For Emily Rose

 

I haven't been here for a while (ok, a few years), and I may not be back here for a while but I felt the need to update this blog and also to say thank you to Emily Rose. I don't know who Emily Rose is, or where she is, or even if she has a blog herself, but she left the most amazing message on my last post (one of two) and I have long felt the need to update her.

So, Emily Rose, I have continued to do diy, on and off, sometimes large projects, sometimes small.

I started with the blue dresser top in my kitchen... I painted it white!!!



I can't quite remember what I did next, but one way or another I painted all the kitchen units in Dulux Egyptian Cotton and completely changed the ceiling. I had asked my ex, years before, to put tongue and groove on the ceiling but he was never keen, so I decided to do it myself.
I pulled down the coving, had a bit of a problem with a hole over the boiler, fixed it, then used gripfill and panel pins to secure wood across the whole ceiling, did it all myself and loved every minute of it. I didn't baton out the ceiling first as I knew that the next stage would keep everything secure. This time I had help, from the same ex funnily enough! We worked out where the joists were by checking under the bathroom floor above and he drilled through the small beams I'd had cut, into the joists. All I had to do then was lots of filling, add a little trim around the edges of the tongue and groove between the new beams and paint everything white.
Can I just say I love it, every single day when I walk in my kitchen I love it, it's my most favourite diy project ever.

 

 

 



As you can see, the ceiling was quite warped and one of the beams needed loads of filling, then there was the problem of the ugly boiler. Although there is a small window to the side of it (that's still there) I really wanted to box it in. I managed to make (with a little help from my brother drilling the frame together) a box that slides in and out, in case the boiler ever needs some serious work. There's also a space at the bottom for cookery books.

Next step was a light fixture that I had made from a piece of driftwood I found on the beach, mason jars and lovely old looking cord and fixtures. Tom Freer made it for me, an artist that has a studio on Worthing beach on the Sussex coast. He's a perfectionist so I knew he would do an amazing job, the way he routed out the back for all the wires is just incredible, a work of art in itself.

The kitchen as it is now, with a new oven and hob. I still need to get that little window filled in and in a perfect world I would have white marble worktops.





The next project I tackled was painting a couple of walls at one end of the dining room, everything was rather white and I thought the gold mirror (great find in a charity shop) would have more of an impact on a hand-painted wall. I gathered loads of inspiration on Pinterest and eventually took the plunge.

 



Before



 

 

 

 

 

I'm always too impatient and re-hang pictures before the work is actually finished.

 

After this I didn't really do much at all in my house, though I did work on my garden quite a bit. I also stopped working at the café and went to work in London. The café had been enlarged considerably and my job had become even more stressful, then an old friend offered me a job designing needlepoint, something I did over 30 years previously. The work was really enjoyable but two years on it has also come to an end. I'm not going to go into the details here but I'm at home, working on my house and a few other projects. I think I stopped doing diy in the last two years because I had a creative job, but I've missed it. I now show my house on instagram, it's called bee.on.a.page, because I have started a new chapter in my life and I really need to be on the right page, right now.

 

I've noticed that lots of my old blogger friends who mostly live across the pond have also stopped blogging which is a real shame, but who am I to talk, anyway, this one is for you Emily Rose, I hope you get to see it one day.