Decorating the Kitchen

In my day job, I'm a software project manager. We follow a fairly new kind of software development which is a bit like prototyping, so that we design a bit, code a bit, show it to the customer, see if they like it, then design a wee bit more, etc etc. That's a bit like how I decorate. I've never been one of these people who get someone in, and design a complete room at once. My rooms evolve gradually with gradual decorating.

So, in the kitchen, I've taken off the wallpaper - thick foamy brown wipe clean fake tile effect - "windmill wallpaper", Mr Primrose and I call it, after the same design but augmented with windmills in our old 2 up 2 down in Lancashire. I always hope to find secret messages under the wallpaper, but only got "W/M", "20-->" etc in this kitchen. My mum found pre-war newspapers under carpets in her house, and amazingly she said that when she once helped her auntie strip 12 layers of wallpaper in her flat, the final layer was newspaper. But nothing like that here.

So, the first stage is that the wallpaper is off, the walls are painted pure brilliant white. The clock is up on the wall, and the bunting is up. My dad plumbed in the dishwasher for me and apart from a massive flood covering the kitchen with 3 inches of water, literally 2 seconds after he had said "That's it, ready! Not a drip!", things are going well. After trying to justify to my dad why I needed to have a stainless steel Smeg dishwasher, and failing miserably to justify it, we went to B&Q and bought a bargain £150 dishwasher off the shelf.

Next stage is to plumb is to plumb in the belfast sink I've owned since 1996 and brought with me on 6 house moves - these things weigh a ton, and the Pickfords guys just look at me with a swear in their eyes and a "you're joking!" when they have to move it. Mr Prim won't let me spend £36 on a unit for the belfast sink, so I have to wait till he carpenters the old one (i.e. saws it in half). Yes, everything we do is on the cheap!

More later with pictures when I get broadband on Tuesday (hopefully - fingers crossed). It is BT though and they seem terminally confused - instead of 5A Out Street Name, we have been getting bills for "5A Bournemouth Telephone Exchange" for the last 5 years - I kid you not!

After 5 Years of Procrastination, I've Moved

Yes, 5 years of procrastination, reading property papers and scouring online, I have at last managed to not only choose a house but get a mortgage for it and move in. This is my 23rd house move since I left home at 17, and most definately the worst move ever. Mortgages are a complete nighmare to get at the moment, even if you have a 100% perfect credit rating like we do - doesn't mean we have money - just that we are well-behaved financially. We secured our mortgage funding with literally days to go.

So, we moved in 2 weeks ago, and the house still looks like a scene from the "before" in "How Clean is Your House?", where some poor unfortunates live with hundreds of un-opened boxes. There is not a room in this house which is organised. In my mind, it's a lovely house, all grey and cream loveliness, but in reality it is a disorganised mess. And don't even think about the wallpaper and carpets. The lovely couple we bought the house off were 87. They have maintained it very well but you know what the carpets and wallpaper are like without me having to tell you - its "granny house" flowers and stripes.

The old couple lived here for 40 years, bringing up 5 children in this house, and they must have liked it because they didn't want to leave. They only moved because they couldn't manage the stairs, and have moved literally yards away into a retirement flat along the road. Problem is that the front door and garage door are painted the most disgusting pinky-red and I am itching to paint it, but they are only just along the road, so I don't want to start visibily ripping the place up yet.

Rowan Summer Crochet: Hydra

Can you spy it in the trees? Yes, at long last, I have actually managed to crochet a garment I would not be embarassed to wear. This is the Hydra pattern from Rowan's new Summer Crochet book, apparently their first book dedicated to crochet. This is great for crochet freaks like me. I don't really want to spend money on a knitting book that just happens to have one or two crochet patterns in it.



This is crocheted in 2 parts, front and back, and then the neck and sleeve bands are crocheted on once the tank top is sewn up.



The initial band is a bit of a killer to crochet. It is done on a 2.5 hook, which if you're used to using 5s or 6s for blankets, seems awfully small. It is not difficult, just never ending. However, once you've got over that hurdle, then it is easy and fast, just treble, chain, treble, chain, all up the body.


The neck and armhole shaping need care in counting, but if I can manage it anyone can, lol.

The neck band is quite plain, but the arm bands are a delight, and really make the tank top into something a bit special.

Little White Crochet Blanket and a New Dotty Project

Here's where I am so far with the little white crochet blanket, and I have to admit that I'm not really enjoying it. With the stripey blankets, there is always the excitement of adding a new colour and seeing how it interacts with the previous colours.


I think I'll persevere with this, but I need to take a break from it. It does have a great crunchy texture, and I think it is going to look great on my white bedlinen.

So I phoned my mum, and asked her if she could go down to the pound shop and get me a ball of blue wool, so that I could experiment. "A ball of blue plastic wool?" she said. Hmmm, lol, not everyone is buying into the use of this cheap acrylic wool.

Here's the idea I have: a spotty pattern - will let you know how it goes.

House Hunting and New Wool

I'm back after a couple of weeks away, house hunting. We had an offer accepted on a house, and I'd even started packing boxes, maybe a bit too prematurely. The survey came back and was bad: new electrics required, plumbing very old and a bit suspect, damp in the bathroom, floorboards and joists rotted though, and worst of all, the deal breaker: a new roof required. Problem was that it was already at the top of our budget.

Oh well! Start again.

In the meantime, I've got some new wool, a white synthetic, bought for £1 a ball at the pound shop. Yuk! Yuk! I can hear you thinking. And I have to admit, I wasn't convinced at first, but it is crocheting up really nicely: all white vintage stripe, except there aren't any stripes.

Worst of all, I've lost the charger for my camera, and cannot take any pictures at the moment, which has put me off blogging.

Back soon with some white stripe pictures, and some pictures of the newly finished, and not at all bad, crochet vest top.

Sunday: No Cost Conservatory Makeover

On Sunday, we interspersed playing in the garden in the heat, with a no-cost makeover of my mum's conservatory using things we found in the house and shed.

Previously it contained heavy, flowery, rather dated 1980's style curtains, green painted furniture, and a lot of boot room/porch junk, like scarves, hats, coats, vases, etc. Although it is on the side of the house, my mum's house like lots of Scottish houses faces its back to the wind and rain, and you have to go round the back to get in the front door, if you know what I mean. So people tend to come in the side conservatory, and leave their coats and things there.
So, here's what we did: "Mum?", I said tactfully, "Do those curtains have white linings? Maybe they'd be nice hung up on their own. They'd look like white cotton curtains". And after bleaching, they seem to be quite nice. Here they are:

Just outside the window, sheltering from the inevitable rain we had later, in the woodpile, you can spy a little white chair. These were previously green. I painted them with some white paint, and I think they look nice now. The old pine in the picture is a bench at the table, which is actually an old church pew.

Here are the chairs perched out in the woodpile. I had to paint them with gloss, because that is all that was available, and it is quite a smelly paint, so we left the chairs outside for a couple of days.

Then, while the paint was drying and the curtains were bleaching, we took some photos around the garden:

and put them in old clip frames to hang on the conservatory wall

above an old blue plant pot, waiting for a new plant to fill it,

above an old cupboard, that used to belong to my gran. She probably bought it in the 1930's. It wasn't an expensive piece of furniture, so we painted it a nice soft cream, using emulsion. It will need an eggshell top coat eventually, but we were 30 miles from the nearest paint shop, and trying not to spend any money. The little cupboard now contains all the hats, scarves etc that were lying around.
The little label is a wooden sign of my mum's saying something like "leave room for the angels to dance in your garden".

Saturday at the Beach and some Crochet

We were in Northumberland on Saturday. Went to the beach at Boulmer, walked along the sand, collecting my favourite shells : little limpet shells, and then we into the lifeboat station for a cup of coffee. They were having a little coffee morning, with delicious home-made cakes. "Go in there", an old guy on the beach shouted to us "The Victoria Sponge is delicious". And it was.


I noticed a lot of grey: The skies were pretty much grey all day, and it was not warm, but despite that, I seem to have caught the sun from my little walk on the beach. When I say "caught the sun", it is not that I go brown, just that my freckles join up.

The buildings in Boulmer are lovely old grey stone, weathered by the sea. It is a real fishing village,with the boats hauled out of the sea by tractors sitting on the sand.

I finished the back of my little crochet jumper. It is looking ok, and I am happy with it. To be honest, I'm not sure about crochet clothing, so we'll see how it goes. The pattern is quite difficult at the edges. It is probably obvious to other people, but the "treble in next but one chain space" seems to be confusing my brain, lol.