Friday 30 May 2014

I've got the bug.

I've definitely got the bug. Shabby chic-ing, furniture painting, upcycling... Whatever you want to call it- I've got the bug!

I thought I'd share about a few projects I've 'done' recently and hopefully inspire you a little. 

I got this nest of tables for £15 from a charity furniture shop in our city. I try to go there quite often to scout out furniture to upcycle! 



I wanted these '3 shades of grey' to go in our new lounge, so I bought some Annie Sloan Paris Grey chalk paint and tester pots of Old White and Charcoal, thinking I would lighten one and darken the other and have Paris Grey in the middle. Whilst painting I realised I wanted them a bit darker so didn't use the old white at all, I just made the greys darker with the Charcoal chalk paint.




I was then faced with the problem of the little table no longer fitting in to the nest! Bummer!! After a few weeks of the tables sitting around and me thinking 'I really need to sort those out' I finally got down to 'distressing' them a bit and sanding down a LOT where the table should slide in! It still wouldn't go in, so I asked my hubby to have a go at it, he had greater succes than I. It now slides in and out, if a little juddery, but it does actually fit! Hooray!




So, with almost a whole tin of Paris Grey paint left, I took to painting our beautiful old chest. 

This chest is VERY special to me, it belonged to my Nanna and was built by my great grandfather, who was a joiner. In it's later years it was used as a blanket box and stank of moth balls, but in it's heyday it travelled the world as a trunk. How cool is that! It has screw holes where it was screwed shut to travel on a boat when my grandparents set off to Gibraltar and Durban. I love the history it holds. 

When my Nanna passed away we inherited the trunk and my husband set to work on it. He used paint stripper to remove the two thick layers of gloss, he then sanded it down and removed 2 layers of black paint and one layer of varnish. Hard work! It looked great and we enjoyed it 'bare' in our lounge for a few years.






Having moved house and changing our colour scheme a bit it no longer 'fitted' in. The wood was too orangey and stood out a bit.



In comes the Paris Grey chalk paint.



Our chest now looks so beautiful in the lounge and will continue to be loved and used (containing our board games), even though it still smells of moth balls when you open it. Yum!


More blogging on upcycling coming soon!

Update from my dad: 

The box went to Canada and the USA (Detroit) in the 1920s when your great grandad took his family there to find work during the depression. It did Durban twice and then Gibraltar in the 50s and 60s


Tuesday 18 February 2014

En France!

It's been too long since I posted... And since I saw my blogging friends over the weekend I feel inspired.

So, we decided to take a fairly last minute trip to see our friends who are church planting in Lille, France. We were booked to get the 10am ferry on Saturday from Dover to Dunkirk. We packed up our car and set off from Winchester at 7am on Saturday morning- aware of the extreme weather conditions of late, and expecting a VERY rough crossing.



The ferry provider website said that there were delays but to still arrive on time for your expected check in and departure. We had a great journey almost all the way to Dover, checking the website for updates all the way. At 8am it changed from 'delays' to 'severe delays'- eesh! 



At 9.10am we had got just past Folkestone and hit a queue. Little did we know it would be a further 8 hours before we actually reached the port. 

(I must add that part way through our journey we realised we had not actually got our sat nav for unsung our way to our friends' house in Lille!)

Having a baby in the car made this even more eventful for us! 

As we were at a standstill for about an hour at a time, then move a bit, we would turn off the engine and try to entertain/feed/change the baby. As well as try and get him to go to sleep for his usual naps! 

Changing a stinking, explosive nappy on your lap is always a challenge!!! 




I'm so glad I had packed up lunch for us!

In one of our long standstills my hubby went and found a loo and managed to get us some much needed cans of coke!
And of course while he was doing this and I had the baby on my lap in the front, my boots off, the traffic started moving... Aahhhh! Classic.


We eventually checked in at the port at 5pm, to get a 7pm ferry. Finally I was able to get my pined after morning coffee which I had planned to have when we got on the ferry at 10am. 

We used this time to buy a map and use the free wifi to figure out how make our way to our friends' house. Taking screen shots of the map around their area- knowing we wouldn't have 3G in France! 

What a day! We eventually made it to Lille at 12am after getting only slightly lost!

We have then enjoyed a lovely couple of days with our friends and our goddaughter- who is so much fun! 

We visited their local park (where the pond was overflowing!), we enjoyed some lovely French dinners, a yummy croc Monsieur out in Lille, saw the very odd looking cathedral (from the outside), had a hot date at the French supermarket stocking up on goodies (where I spoke some French and ended up professing to be an English man!), experienced the local boulangerie and had lots of laughs playing 'ticket to ride- Europe'. Such a great few days- wish it was longer!



Our journey home was MUCH more successful and smooth! The part of our journey that had taken 8 hours in 'operation stack' took only 8 minutes coming back. Hooray! We even had a treat pop in to see our friend in Hythe!

Praise God for safety travelling and lots of fun and special memories as a family!