Snapdragon's garden

Chaos - but getting there.

Sometime next month various photographers from extremely glossy magazines are coming to photograph the house/garden/airstream for a variety of house/lifestyle/small business features.

I have been putting these photographers off for about 18 months while building work went on around us, but now we pretty much have 2/3 finished house.  That is enough for photographers, who to be honest aren't really ever going to be interested in the box stuffed study or supposed guest bedroom (poor guests).  The upshot is that everyone seems to want to come at about the same time.

So now the panic begins - everywhere I look there are all those little jobs that tend to get put off till you move house - door handles, hooks, paint touch ups.  There is also the slight issue that there is still no floor in the sun room and the outside of the house looks like the back of an industrial estate - half rough-cast, bags of rubble, neglected grass, unidentified bits of metal.

I am cheering myself up by looking at these -

Photos of the house before we bought it - all tiny rooms, crowded with stuff and not much light.

Now it looks pretty much like this

with calm ordered bedroom

and bathroom

 
windowsills

 

and window seats

All very lovely, very reassuring - but if you turn round & point the camera the other way, the house is a mess of paint pots and half unpacked boxes.

Euan is away to buy us a letterbox this morning (only been 6 months without one).  This afternoon we begin to paint the pantry shelves that will house all the tins etc. so they are no longer on the floor.

As my Mum said after she read my first appearance in a glossy - "well I won't believe anything I read in magazines now".

Skinflint design

One thing about waiting 6 years to renovate a house is that it gives you plenty of research time.  You have lots and lots of time to tear pages out of magazines and browse through websites.

If we had not had that long enforced time of waiting to extend the house I doubt that we would have had the home that we do - it would have been a much more off the peg creation.

Certainly I doubt that we would have come across Skinflint designs.

Most of the lighting in the house is flush and inconspicuous - something determined in part by the low ceilings - but when we were looking for wall lights for the bedroom we felt that we should get something a bit more distinctive.  I am not a great fan of wall lights, but they are good for reading, and I was just about to settle for something vaguely angle poise when I came across these

They had been salvaged from an old hospital and had just the right gangly grace to stop the bedroom from looking too twee.

They were also, to be honest, cost about twice our budget.  We hummed and hahed for a couple of weeks.  Now, they are the best thing in the bedroom and I don't regret buying them for a single second - as well as looking fantastic they are the best reading lights I have ever known.

One of those pricey purchases that turn out to be a great bargain in disguise.

To get the room back under budget we took the back off an old wardrobe, painted it gray and didn't need to buy a headboard!

The team at Skinflint is really friendly, talented and professional - they are worth following on twitteras they often only have a few of each light and they get snapped up fast.

I'm always on the look out for something that will work in the living room when we decorate it next year.

Colours

As we start to put things back into the house (very gingerly as it is by no means decorated - we are still waiting on some of the flooring) I am beginning to notice certain colours insinuating themselves all over the place.

I have not been aware of being drawn to the colours - in fact they match very little that we had on show before - but I must have been drawn to them in the years I have been squirelling away things for when the house was finished.

The most obvious colours is a Heinz tomato soup colour - an orangey red (when I would have told you firmly that I like a red-red or a blue-red).

It is here

in both the mulberry linen (bought on e-Bay 6 years ago for this chair "when the house is done") and the Sanderson 1950s fabric on the cushion.

What clinches it though is that it is an exact match for my latest purchase;

Stephen O'Neil's print of the statue with the cone which I bought at Gifted in Clarkston.  It has exactly the same tomato soup background.

Here it is in a part of the house that obviously isn't quite finished . . .

and obviously not tidied . . . .

Something for the house

Because I sew for a living, beavering away in my workshop all week, I often find that the things I want to sew for the house get put off.

I'm probably borderline workaholic so the last thing that my family want to happen at the weekend is for me to disappear down to the cabin again.

Today, however, that is what I did.  I have had an old bedraggled patchwork quilt in my pile of fabrics for ages - it is a pretty poorly made quilt - squint stitching, weirdly cut shapes, blocks not properly aligned.  It was also battered, fraying and stained.

But there was also something about it that was just singingly happy - lots of blues and reds placed together brilliantly with a bit of shell pink.

 

I wanted to make something for he house with it - something that would be as lackadaisical as the quilt itself - something in daily use, to be tossed about and sat on.  I wanted to make something that sings in its imperfection.

We have window seats in the sitting area of the big space - in time they will look onto a wood burning stove, but at the moment they form a cosy reading corner.

That is where my quilty cushions will live - under the coloured glass - though I'm absolutely sure that, being cushions, they will travel round the rest of the house too.

I hope that whoever made the original quilt - with her fine colour sense and impatience to get it made - will approve of what it has become.