, I used the Arrange-a-Room feature from Better Homes and Gardens to play around with room layouts. Our room is only about 12 ft square, and that includes the stairs and front door area, so there isn’t much room for manoeuvre. At first, I assumed that it would have to be in the same layout as it is now (with the exception of replacing the bookshelves in the alcoves with fitted cupboards and shelves):

But then I read the book more closely. A couple of the tips which leapt out at me were that there should always be at least three separate sitting places in a living room, and that furniture works best when centred on the middle of the room. That suggested to me that a) I needed to fit in another chair somehow and b) the ‘middle’ of the room in my case is in fact the fireplace. So I jiggled things around a bit and came up with this:

Immediately, it looks much cosier and more communal and more balanced. The sofa and chairs are centred around the hearth, making for cosy chats and relaxation (especially once we get our woodburner). It does mean getting rid of my beloved trunk (previously under the window, a space now needed for the landing strip which I’m tackling next week) and it is in effect making the social area of the sitting room much smaller, but it just seems to work. I think the TV will go on the cabinet in the small alcove – I’m not entirely sure about this, yet, but it seems the best solution.

Friday Flowers

This week’s flowers are English chrysanthemums in a gorgeous golden orangey yellow. They were sitting in a bucket outside my local post office and I had to buy them.

Such a happy colour.

Armchairs

As part of my AT homework, I have been looking through a small stack of old Period Living magazines for style inspiration and came across a very interesting article about easy chairs. It confirmed my instinct that three piece suites are a no-no for my style:

“Professional designers like to add individual chairs to a room - say, a wing chair and an open-arm chair, alongside a classic sofa - to give the impression that the room has slowly evolved… The furniture should be of roughly the same scale, so no one piece dominates or is dwarfed, and the covers should be complementary rather than an exact match.”

Exactly what my instinct was telling me, although a lot more eloquent. I know I definitely want a wing-back chair, beacuse an experience in a holiday cottage of a perfectly proportioned and stuffed wing-back earlier this year has made me determined to create a little reading / snoozing corner with just such a chair. The perfect chair is proving hard to find, though, because it needs to be smaller than the average chair, but not too small.

Other tips garnered from the article:

Covered in leather or tapestry they have a straight laced formality, but dressed in checked or striped fabric they assume a relaxed look. I am thinking a modern, muted tartan might be good.

For reupholstery, an average armchair seems to need about 7 or 8 metres of fabric.

You can replace uncomfortable seat cushions with feather-filled ones for a real sink-in relaxing experience.

Find a complementary link to other furniture in the room. For example, if a sofa and armchair have different types of cover, add cushions or throws to marry them together.

My total budget for the sofa and chair is £350, which is a piddling amount, and includes fabric for reupholstery to be done by me). I’m hoping I can find what I need for this. I’ve already got a bid in on a sofa, but no suitable chairs have come to light yet.

Elements of Style

Even though I’ve got a lot of repair work to do before I can get decorating, I am starting to think about style. In Apartment Therapy, the questionnaire at the beginning of the book helped me begin to define my style.

The biggest element has to be Englishness - and by that I mean tea and crumpets, damp rainy days, log fires, Miss Marple, Radio 4, tweed, Muriel Spark and so much else. It’s so much a part of me that I find it hard to describe, although I will try to do so as I go along.

It’s also modest and eclectic. The type of English style built up over generations. Mismatched but high quality furniture, a bit worn about the edges. Vintage, rather than expensive antiques. This is what really makes the style, I think. It’s the individuality and sense of history that each piece brings to a room. That’s what I remember when I think of my childhood homes (and there were quite a few of them, although always the same objects and people).

But there is something else to throw into the mix, too. Chinoiserie. Not the full-on Orientalia look, but little touches here and there. This is part of my personal family history, of Brits abroad in China in distant centuries. My childhood home was scattered with beautiful Chinese objects in silver and jade and black lacquer, and precious silk fabrics kept in trunks. Accompanying all of these were true stories involving pirates on the Yangste, kidnappings and dwarf travelling healers.

All that would make this feel like home. But where to start?

Bad Bones

Or good bones, treated by a quack osteopath. After tackling the wall in the alcove yesterday, I lifted up the panel that hides the pipes for the gas fire and discovered two things. Firstly, the brick hearth that runs along the length of our sitting room is not original. It has been built on top of lino tiles, presumably by the builder who renovated this row on houses in the 80s. The second discovery was that there was a whole load of rotten wood in there.

Getting it out took me back to my days as a student archaeologist, as I sat there scraping behind bricks with a trowel, a brush and a teaspoon (not official archaeological kit). The builder obviously just blocked in the original skirting boards, which have rotted. That particular bit of wall is underground, as our house is built into a hill, so it wasn’t the brightest thing to do. But it’s all out now and the rest is drying out with the help of a dehumidifier. It’s reminiscent of a Roman hypocaust system.

Perhaps I could fit in a very small bathhouse instead of a cupboard?

Good Bones

I have really warmed to the idea in Apartment Therapy that the structure of one’s home is equivalent to the bones of the body. Our house is very sturdy, being built out of good quality materials over a hundred years ago, but I have never quite trusted it. I have been wary of poking things too hard in case the whole thing comes crumbling down. But the book has made me see things in a new light. I need to touch the walls and get to know my house a lot better.

I have had a hands-on lesson in this today. The wall in the sitting room alcove where I am building the shelves has always been very bumpy and rough, with a few small rust patches on it. I had originally thought I’d just whack some paint on and ignore the problem, as it would be mostly concealed by books when the shelves are up. But after reading the book, I decided to explore a bit further.

[A bit of history: we bought our house about ten years ago. The previous owners had fallen on hard times, both financially and emotionally, and the house was in a very bad state of repair. It had not been heated for years, had not been maintained and the two dogs and four cats who lived with the family were not house trained. Despite the stench, which hit you when you opened the garden gate, and the dog poo in the carpet, I fell in love with it at first sight. And now I have the words to explain why: it had good bones and, like a mangey mongrel in a rescue centre, it was crying out to be loved. Maybe we took on too much. Over the first few years, we worked hard to address the most basic problems, but then ran out of money and steam, and it has started to slide into neglect again, which is why I'm doing this now.]

So, this morning, I took a scraper, hammer and pair of pliers to the bumpy wall. A lot of the bumpiness turned out to be bad and blobby paintwork, which scraped off to reveal good, solid and smooth plaster beneath. There was also a big patch of crumbly, loose plaster and a small colony of rawl plugs and screws (hence the rust) which had been covered roughly with filler. After removing all this I was left with this:

It doesn’t look very pretty and it’s a good job I budgeted for a plasterer, but I am very happy. The niggling doubts about whether there was something seriously and structurally wrong have disappeared, and I feel a deep confidence in this house, which can only grow as I progress with this project. I feel like I’m falling in love with our little house all over again.