Seb Palmer

A while back we decided to repaint the dining room end of the lounge a slightly warmer colour. It was red when we moved in, and I’d already painted it a pale off-white. But it was too cool, verging on cold.

Teresa demanded something more yellow, warmer. And she was right! We chose ‘cupcake’, from B&Q’s Valspar range. I made a small start quite a while back, just with a sample pot. I finally got a proper pot full a while later, and today I painted the bookshelf alcove.

I also went to work upgrading the bookshelves themselves. There are four, each of which is a different depth (well, two of them are the same). Originally they were just rough planks, resting on little wooden brackets.   They still are, but I wanted to put a nice decorative face on each of the shelves, so I bought some trim from B&Q, cut it in to four pieces, cut them to size, and then tacked them on.

I took the trouble to prep the painting area with Frog tape, at each stage. Whilst doing so I noticed how nice the shelves and trim look, with their contrasting colours/grains (even though both are pine). So I took a pic, as I was about to paint them white.

The gloss white paint, from Permoglaze, is absolutely fab. One of the best domestic paints I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. Sadly it seems the once massive Permoglaze range is currently being run down. I’ve put one coat on so far. I’ll do another tomorrow. The contrast between white gloss and the new matt yellow-ish colour, ‘cupcake’, is really nice. Just what we wanted!

Later the same night:

Got to be patient. Second coat of white gloss won’t be thoroughly dry till tomorrow, 10 a.m. Then I’ll be able to load up the books. Have to say I’m very pleased. The ‘cupcake’ colour is exactly right, warm, soft, cosy. And the gloss white woodwork, with the nice ogee facing, really sets it off.

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The next day…

Mostly filled with art books at present, plus some miscellaneous and the omnipresent military/Napoleonic stuff! We may put a curtain rail and curtain across the aclove, so we can shut it off as and when we want to, to de-clutter the view.

We’re convinced a previous guest of ours – a friend who stays with us regularly – wandered off with our spare key last time he stayed over. He says he doesn’t have it. We reckon he just hasn’t bothered checking properly! Still, we may be wrong, and it may turn up here at some point.

Anyway, I got some new keys cut today, for our AirB&B guests. I decided I wanted to make them less easy to lose, and that key-fobs might be the way. None of the ones at the key-cutting shop were suitable/nice enough. So I resolved to make some wooden ones.

They’ll be big ‘n’ chunky, in a nice dark hardwood I wish I knew the name of, and I’ll be putting the AirB&B logo on them. To that end I printed logos, and glued them to the wood.

As many have observed before me, the current AirB&B logo resembles female genitalia more than the various concepts it supposedly embodies. Maybe that’s why I don’t mind breaking my usual embargo on ‘brand’ labels?

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Some time later… Hmmm, well, as can be seen below, that didn’t work! The one on the left I carved using some mini-chisels I bought via Amazon, for model making. They cut through styrene fine. But they wandered all over the place in this hard wood.

I painted in the carved area, and then sanded back. The idea is sound, but it just didn’t work here. The grain of the wood has all these fissures, so even if I had carved the logo superbly, the paint would have bled into the fissures, and never looked as crisp and neat as I wanted.

For the one on the right, I traced a dotted line through the centre of the line described by the logo, in the manner of a renaissance painter transferring their design from paper to a painting surface, with pin-pricks. I then carved as light and accurate a line as I could, following the pricks (sounds a bit rude!).

I wish I’d photographed that stage, as it actually looked pretty good. I then tried to manually move the wood underneath a dill bit, in the drill-press, to ‘draw’ a bevelled channel in the groove I’d carved out. Once again, however, wobble and wandering ruined the design.

So I’ve opted instead to just stick a large plain wooden doodad in the key ring, and keep it ultra-simple. Disappointing. Especially given how much time I wasted on trying to make it work.

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* College, Cambridge, the ‘Gate of Honour’. My dad had a pot labelled Caius, in which he kept old, random, spare keys…

Teresa asked me to carve the pumpkin today. I scooped out the seeds, and most of the sticky, stringy innards, before using an ice-cream scoop to get the flesh out. Looking forward to pumpkin pie, and pumpkin soup!

I prefer to go for old-fashioned simple designs. This is my most trad/goofy so far. I’ve kept the seeds for planting, and the flesh for eating. Wooo, ooo-woooh-oooh… ha, ha, ha, ha…

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Of course I did some work in my shed. I got the heater I had off Freecycle a while back working, and I cut down my home-made laminated top for the ‘tool chest’.

I was hoping to do some trim for the shelves in the lounge, but I’ve kind of run out of steam now. I might still do it, later this evening. But at present I feel exhausted. Tired enough I could easily go to sleep here and now; it’s only 5.30 pm! I felt a bit off colour today, probably on account of the flu jab I had (as did Teresa) at the weekend.

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Here are pics of the pumpkin flesh – still quite a bit – even after using half, or thereabouts, to make the soup. Which, though I say it myself, is delicious!

We, or rather I, have a fairly vast book collection. In our previous home (skipping over our short stay in a Grade II listed Georgian property)  I built a set of shelves covering one entire wall of our lounge. Whilst this didn’t accommodate all our books, it dealt with the lion’s share. So a few other areas of shelving around the place held the rest.

Since moving to March we’ve never yet had enough shelving. So many books have remained either in storage, or simply messily piled in various places. We’ve acquired several sets of shelves, some really quite nice, off Freecycle. One is fully laden in our guest room, another is over-filled on the landing. And their are several in the box room, also full to overflowing.

As is my way, I also like to build my own shelves. There are now several around the house: in the lounge some are built into an alcove (I plan to work on these today), and in our master bedroom there are two, both made from rough scrap wood, one pretty shoddy, and the other actually quite decent. A third larger set, made from poor quality timber, fell apart under the strain. The cleat for hanging the latter remains on the wall.

I’ve also made several sets of mini-shelves, one as a paint rack, for my Vallejo model paints, and two for displaying my models on. Then there are three very rough boxes, recycled from the broken bookshelf mentioned earlier, in which I store what remains of my vinyl LP collection.*

And we also have need of other types of storage, such as hooks for hanging guitars. I’ve put up four so far, two in the lounge and two in the guest room. I think there should also be at least one in the master bedroom – prob above the recently restored chest o’drawers/Philips record-player? This last one I hope to make and install today.

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* I sold about half my records at boot sales over the summer. Kind of wish I hadn’t. But we needed the money.

I popped out earlier to visit  a second-hand book sale in the village of Hilgay. Got six interesting books for just £9. Mostly art books, with one on restoring antiques, and another – yet another – on Waterloo. We plan to use some of the printed artwork in the art books around the house: I’ll chop ’em out, make frames, etc.

Back in the shed… er, I mean workshop, I loaded a bunch of stuff on to the newly painted set of shelves, and touched up the paintwork on the floor and adjacent wall. Later on I hope to get ye olde table back in there, and poss’ also to make a start on the ‘tool’ chest. Altho’ quite where I’ll put the latter, I don’t know!?

Returning to the books. I got a lovely old pocket-sized 1886 edition of Isaac Walton’s ‘The Complete Angler’, and the book Michelangelo and Raphael in the Vatican features some great reproductions, including a number that fold out, some making five-page spreads. Lovely stuff!

Funnily enough we’d just watched the episode ‘The Artist As Hero’ this morning, from Kenneth Clark’s magnificent Civilisation, which concentrates on Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci. So that particular book came quite serendipitously!

I tried moving the old table back into the workshop. But it wouldn’t quite fit. So I smashed it up. It was in a very bad way, with woodworm, advanced rot, it was practically falling apart. I’m going to use the timber for firewood! I just managed to squeeze the old chest into the space. Although even then I had to take some bits off to get it in. I’ll make a top of some sort for it ASAP.

I’ve taken the sides from the wardrobe, which I’ve had to cut and laminate: two layers, each of one wide piece and one narrow piece, with the top layer reversed, so the four pieces all overlap and reinforce each other. Pictured below the wood is buried under a load of heavy art books, to help it glue up.

I finally moved an old set of shelves I got off Freecycle a while ago into the corner of the workshop. They were very tatty, so I’ve roughly sanded them, and painted them a creamy beige colour.

To make space I had to remove two old decrepit shelves that I’m assuming Clive put up, along the left wall. I had a spillage of paint, visible on the floor in front of the shelves. I worked fast and slapdash, so both the rear wall, at right, and the floor, will need touching up.

I’ve had to move a knackered old table outside, and it’s pouring with rain. Well, hey-ho, it’ll have to sit there for a bit until I can create enough space to move it back in!

All of this has provided me with an opportunity to clear up and reorganise a bit. Well, it will do. At present the workshop is one almighty mess, with everything temporarily moved aside so I could get the shelves in and paint them, etc.

There’s also the bottom part of a wardrobe, which I might use as a chest for storing power-tools, to keep them protected from all the dust. But I’ll have to make a top for it, poss from scraps of what was formerly the top section of the same wardrobe, which I dismantled. We kept the mirrored door. We’ll find somewhere to put that!

As mentioned in my previous post, we visited Oxburgh Hall today. It’s an amazing and very beautiful property. And it’s only a 45 minute drive from where we live now.

The moat is one of many features that make Oxburgh Hall so fascinating and alluring. Ironically I’d been thinking, do we really want to go here again? We’ve been so many times before. It might be boring. How wrong could I be? I’d forgotten the chief reason I love Oxburgh Hall. The interiors.

It’s the incredible opulence of the interiors that really make this place sing. To me at any rate. I mean, just look at that fireplace, above. It’s the combined effect of all the elements: from the sheer scale, to the huge range of objects, surfaces, textures, patterns and colours. I find it intoxicating.

The chair above is in the same room – a library – as the fireplace. And what a chair! I love the patterns in the textiles. I love the carving of the wood. And the two set each other off. The carpets and wall decor add to the riot of design excess. Fantastic! Behind the chair you can just see an open door that’s worked into the wall. There are also similar ‘secret’ doors disguised as extensions of the book collection.

Even the areas between rooms are places where you could dawdle for ages, admiring anything and everything, from the paintings on the wall, to the walls themselves. The walls pictured above and below are ‘wallpapered’ in embossed gilt leather, itself painted in dazzlingly rich colours.

And then one can get lost in admiring just one aspect of the experience. Let’s take furniture and wood first:

There are loads of lovely chairs. Sadly you’re not allowed to sit on them! I bought a large carved high-back chair from Willingham auctions a while back, which we refer to as my ‘throne’. But, beautiful as it is, it pales against this one. I plan to try my hand at some carving inspired by such things. One day! And then there are chests, cupboards, sideboards, and whatnot. Look at the inlaid metalwork – brass, I think? – below. Amazing!

Equally breathtaking, if stylistically quite different, is the marquetry on such pieces as the chest pictured below. I want this level of fabulousness in my life! How it might work, or not, on our much humbler scale. Who knows? Got to be worth a try though, eh?

There’s a very dark room, shown in the next two pics, below, which is/was, I think, the smaller non-formal family dining room. Dimly lit – originally intended to be used and enjoyed by candlelight – and filled with richly carved dark wood, it’s just incredible. The wooden stuff is a crazy mish-mash, but it all works together beautifully. The library fireplace looked difficult to top. But then you walk in here, and it’s even more richly extravagant. Albeit in a rather different manner.

The sideboard above – only just visible in the gloom – epitomises the room; cobbling together elemnts of different eras, styles, and origins, it still works as a unified entity. And the lighting and wallpaper add to the opulent yet cosy charm.

The next few timber derived jewels are to be found in the sleeping quarters. The headboards and footboards, the side panels, the four-poster posts, all are ornately carved. Below are just two examples I liked enough to photograph.

And here we have a ‘simple’ stool like chair, one of a pair. Mechanically it’s simplicity itself. But the aesthetics, design and execution, on the other hand, are dizzyingly florid. Both bottom and top elements feature what I can only describe as ‘high-breasted nymphs’… lovely!

And then there’s the art, or the various types of objects, from weapons to bibelots. The social politics that allow some to wallow in such opulence, whilst for others it’s dung for breakfast, dung for lunch (if you’re lucky enough to get any lunch), rounded off with dung for dinner… well, it doesn’t really bear thinking about. But have things really changed very much, in this respect?

As Grayson Perry observed, in his Reith Lectures, ‘democracy has bad taste’. Or, put another way, for stuff to be such that anyone and everyone can have it, usually means it’s going to be cheap, crappy, mass-produced tat. Amassing vast collections of labour intensive master craftsman level creations will always be the preserve of the privileged few.

Dotted around the place are a number of weapons, and even some bits of armour. In the gun room, now serving as the NT bookshop, there are a number of Napoleonic era muskets (and an Austrian air rifle, of similar vintage). Pictured below are some terrifically attractive pistols. I have vague plans to make myself a pair of replica flintlock pistols, an idea seeded by seeing a pair of genuine articles at the house of my aunt and uncle in Harpenden.

Yet another brace of future projects revolve around storage. And whenever I see things such as the following chest, I take note. The avian theme reminded Teresa of the many bird-focussed artworks at Anglesey Abbey. The latter are mostly paintings. These are made with inlaid materials, in a chunky mosaic style, possibly using stone.

Heraldic items have a strange charm. I bought a small stained-glass window from an antiques shop in Framlingham years ago. Sadly it’s slightly damaged. I’ve long intended to use it as a window panel in a foot. But I’ve not got around to it as yet.

There’s a fab stone in one of the outer walls that features a stylise heraldic helmet, replete with crown and flowing bits that might be stylised feathers, or some form of drapery. I meant to get a pic, but had gotten satiated and lazy from a surfeit of photography by that point.

In times where toadying to the powers that be was an essential aspect of survival, grovelling to God – the ultimate power, in theory – could set one at odds with earthly powers. This is attested to by, amongst other things, the ‘Priest’s Hole’ at Oxburgh Hall.

Then there are such things as this, below, which – I rarely read the captions explaining stuff – looks like a model of a font cover. And, even more extravangtly opulent, the incredible altar in the nearby chapel.

Oxburgh Hall is an amazing place. Visits there are inspirational.

This morning I had to chisel off a little bit off the new runner I had made, to support the second drawer, in our new old Freecycle drawers. Excepting for the missing bits of trim, this is now complete. And it’s already in place.

We’re off out to Oxburgh Hall, a (fairly) local National Trust property now, to make the most of a beautiful sunny day, and both having the day off work. When we get back, I’ll load all my clothes into it.

Whilst disposing of the old Ikea chest of drawers at our local municipal dump/recycling centre, I spotted the writing box, pictured above, in the waste wood tip. Unbelievable! It’s such a lovely thing. So I asked one of the guys who work there if we could fish it out, and – if it wasn’t too bad – could I have it? In the end he charged me two pounds for it. Score!

It is fairly dilapidated. But not so far gone I don’t feel able to have a go at restoring it. It needs new fabric; we’re going to try and match the lovely original dark green velvet. There are some marks and dings, and a few little bits of wood that need replacing. And internally, there’s need of a fair bit of restoration to the internal components, which include some lovely little drawers. It also has a lock. Will I be able to retro-fit/source an appropriate key, I wonder?

Whilst examining it in the company of the dump employee, I found the above inscriptions. One reads ‘Ely—* Margetts, a Present from Edward Hodson, Esq, September 1850’ (or it might be 1858?), in a lovely copper-plate script. The other, dated May 18th, 1943, says ‘C. Edwards, 32 Creek Road, March, Cambs, Age 18.’ We live on Creek Road… fabulous!

Rescuing and restoring a bit of local history feels great. I’m going to give it to Teresa, as a bonus Xmas gift

Returning to my first subject, kind of, on top of the chest is another fairly recent restoration job, a Philips GF 446 portable record player. This was yet another Freecycle acquisition. Did I say I love Freecycle?

When I got it it wasn’t working properly. In the end it turned out all it needed was a new stylus, which I got for under a tenner, via the interweb. Here’s a video of it in action, sat atop our former Ikea drawers.

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* I can’t quite make the whole of this first word/name out!

I actually had my saw bench in my workshop today, and stood on it whilst painting the higher regions of the rear wall. It then came back in the house, with a view to Teresa using it.

But our moggy had plans of his own: a new object in the room? It must be there for me to sit on. What else could it possibly be for? He’d wanted to sit on it earlier, but had detected the Danish Oil wasn’t 100% dry.

I enjoyed making the bench, and I already love using it. It’s even nicer when other folk, be they human or cat, choose to use it.

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Oh, and I moved the chest o’drawers up to our room. I still need to fabricate a few bits of missing trim. And the second drawer still needs some fiddling before it’ll go back in. But most of the major repairs – gluing, nailing, fabricating trim and missing components (e.g drawer-stops and -slides) – is done.

I ejnoyed taking the Ikea drawers apart. I’m keeping the drawer-slide components, for possible future use. But the chest of drawers itself is destined for the local municipal dump.

A little while back, inspired by the colour scheme in the background of a Paul Sellers video, I repainted the back wall of my workshop. The colour I chose – a little different to Paul Seller’s scheme – was a very dark green, in the grey-green spectrum, from B&Q’s Valspar range, called Peacoat.

However, I wasn’t entirely happy with how it was looking. For one thing it’s too dark. And for another, it’s not grey enough! So I went back to B&Q, and ordered some more sample pots. I find them a cheap and useful way of testing colours in situ. And sometimes the little pots are all I need.

The new colour is called ‘Campground’, and I reckon it’s perfect. The single little £3 sample pot  was almost enough for the job! I also bought a pot of a pale creamy beige, called ‘Lark Song’, for painting any more storage units or cabinetry.

I added six spade-bit storage holes to my router bit doodad, and a couple of dowel pegs, one on the saw-rack, for ear-defenders, and the other just below the router bits, for safety-goggles and face-masks.

I got my new planes – the four I’ve currently restored are all in the saw-rack at present – out of the cardboard box they were in when I bought them (put that in the recycling bin!). It’s nice to gloat over them!