Dining Room Table Makeover, Part I: From Orange to Oooooooh

We are spending some of my maternity leave at home in Ireland (I had a baby! She's adorable! I'm so tired all the time!) and the house that we're renting here is a monster compared to the weeny one or one-and-a-quarter-bed flats we're used to in London.

We mostly huddled in one corner of the kitchen when we moved in, like agoraphobic bunnies freshly sprung from a cage, but now we've spread out and are slowly colonising the whole place and drying our underwear on the radiators, and slowly it's starting to feel a bit more like home. I'm taking advantage of the fact that we have a separate dining room (!!!) to makeover this new-to-us mega-orange pine farmhouse dining table that I picked up on DoneDeal for €70.

Fun fact: I also bought my dream Jenny Packham wedding dress on DoneDeal! True story.

Anyway, this beast of a table was obviously in need of a hefty dose of TLC but I reckoned it had good bones - just look at those sexy AF turned legs! - and to be perfectly honest I was in desperate need of A Not-Baby-Related Project.

The first item on the agenda was to sort out that varnished orange tone, and that was where I made my first mistake. I should have used a chemical stripper like the trusty Nitromoors I usually turn to for any paint removing work, but with a babóg in the house I decided against using anything fume-y and got sander-happy instead. I think I still have carpenter's lung as a result.

To add insult to respiratory injury, I managed to dig a couple of divots into the table lid in my power-tooled enthusiasm to get shot of some particularly pernicious orange patches, but when my sanding frenzy was done I showed the affected areas some love with a handheld sanding block and they were barely noticeable.

Having eventually achieved this paler tone to the wood and cooing over it like it was an especially cute new Pomeranian puppy, I initially thought that the next step would simply be to lacquer it to protect from stains and water damage and the like. However. A quick Google informed me that due to the peculiarities of pine, it will apparently always tend to orange. So over time that hard won lighter finish would invariably revert to the colour of my fake tan circa 2003. As the bambino would say, WAAAAAH.

One Google later and I had the solution: this video, complete with almost unbearable background buzz, from a crew called Finney's Wood Finishes. I mixed up a semi-translucent stain using white wood dye, acrylic lacquer, and some water as instructed, and buffed it into the wood using a soft cloth. Ok, ok: using a pair of decommissioned knickers. (What the hell else can you repurpose old knickers for? Seriously. And they are perfect for jobs like these.)

The idea is that this whitewash will act like a long-term real life Instagram filter (Hudson, maybe?) counteracting those pesky orange tones as they start to reappear.

The next step in the table's rehabilitation will be to paint the apron and legs grey and then wax/lacquer the whole thing, all of which I hope to get done in the course of the long Easter weekend. After turning my nose up at Annie Sloan chalk paint like a total elitist DIY snob for the last several years, having extraordinarily limited time to dedicate to furniture do-overs means that I suddenly find a paint that needs no major prep work very appealing indeed. 

I've got a shiny tin of Paris Grey all ready to go - teething permitting...

Better late than never. Or something.

I was catching up with Jen's blog earlier today after my self-imposed Christmas internet hiatus when I came across some real "Now why didn't I think of that?!" stuff.

You see, over the course of the festive season, while I didn't exactly become a full-blown domestic goddess, I did do some baking.

I made my own mincemeat.

I made Himself carrot cake muffins for his birthday.

I made my own mince pies. (Some were star-topped, so the mince sort of oozed through. Some had full-coverage lids. They were all yum.)

And, er, that was about the height of it.

The biggest problem I had, after trying to decide if Himself was just blinded by love when he declared that the edibles he was given to test were fit for public consumption, was transporting the feckin' things. I actually had nothing to put them in. But this evening I discovered that, rather than just wrapping tin foil around baking trays when I was bringing the goodies over to the in-laws (for shame!), I could totally have dickied up a Pringles tube for the mince pies and either a Crunchy Nut Cornflake or Alpen No-Added Sugar box (the cereals of choice in our gaff) for the carrot cake muffins.

Sigh.

Night night.

Oh man, I so need to go to bed. Two & A Half Men repeats are the height of the good telly, and the house is getting cold so rapidly that the heat from my laptop is no longer sufficient to keep me toasty.

Oh, and I'm knackered.

But tomorrow I'll hopefully be putting up a made-by-my-own-fair-hands blind on the kitchen window as part of the drive to get the house in some kind of order this week. Himself's birthday is on the 22^nd and I've set it up in my head as a deadline of sorts. It'll be a roll-up blind constructed from the offcuts of the panel blinds in the dining room and things like dowelling and battens and made by following these instructions.

Mostly I'm mentioning this here because it's been a work in progress pretty much since we got the dining room blinds, which was neither today nor yesterday, and maybe a mention on le blog will spur me on to complete it.

Yeh. Maybe.

Problem with Plan Pom Pom

Have found the perfect mini multi-coloured pom poms for my spare room curtain madness project. It's harder than you might think to find mixed coloured pom poms in one size and decent, non-glittery, non-pastel colours. And although they're a bit of a steal at only €1.99, I haven't put in an order yet.

That's because the company who supply them, EdQuip in Arkleh, charge a standard €7.50 for delivery. That, by the by, is what An Post would charge for parcels up to 1.5 metres long and up to 2kg in weight. When I emailed to explain that I'm only looking to purchase one packet of these (not very heavy, not very big) and could they give me a better price on delivery, I got no response.

So I've just put in a call to EdQuip, explained the situation, and the very nice lady I spoke to told me that they could waive the delivery charge - deadly! - if I was ordering goods worth more than €50.

Ah. Genius.

It'd almost be cheaper for me to drive to Arkleh, stop somewhere nice for lunch along the way, and feckin' buy the things in person.

Evenin' all...

Have just had dinner (diced lamb marinated in harissa paste and olive oil, cous cous with black olives, feta, basil, oven-roasted red peppers and tomatoes, served with a big dollop of Greek-stylee yoghurt. Oh yes, I iz just dat fancy), watched three episodes of my new favourite telly show How I Met Your Mother back to back, and am now catching up on Sky Plussed The Apprentice while trying to avoid any spoilers and having a glass of Pinot Grigiot and doing some Beaut.ie-ing and thinking about putting weeny multi-coloured pom poms on the purple curtains in the spare room.


Busy busy busy, ha?

Office update.

Well, the IKEA Fintorp table legs have been painted. It took five (yes, really - I counted every frickin' one) coats of satin white paint atop a metal primer to take them from this:


... to this:

Whiter in real life than they look here.

I had intended to spray paint these bad boys for the ultimate finish, but it wasn't until after I tried to apply my first coat of Rustoleum All-In-One Universal in the garden that I realised outdoor projects + Irish November weather is not a winning combination. Man, I wish we'd a garage. Ultimately, I primed the legs with International's Multi Surface Primer (good for ferrous and non-ferrous metals and heaps of other stuff) and topped them off with five coats of satin finish Dulux Easycare Satinwood for Wood & Metal, which was the only metal paint I could find in Homebase that was water soluble.

Luckily, I quite enjoy bitesize painting projects - as long as they involve a just-rinse-out-yer-brush-in-the-sink paint - so apart from being time consuming this wasn't too much of a pain in the arse of a job, and only the very eagle of eye would spot any of the few, very fine brushstrokes.

Love Harris' Finesse brushes.

(Oh, and realise how odd it is for me to actually know the name of and publicly declare my love for a paintbrush.)

Anyways, I think that I am going to have a pretty awesome desk when these boyos get hooked up to my white satin finish desk top over the weekend.

My project to take a worn-out bedside locker and transform it into a hot pink mini filing cabinet is going a little less swimmingly. It started out looking something like this:

... and has since been sanded and primed in preparation for its fuchia facelift:

Today, after I'd gathered together the necessities like a Stanley knife and a mini wallpaper roller and a tub of Mod Podge Hard Coat for decoupaging onto furniture, I finally got around to measuring up the wrapping paper I'd intended to use for this project. This is a not too great photo of it:

Needless to say, I don't have nearly enough of it - about a third of the amount I'd need. And since it was bought in January to wrap my birthday present, I'm not holding out too much hope of Himself remembering where it was procured, let alone being able to get some more of it.

Flip's sake...

Distractable? MOI?!

Day 3 of the career break, and I'm still not quite used to the whole thing. For now, I'm busying myself with tidying up the house. It's actually ridiculous how out of hand we let everything get before pulling it back in order, courtesy of the "But we work far away from home!" excuse, and I find it difficult to concentrate in a chronically untidy space.

Plus, if things aren't all neat and tidy there are a million and one potential working-from-home distractions to add to the pull of the telly, which are harder to ignore if the place is topsy turvy. Like, "Ah sure while I'm here I might as well just do a hoover/a wash/a bit of painting/pop out and mow the lawn/do a spot of rewiring before I do this worky thing."

Dangerous.

Especially since I'd have to go look up Dad's handyman's bible to even see how to wire a plug.

The sitting room is all but sorted, and I can now see the dining room table again having loaded up a couple of bags with paper rubbish for the recycling bin. I'd nearly forgotten what it looked like. On my tea break, I decided to sort through some make-up for review over on Beaut.ie (yep, tough life) and do my nails (all in the name of research, of course)... and then I got properly distracted by the absolutely gorgeous colours in the back garden.

We have two crab apple trees in the bottom corners of the garden that are currently doing their damndest to display every autumnal hue imaginable. There are a few die-hard green leaves and a couple of already denuded branches, granted, but for the most part they're riots of crisp yellows and golds and russets and oranges, laden down with the cutest mini apples.

So out came my inner Mary "How Do You Do?" FitzGerald to try and bring some of that palette inside and crack on with a bit of make and do in honour of Oíche Shamhna (Irish for Halloween).

Do you remember it now?

Sadly, I didn't have any cardboard innards of toilet rolls or twine or safety scissors lying about, so I took my life in my hands and took a grown-up scissors to a black page out of a magazine for a couple of tasteful bats.

Bert (left) and Ernie (right). Yes, I have christened the paper cut-out bats.

No sharp implements required for an M&S hurricane vase holding leaves from the trees in the carpark and Himself's Japanese maple and a crop of the aforementioned crab apples. The fact that the label on our Monart candle coordinates nicely with this autumnal vignette is an ironic coincidence: it's called "Summertime"!

Yesterday evening, I took a mad notion to get a pumpkin, so it was off to Superquinn in Portlaoise for one of their €2 offerings. I'd intended to carve it up to make a creepy jack o' lantern, but after I'd cleaned it up I stuck it on the hearth out of the way while I was doing dinner...

... and I like it au natural.

I suspect this is not normal.


Footnote: While reacquainting myself with Samhain lore by way of Google, I came across a sentence that kicked off with the classic phrase "Some people think Americans started Halloween..."

Er, indeed.