Preparing the Pillars

Today the weather was lovely so I spent most of my time outside, sanding down the wooden pillars for my wardrobe archway. Here are pictures of them from a couple of days ago, after being washed. They were filthy, covered in mud and I expect what was soot from the fire:

 They appeared to be painted in a sort of black wash, either that or they were seeeriously caked in soot from over many years. Either way, I wanted to bring the wood back to its former glory.

I began by hand-sanding the wood, but this proved to be a lot of effort, and so I eventually resorted to the machine sander, which worked miracles. A couple of hours later and they looked totally different:

 The colour of the wood is actually really nice, so in a way it'll be a shame to paint it, but I need the archway to be uniform with the mdf structure of the wardrobe, and hence it'll all have to be painted in cream (clunch!) to match. I plan to sand the paint down in parts though, to retain the character.

I didn't sand inbetween the long grooves in the upright part of the pillar, but left them black, which created a really nice contrast:

The wood grain came out really nicely, I think it must be oak or some other hardwood:

I'm making it my mission to sand down the archway to the same quality tomorrow whilst the weather is still nice - stay tuned for more updates!

Ch-ch-ch-changes!

I've been up to a lottt of exciting stuff since my last post - prepare yourself for an overview of my endeavours! 

Furniture Refurbishment

So the plan chest I've been working on was put on hold whilst I was clearing out my attic, but as soon as I'd finished that mini project, I decided I wanted to get straight back to it. Transforming this piece of furniture is just one step towards my overall summer goal, which is to convert my bedroom into an art studio, with sufficient storage space for all of my equipment. Textiles is my main thing (it's my dream to someday be a costume designer for a living!), so I need more space for using my sewing machines, storing fabric, and I also want a room which inspires me to create.

With this in mind, getting my plan chest up to scratch is essential, as it's going to store all of my scrap fabrics, each draw sectioned in half to provide space for two different colours (so blue scraps in one half, red in the other, for example). The top drawer will also be a light box for tracing - I'll go into the details about how this will work later. In my previous post, I had done little work on the beaten up chest I had salvaged from my school - I had removed the stickers and washed the front of two drawers, but that was all. Since the completion of my attic clearout I've done loads more, starting with sanding down all of the drawers by hand, then sanding down the main frame:

I was so pleased at how nicely the wood grain came up - it looked like a totally different piece of furniture by the end of it! Despite its clean appearance, the wood was still water damaged and generally not in the best of condition, so rather than leaving it natural I went ahead with my original plan - painting it. I went to Homebase, grabbed every paint booklet they had, poured over colours for ages, and finally settled on 'Clunch' by Farrow and Ball:

Okay, so the name is pretty hilarious, but that just adds to the appeal if you ask me. I knew I wanted to paint my furniture in creams from the start, as I love the shabby chic look, and cream is very neutral - you can accessorise with any bright colours and vibrant patterns when your furniture and walls are plain. Farrow and Balls' colour sample booklet drew me in from the start (it looks so professional and quality), and 'Clunch' was the shade of cream that I decided upon from their collection.

The Cheapest Piece of Furniture I've Ever Bought From an Antique Shop

At the same time as bringing my plan chest to life, I was blessed with the piece of furniture of my dreams - a bookcase with glass sliding doors. I've been looking for one of these for ages, for displaying my collectables, but they've always been pretty pricey on eBay, or else too far away for me to collect. However, I was shocked and delighted to find just the bookcase at my local antique shop for £8!! Say what? I had to look at the sticker closely to make sure the '0' hadn't faded in the sun. Nope, definitely £8. Eight. Pounds. Quite a beautiful number to see on a piece of furniture when you're a skint student. Isn't it lovely?

I think it's probably a reproduction piece, hence the cheap price, but it has the charm of an antique, and of course its old/ slightly battered state is good cause for bringing this baby back to life! I'd feel guilty for painting it if the wood were in good condition, so just as well the top surface was all scratched up and water damaged.

Painty Paint Paint Paint!

The first step on both pieces of furniture, once washed and sanded down, was priming them. White primer basically gives wood an even coloured surface to paint on, which is particularly useful when you're using expensive, light-coloured Farrow and Ball paint - if the surface is already light in colour, you have to use less of the cream later on. Here is the bookcase after one coat of primer:

As you can see it looks really streaky - this is the stage where you wonder if you made the right decision. It gets better though! On the second coat it looks a lot fresher:

And then it was on to the Clunch, which really started bringing it to life!

It took me a couple of days, but I really enjoyed the process - painting is veeery therapeutic (Plus I've been getting through my sister's Gilmore Girls box set at the same time - always a bonus!) I still need to paint the shelves and the drawers, but they should be reasonably quick to do. And of course I was working on my plan chest at the same time - check it out!

This was in the first stage of priming, including the top drawer. I'll eventually take out the drawers individually and paint their insides - I want them to be perfect!

After a second coat of primer, it was looking pretty fresh. By the last coat of Clunch, it looked like a totally different piece of furniture!

I can't wait to sort my fabric into this badboy once it's finished - I'm hoping to get the drawers painted ASAP and then construct the dividers for the materials. I still can't believe I got this chest for free when they go for hundreds on eBay, I'm so lucky!

 Wardrobe Planning


My final announcement concerns the planning of my new wardrobe (yep, I'm going all-out on changing my bedroom!) My current wardrobe, although beautiful (a cream french armoire), is very small and impractical for my clothing - a lot of them are screwed up and shoved into compartments because there isn't enough room to hang them. I want a larger space where my shoes won't be littering the floor, my expensive dresses won't be screwed up and creased and my bags won't be dumped in a corner. I plan to build my own wardrobe from scratch, which will be fitted across the whole of my largest wall, and will also incorporate my wall bed/ 'murphy bed' - a bed which folds up into the wall in day time to make more space. Anyway, the basics of this wardrobe will be plain old MDF, but as I like EVERYTHING to be pretty, I purchased this beast from eBay to build into the front:

This beauty is a 19th century surround to either a fireplace or a door, the seller wasn't sure which, but either way it's absolutely beautiful - the carvings are so intricate, it has real character. It's also massive, nearly the length of the biggest wall in my room and nearly the height when mounted on the pillars. Once sanded and painted it'll look stunning I'm sure, and house my clothing with true magnificence. My DIY king of an uncle has agreed to help me put it all together - more updates on this front soon!

Finishing Up the Loftovers

I am proud, amazed and most importantly relieved to announce that my experience in the attic is at a close. After 11 days of hard labour in grimy, sweltering conditions, no less than 145 boxes are numbered, colour-coded, documented and organised. Honestly, I don't know how I did it. My sister gave up after three days, so feeling motivated was difficult at times, but the work paid off.

Applause for Klaus.

I had a real breakthrough when I started moving out the big junk - old headboards, laminate flooring, rolls of carpet - floor was finally visible and I could actually start moving things around. I like to think that I had a bit of an adrenaline rush in the sixth evening - I spent until gone midnight at the job. I'd like to take this moment to thank Klaus Badelt for composing the music that kept me going through the hard times. Here are some pictures I took at the end of the night:

Think back to my last post - on Day Three the floor was still near-invisible. I think this must have only been about Day Six, but as you can probably see, the progress made was substantial!

There bin liners pictured here were just filled with rubbish...I seriously dread to think of how many bin liners went to the tip in total - I hate the thought of landfill sites and waste. Thankfully most stuff is recyclable these days, so a lot of the junk was sorted into electronics, metal, wood etc.

This was the pile left to sort, which believe me, looked like a heap from heaven at the time, in comparison to the scale of work I had been facing all those days before. It still took me another five days to complete, despite this. Such is life.

Fini!

And here are some pictures of the end result. I'm yet to finish typing up 'The Roof Book', where the contents of the numbered boxes will be documented, but you can see how the system will work. What's more, we have a massive amount of unwanted stuff to car boot, so hopefully my efforts will pay towards the decorating of our hallway. This is the middle part, for household things:

The front right-hand side, for camping equipment. Some of the larger camping stuff was too big for boxes, but most bits are stored:

Childhood, on the front left-hand side. It was really hard to stack this all neatly as there were so many boxes, the most out of the five categories by far:

A close up of the Childhood sign, just a print-out stapled inside a plastic wallet for protection. Simple yet efficient:

There's a raised ledge at the back of the attic, and this is where all of the Christmas stuff is stored in plastic boxes - there didn't seem much point in documenting it as it has to come out every year:

One of the pathways on the right-hand side, leading from Camping to the smaller Work category. The left-hand side is similarly organised, the pathway leading from Childhood to School. The Household category fits neatly in the middle:

A little plastic basket I found whilst clearing in the earlier stages is now used for holding the permanent markers for labelling, a torch, scissors, tape and the colour-code stickers:

Flat-pack boxes by the ladder, ready for use should there be new things to store:

An overview photo, which nicely sums up my work. There will also be a 'Sign In/Out' book, so when you remove or put stuff back up, everyone knows. Sounds a hassle I know, but it'll avoid it becoming chaotic again! I feel like a proud mum:

Sometimes You've Got To Be 'Roofless'

 So Long A Levels!

I am pleased to announce that after a painful month or so of waiting for English Literature, which I sat on June 20th, my A Level exams are finally finished! Thank. Goodness. For that. I'm hoping that this new freedom will allow me to update my blog frequently - I have so much to talk about!

Cash in the Attic?

Over the last three days, my younger sister and I have been carrying out the near-impossible task of clearing out our roof. We've lived in our house for a good ten years, and over that period of time, stuff we've no longer wanted or needed has just been dumped up there. As a result, when you go up the ladder these days you can barely move an inch for the piles and piles of clutter. Just to give you an idea of how chaotic this situation really is:

...

...

So yeah, pretty embarrassing. It's actually hard to take a photo which illustrates the scale of the damage, because you can't move into a position where you can get a photo of the entire thing. Our house is of a reasonable size, so just imagine a very big space, filled to the beams with junk. A lot of it is unboxed too, or else just in plastic bags - NIGHTMARE.

Our incentive for this escapade is selling the stuff we don't want at a Car Boot Sale and putting the money towards redecorating our hallway, which has somewhat fallen into decay - giving it a new coat of paint, stripping up the carpet on the stairs/landing/in the hallway and laying down wooden floorboards. A lot of potential sale stuff belongs to our parents, so we've had to get their consent before putting it in the 'Selling' pile. My Mum is a bit of a hoarder, so we've told her she has to be 'roofless' (get my pun?) and only keep the stuff she needs.

Day One.

In the last three days we've made significant progress, but the amount of work left to do is daunting. On day one we emptied as much as we could into my older sister's room, who is conveniently away on holiday for two weeks:

We also used the upstairs bathroom as a dumping ground:

Leaving a (tiny) fraction of the attic empty:

 We then had to face the near-impossible task of trying to sort through it. On Wednesday we spent from 2pm until 11pm on the job, re-boxing things categorically. We have a new system in which each box is numbered, and everything in each numbered box is recorded in a notebook. This way, if anyone ever needs something from the roof in the future, they refer to the book to locate it, rather than rifling through various boxes and making the place a bombsite again. We also have 5 categories (Christmas, Camping, Childhood, School/Work, Household/Electrical) - we plan to colour-code the boxes with stickers and divide the boxes into sections to make it even easier to locate objects. Genius, if I may say so myself, but easier said than done - every step takes time. Here's my sister, bubble-wrapping ceramics made by my mum years ago:

   Although tedious at times, it's an interesting job - here's a bag of makeup we found belonging to my mum, a good 20 years old! No longer useable of course, but interesting to think of how long it's avoided the bin:

 Day Two.

 

After a well deserved sleep we began our second day of intense manual labour, which began by moving any sealed/completed boxes back into the empty space in the attic. We decided to try working within the roof rather than pulling it all down this time around, in order to save some time and effort...and mess!  It's hard to keep the morale up in such conditions, so we played the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack to raise our spirits - such a motivator. This photo was taken at the end of day two - considerably better on the far left hand side, but still horrific:

Day Three.

  

By the end of day three things actually looked different, which is such a relief, words cannot describe. Although nothing is organised as such yet, boxes are sealed and stacked and the far left-hand side of the attic actually has floor space. Like...you can SEE the floor! Wow:

 

You can see our numbering system clearly here. We're nearly on box 60 now and yet we have so many more to fill! I made a bet with my sister on how many it'd take altogether - I said 75, she 103 - she's going to win without a doubt:

And finally, for the sake of nostalgia, a picture of the Puppy in my Pocket and Kitty in my Pocket toys we came across, among our favourite childhood toys back in the 90s:

That's all for now, but I'll be sure to post an update with pictures when the task is entirely complete...give me a couple of weeks, maybe a month?

 

 

Introducing Brownton Abbey and The Plan Chest

Hello friends!

I warmly welcome you to my first official blog, Brownton Abbey. In the past I've half-heartedly attempted to create blogs for various purposes, but they never actually came to anything. Brownton Abbey, on the other hand, is living proof that my procrastination can sometimes lead to an end product...huzzah! 

Firstly, about the name. 

Initially I wanted to call my blog 'The Town of Brown', but someone had already used it as their URL. This annoyed me because they hadn't updated their page since 2008, but it's cool, because in this moment of disappointment, 'Brownton Abbey' was born from the ashes (courtesy of my sister who came up with the idea). You see, we're both big fans of Julian Fellowes' T.V. series 'Downton Abbey', so it seemed pretty fitting, with my last name being Brown n'all. I've sort of mimicked the logo, although with my own house floating above the letters, rather than, y'know...an Abbey.

This is a multi-purpose blog.

  

One of my problems in life is that I find it hard to concentrate on one thing and stick with it...I have lists coming out of my ears of tasks to perform, projects to complete, missions to fulfil, and I'm forever flitting between them. To put it more positively, I have a lot of interests and passions, so it makes sense to compact them all into this one website, rather than trying to juggle multiple blogs. 

I like lots of things.

I appreciate so much stuff in life and want to talk about all of it! I enjoy painting (with watercolours mainly), textiles (especially costumery), generally being creative, spending time with friends, attempting to cook (then eating it), going to nice cafes, listening to a variety of music, reading a good book, watching movies, being around animals, exploring other cultures (especially Japan), riding my bike, immersing myself in nature, being nice to the environment, going to charity shops and finding bargains, fashion and clothing, vintage and retro things...the list goes on!

But enough of the rambling and onto the good stuff...my latest project!

I gave 'My latest project' an exclamation mark because I'm exciiiited about it! For some time now I've been planning and investing in transforming my bedroom into an art/textiles studio, which will be in full swing once my final A Level exam is over. I'm taking an art foundation course next year so need a larger, more practical work space for my studies, and apart from anything else I'm really passionate about being creative, so I want a room which will inspire and motivate me to keep going! I've gained heaps of inspiration from Crafty Storage (http://craftystorage.blogspot.co.uk/), a blog which shares pictures and ideas for turning rooms into creative havens. There are some beautiful examples on here, and I can't wait to properly get started on my own!

I hope to document my own journey here, starting with the story of this plan chest:

 I've wanted a plan chest for a while for storing larger work, but was disappointed (yet unsurprised) to find that they sell for hundreds and hundreds on eBay. For this reason I doubted I'd ever get my hands on one, but I was lucky enough to have one of those 'in the right place at the right time' moments. 

One of the art rooms in my school, where I spent most of my time in sixth form, had been refurbished over half term, and hence a lot of new furniture had been fitted. I happened to arrive at school early and sat in this room, waiting for my art lesson, whilst the teachers discussed the changes. I caught the part of the conversation where they said they were chucking out one of the old plan chests, and I couldn't help but jump at the opportunity to save it! The bottom drawer had been very badly damaged when it became jammed, almost beyond repair (which is supposedly why they were getting rid of it), but this didn't stop me from saving this baby. As you can probably tell it has seen better days, but all the more satisfaction for me when I bring it back into its prime!

A couple of days ago I started work on it, taking out one drawer at a time to be prepped:

 Some of the stickers were severely faded and yellowed with age...it excited me to think of how many people had used this chest over the years!

 You can sort of see the mouldy white sheeting at the back of the handle, which I promptly unscrewed on both sides...

 ...much better!

I then went on to use this sander...machine...thing of my Dad's to lightly smooth down all of the sides:

 As I expected, this did very little for the front of the drawers, especially those darn stickers which were clinging on for dear life. I took a leaf out of Kim and Aggie's book (anyone get the 'House Clean is Your House reference?) and used a combination of boiling water and fairy liquid to lift the stickers before attacking them with various tools...

...and it took me AGES, simply because I had to peel off sticker upon sticker upon sticker - in this instance, revealing the name of 'Sharon Ford'. Also, as odd as it may sound, I have a bit of a weird thing about touching peeling stickers, so I felt pretty brave at this instance (...go ahead, laugh at me!)

As you can see, this scraper lifted up a lot of the old varnish, but not all of it. I concluded after doing this for nearly two straight hours on the front of the first drawer that I'd need to manually sand it later.

I *finally* finished the first drawer after many hours of work - sanded and scrubbed 'til it was squeaky clean. My cat, Hunter, showed his appreciation by sitting in it whilst it dried.

And then there were two...and I'm so proud of how they've turned out! It's all I could manage in a day because it's such tiring, physically demanding work, but I'm one step closer to painting it...just thinking about picking a colour (or colour(s)) makes me twitchy with excitement! Annoyingly it's been torrentially raining for the last week, which has made getting outside to sand down the rest impossible - maybe God reminding me that I should be revising for my final exam instead?

Bella appreciated my hard work anyway!