Up-cycling obsession

I am a little obsessed with junk shops. 

Recently my husband and I had 3 days, 2 nights away in Greytown to celebrate our 15-year anniversary. Now, I just love Greytown. It's so quaint and full of the cutest shops overflowing with antiques and collectibles. There are some gorgeous kids' decor shops as well as lovely little cafes. My husband has promised me a day to 'do' the antique shops for years, and finally my time had come. Three days! 

What I arrived home with was a grey jug. I had visited every shop there, religiously using every second that was in the day to trawl through these beautiful antique shops. The problem I had was that everything I saw, I wanted to change. And how silly is it to spend $500 on a carver for the office that you then mean to paint and re-upholster? 

Even the jug I could have bought from a wholesaler though our store, but I just had to come home with something!

Here are a few photos of one or two little projects that I have enjoyed. Hobby has gotten to obsession stage now, as new and partly finished projects mount up around the house. I've decided I better get moving and finish some so that the family can actually use them before they all start a revolt and send me to work! 

That's the key to all the up cycled items I do: they have to look loved. Many get the distressed treatment as it saves the kids from the risk of distressing me (and thereby themselves!) when they hit it with a hockey stick or a random stick.

Still sitting partly finished are 2 bar stools and an office chair. And a couch, some curtains, my new bed, the sideboard, a little stool, that fire-surround I mentioned...and that's not even starting on the items I haven't even started on yet - the other sofa, the lounge curtains, a foot stool, and the kitchen chair and arm chair I just bought...

This elegant lamp was brown and pink.

Ah yes, the kauri bench which I grew up with.

Gotta love a little kitchen stool. We use it all the time.

'Butchers Block'. Every kitchen should have one.
The macrocarpa top was from an old tree my parents milled.

Love, love this fabric. I'm going to make curtains from it.

Free Romance

No, I'm not going to start harking back to the 70s and promote free love and peace. For those of you who like a little romance and beauty in your life, I found this lovely list of romance that's free for the taking in an old library book and have added a few of my own:

Thunderstorms

Stargazing

Spring rains

Skinny-dipping

Mountaintops

Waterfalls

Birds' nests

Sunsets

Beaches and oceans

Moonlight

Shooting stars

Letting the sun dry your skin

Staying up all night and watching the sun rise

Outdoor showers

Old orchards filled with lichen

Chimney remains in a field

Tiny shells

Firelight flickering on skin

A little Shabby Chic

You will have seen the photos of our master bedroom on My Home page. What was once in this area was a much smaller bedroom with a window opening out to the front verandah, back in the '20s. Later, the end of the verandah was built in to make a sun-porch which was accessed from the remaining verandah, as was very common. During the '80s renovation, the door to the verandah had been taken out, the sunporch incorporated into the bedroom, and a bay window added to the front. Thank goodness for that, as it's about the nicest 'original' feature of the house and it's not even original!

Now, it has a new colour on the walls, ceiling, windows and doors, new hardware on the windows and cupboards, new curtains and a blind, and the last couple of things will be a new bedhead and carpet. (The curtains were installed later, so I'll include photos of them when I get around to taking them) I had to sell almost all of our bedroom furniture, much to my husbands disgust, and buy new, smaller furniture to fit the smaller dimensions of the room. I guess that's what you get when you cram 4 bedrooms into 143m2! I haven't managed to get him to agree to downsize from a king-size bed (now that the three kids aren't regularly in our bed in the mornings!) to a queen, so it's still somewhat cramped and I keep crashing my thigh into the bed-end when I walk past when I'm tired! 

An op-shop side table which I painted.
This little window now has a striped blind
and I have bought a new linen-upholstered bedhead
which I need to install and photograph.

I put up an old-fashioned 'picture rail' to make the most
of the high ceilings. 

NB. I finally convinced darling husband that we needed a different bed. My battered and bruised thighs still twitch as I walk past the foot of the bed in the dark but are now safe from sharp, wooden bed-steads!

All the cupboards had rimu architraves,
brass handles and cream paintwork.
They all got the white high-gloss treatment.
We replaced the four big, round downlights with
a nice crystal chandelier. 

My sewing corner

Shady garden makeover

Since marrying my husband 15 years ago, who came attached to a garden centre, I have had an increased interest in gardens. My last house consisted of 12 acres of neglected paddocks and was possibly a bit too much to bite off on my own. This house is only a 1/4 acre, and much more manageable. However the one problem it has is that the usable areas are on between 5 and 10 levels, depending on what you consider useable! So the only way to tackle it is one garden 'room' at a time.

The first garden we started on was the little shady garden between our house and the neighbours, a garden of 4m in width and about 15m in length, sloping, and sporting a terrific 60's brown fence and a whole heap more mud than grass. I never mowed it (mowing involved bringing the lawn mower down 3 flights of stairs...and then back up again afterwards), and none of the kids ever played on it as it was too small and rough. Probably also because I never mowed it. It also had enough ivy growing over the old fence to sink a ship, at parts reaching almost to the overhead powerlines. Once we started clearing of the garden bank which was shading my eldest son's bedroom, we discovered a little garden above a curving brick planter box wall, and a big pile of bricks just waiting to be turned into a curving brick path to match. The garden also included an existing concrete paver path curving around the edge of the brick planter to meet a little gate opening into the neighbours back path in a very sociable way.

The garden ran the full length - no great length at that! - of the house. Access was either around a path from the back door or else down 3 steps from the front porch of the house. The bottom of the sloping garden, which faces towards the front of the property, has a beautiful view of Whitirea Park once we cut out all the ivy and was perfect for the spa which was languishing in the parking area at the top of our steep property, where it had been for nearly a year since moving into the house. (5+ levels of garden = lots of stairs which does not combine well with moving a spa) It would be easily accessed from the house, with a lovely view, and makes use of a cold garden well as we didn't want to waste our one potentially sunny north-facing garden for a spa.

Down came the 40-year old fence and a funny little oriental trellis which was hiding the a/c unit from...well...nothing!

The second job was to create a level area for the spa pool. Initially we got a huge quote on both re-fencing and building a 4x4m deck for the spa, so we decided to pave instead. It didn't need a lot of 'cut and fill' - about 300mm both ways and a little sleeper above and retaining timber below and it was ready to go! I find a 450mm paver looks great when it is edged with old bricks. It takes away the brand-new look of it which clashes with old houses.

From there we continued the paling fence up to meet the brick garden, and built a new garden gate through to the neighbours' house. These two houses were built at the same time so many years ago - I wasn't going to be the one to break them up!

After the spa area was finished, it was time to get rid of the remaining lawn to avoid any more marital tension over lawn mowing! We had the brick path built just off-centre, and dug up two beds either side. The soil was terrible, of course. Up until the '80s there had been a concrete water tank - two sides still visible behind the pile of bricks - when most of the steep bank had been dug away to create this garden. So all that was left was clay and rotten rock in many areas.

 Stay tuned for an updated photo of a year's growth. Once I have weeded it...

Below is the list of plants I have used. These are suitable for shady, south-facing and slightly acidic soils:
Largest:

• Magnolia "Genie" (rich red, deciduous, will grow to max 4mHx1.5mW)
• Berberis "Helmond Pillar" (burgundy foliage, deciduous, will grow to max 2m x .5m)

Medium:

• Hydrangeas "Limelight", "Bridal Bouquet", and "Bloody Marvelous/Merville Sanguine/Raspberry Crush" (lime/cream, white, and rich red flowers, deciduous, 1.5m x 1.5m)
• Loropetalum "Burgundy" (burgundy foliage, pink flowers, evergreen, 1m x 1m)
• Azalea "Brides Bouquet" (white flowers, evergreen, 50cm x 50cm)
• Pieris "Christmas Cheer" (pink flowers, evergreen, 1m x 1m)
• Anemone "White Knight" (white flowers, 1m x 75cm)
• Daphne "Alba" (white flowers, evergreen, very fragrant, 75cm x 75cm)

Small:

• Heuchera "Obsidian" (burgundy foliage, evergreen, 50cm x 50cm)
• Bergenia "Blessingham Ruby" (green/red foliage, evergreen, pink flowers, 35cm x 50cm)
• Buxus hedging. This will be trimmed to 40cm x 30cm. 
• Annuals: Summer - white impatiens, Winter - white pansies, silver cinerarias, white primulas.

Our "The Block" week

When we moved into our house a year and a half ago, I promised my husband that I wouldn't start renovating until we had lived here for at least a year. All the experts say that is what you should do, to get an understanding of how you live in it, where the sunny and warm spots, as well as where it's not really used and a little cold and unpleasant. I had full confidence I could do this, as the race to suddenly finish all the projects we had started on our last house in order to sell it quickly had left me somewhat tired of the whole renovating thing. Or at least I thought.

Three months later the first school holidays hit and we had decided to have a "The Block" week in my younger son's room. Yes, I know, what about being sick of renovating? Don't ask me. Anyway, my son's room was on the southern side of the house, absolutely tiny at 3x2m, and was painted a sort of mushroomy-pink colour. You can see it on the "My Home" page. Yep, every boys' dream...

Now I do love vintage styling, however most little boys won't appreciate too many old suitcases, bevelled mirrors and floral fabrics, so we decided to theme the room according to what he was interested in: animals. And more specifically, African animals and Sea Mammals.

Wall colour is important and I am a big believer in making the most of small and cold rooms not by painting them warm whites, but by using gorgeous, jewel-like colours that enfold you in beauty and energy. Rafe decided on Emerald as his colour but let me tell you - this is no easy colour to find! After about 3 or 4 samples (getting up to $10 a sample isn't cheap!) we happened upon a tin on the clearance table with a green blob on the top that looked about right for $30. Four litres of gloss enamel should do the trick in a room prone to dampness, we gave it a try! Sure, it did take 4 coats to really get to the depth of colour we were after, but the result is stunning.

The space under the sleeping platform is nice and high - nearly 2m - but still a little boring, so we ordered a photo-murel from the US - a cheetah and her cubs which are Rafe's favourite animals. At nearly $400 it was an expensive wall but gives the room a sense of space that it lacked before and makes it truly feel like you are out on a safari! In hindsight, I would purchase one with a single drop, rather than two pieces as the thick vinyl is very hard to stick down, even with the thickest wallpaper paste. I ended up stapling it down at the edges. 

Other little details are a hammock hanging below the sleeping platform (we started with a string one but this was uncomfortable so we changed it for a green and blue silk one from Mitre10), a stripy blue, green, and grey mat from The Warehouse, hooks for all his caps, and a tall cubed shelving unit to keep all his knick knacks and animal models.

I made a little desk space with a fabric-covered pin-board for his awards and sports photos, and we picked up all kinds of gorgeous pictures for his themed room - a canvas of a tiger, a 'moving' picture of some dolphins, and a poster with all kinds of whales on it. His bed has a cheetah fleecy blanket from Spotlight and pillows with cheetahs and zebras from Trademe. On the floor are a beanbag and pillows in zebra and cheetah prints. I covered his light shade with a green 'batik' my husband had brought back from Africa 20 years ago.

Virtually all of the house has rimu skirting boards and architraves, which I find absorb so much of the limited light. Rafe was given the option of painting these out white or leaving them timber, and he chose to keep them natural. I'm glad he did now, as it's nice to feature some native timber somewhere in the house!

A future projects for the room is an army camo mesh 'curtain' along the front of his sleeping platform which he has to climb under to get in and out of bed but I haven't managed to source one yet.

The truth is that it took more than the prescribed week that was our challenge, but it takes time to get things perfect!

My first confession:

Today I painted over a 100-year old rimu door. 

There, I've said it. Now I have to make sure my father never knows of this blog site slash confession post. That, and make sure he never comes to visit ever again, or at least never looks into my hallway. 

I thought I painted a lot, and I always enjoy the results. However lately I've become aware that most of the wood that I've been covering with colour - or more likely in my case, white - has been special wood. You see, I'm the daughter of a cabinet maker who also makes beautiful furniture. In the family home is a farm-house kitchen built entirely of matai, from kickboards to beautifully panelled doors to finely moulded bench top. My mother's extensive collection of blue and white crockery is displayed on a traditional country dresser with handmade lace shelf trimmings, and the pantry is a three-doored and be-moulded mountain of beauty with the same panelled t&g doors. The floor is stripped back original '20s timber flooring, and this continues throughout the five-bedroom farmhouse. As you walk through the home you will come to the dining room with it's 8-seater polished wooden table with turned legs and padded timber seats. The lounge has a large, open fire on one wall, completely surrounded from wall to wall and floor to ceiling with timber bookshelves and cupboards, display shelves and mantlepiece. Most of another wall has glass-fronted display cases and panelled timber doors. 

Need I go on? 

Not only that but my grandfather is even worse. I mean better. Family legend has it that when my father married my mother, he told her he was not a 'handy man'. I imagine my mother's father possibly told my grandmother the same thing when they were married. However as my maternal grandmother's own father could turn from taking apart an engine in his garage and putting in back together, to creating a heater that still pumps out fantastic heat nearly 80 years later, to building a replica Tudor dolls house complete with tiny staircase, leadlight windows and hinged doors, I imagine she took it for granted that her new husband would simply carry on building and creating as her father had. In fact, my grandfather has just finished building his most recent house at 90 years of age, a little cottage with handmade kitchen, doors...and all the rest. He built my daughter a beautiful weatherboard playhouse, 3.1m x 2.4m, in such a way that all the wall panels, roof, and floor panels can be unscrewed, put flat on a trailer and moved to the next house. It included bunks, little glass windows, a dear front door with stained-glass insert, and curtains made by my grandmother. 

And so perhaps my confession makes a little more sense to you possibly. In my family, timber is sacred. As I have now made the first step towards freedom from this addiction, I will come completely clean: I have also painted all my timber t&g ceilings in my new house. And gibbed over the beam and t&g ceilings in my last one. I painted a kauri kitchen bench/stool, and a rimu desk, and a rimu bedside, and an oak dresser, an oak carver chair, my rimu panelled kitchen cabinet doors, all the rimu skirting boards and architraves in my house, a rimu fire surround, wooden bar stools, wooden bentwood chairs, mirrors, a sideboard...I had better stop there...

Now I need to figure out how I can justify painting my latest victim.

Welcome to my blog.

I never thought I'd be the kind of person to blog. It always seemed a little presumptious. However I've found over the last few years of home-making in my 2 latest homes that I actually can't help myself. Its so much fun that obviously every one of my Facebook friends and family needs to hear and see all about it, barely escaping minute detail of how, when and why I did each new project! So, ignoring my better judgement (I already have far too many projects to fill my time) I am going to proceed to presume that you, my reader, are actually interested in my home and garden, and it's up to you to then to either read or not. Really, you're doing my Facebook friends the most enormous favour.