In Disneyland, nothing is normal. And I’m not just taking about that fact that there are grown adults walking around wearing Mickey Mouse ears and carrying a stuffed toy Cheshire Cat. Nope, everything in Disney gets ‘imagineered’ which is a horrible phrase to describe how they pay too much attention to stuff many won’t even notice, but when you do, it’s quite nice.
Whilst queueing to have “Blanche Neige et les Sept Nains” inflicted upon me, I glanced up to see these funny little buggers and it made me chuckle, so here they are for you to look at with your eyes too (and you can avoid having to queue to see such things)
This is a new type of post. It is a premonition of an impending Saga. I foresee the beginning of Cabinet Saga.
Don’t misunderstand me. This might be a good Saga, and it’s one I’m genuinely excited to get started on. We’re finally getting round to decorating the living room, you see, and since our house is Edwardian and the living room is the one place with some surviving period detail, we’re doing what we can to restore it to its former glory. I’ve fixed the missing bits of plaster coving and the original window frames. We’re going to find a cast iron fire surround like the one the house would originally have had. And we’re also going to put bookshelves and cabinets into the alcoves on either side of the chimney.
Turns out alcove cabinets are not cheap. It’s just a bookcase, and yes, a Billy bookcase would be very cheap. But if you want a Billy bookcase that is built in, custom-made to fit your house’s charmingly non-straight Edwardian architecture, with detailing that would fit in with the carefully restored features of an Edwardian room, and also ideally has hidden LED under-shelf lighting, that’s not economical. Ikea don’t do it. You have to get a joiner to come in and price it up, and then he quotes you a figure that makes you sit down and concentrate on breathing and dab tears from your eyes, and then when you’ve collected yourself you ask him to leave and never come back.
Luckily there’s an alternative. You can measure every conceivable dimension of your Edwardian alcoves to the millimetre – several times, until you’re really sure you’ve definitely got it right – and then send them off to a company who will design them and supply you with a flat-pack kit of heavy duty MDF parts for you to assemble and install yourself. The cost of this still causes a sharp intake of breath but is much more affordable.
So it was that in March we measured parts of our living room over and over again to pin down its every millimetre, and so it came to pass that on Wednesday a van arrived at our house and unloaded an industrial quantity of precision-cut, pre-drilled MDF.
I’ve been on nights this week, which is not prime DIY territory, but I’m off work all next week and it will be cabinet time. I can’t wait for cabinet time. I like building things – flat pack furniture, Lego, raised beds in the garden, anything really – and this is a big thrilling building project where I get to make something intricate and impressive without having to do the difficult woodwork bits.
This could just be sheer enjoyment from start to finish, but the potential for an impending Saga arises from the need for “scribing”.
Built in furniture, you see, has to be built in to the room. As in, fit it perfectly. Meet it seamlessly. And no amount of millimetre-perfect measuring can achieve that. Instead, wherever your MDF meets the wall, you need to scribe it. Hold it perfectly in position and then trace the outline of the wobbly plasterwork and the skirting board and the extra bit under the skirting board that covers the edge of the laminate floor and whatever else is in the way. Then you need to get your jigsaw out, with its splinter guard on and its high precision fine cutting blade, and cut strips off the MDF pieces you’ve just paid an arm and a leg for. Thin strips. Really precise strips. Really thin, precise strips with awkward shapes and fiddly bits that you need to get right first time on a piece of wood that can’t easily be replaced.
I might be brilliant at scribing. I hope I am. But I’ve never done it before, and there’s going to be quite a lot of it in this project, so while I’m going to have a lot of very enjoyable DIY time ahead of me I’m slightly apprehensive about the potential for it to become a Cabinet Saga.
Welcome to back to a breath of fresh beans, this week we’re just going to nip to the loo, don’t worry, not literally (we did that before we started recording).
I know nothing about the owner of this house except that they named their house this.
Imagine coming up with this.
Imagine coming up with it and thinking it was so good, so funny, so enduring in its humour that it wouldn’t just bring you joy and laughter in this one moment where you thought of it, but it would continue to bring you joy and laughter for years to come.
Imagine thinking that it would bring joy and laughter to other people if you stuck it on the front of your house.
Imagine applying to the Royal Mail to change the name of your property. Applying to the council to have it amended in their records. Speaking to people at every bank and utility company who have your details to explain to them, and spell out letter by letter, your brilliant joke, so that it would appear on all the post addressed to you.
Imagine going in to Timpson’s and asking them for a rustic wooden house sign in sustainable pine with bark surround and telling them that this is the word you want them to engrave into it using three-inch-high letters in Chancery Bold Italic.
I am currently undergoing a transformation and there’s nothing I can do about it. I am not the same person anymore; I am slowly morphing into something else and how it will end I do not know.
It all started earlier on this year when I bought a house. It was my first time, a life-changing event, one that was met with equal parts joy and exhaustion (I’ve got the plug!). We moves in no problems and set about doing the usual shuffling items of furniture about and redecorating.
It was slow to begin with, almost crimsonly even. Rambling about a garden centre, I noticed the garden tools and took one off the shelf. Normally I’d make a beeline for the chainsaws and start swishing one around like a child only this time I removed a reasonably-priced garden strimmer and thought to myself, “hmmm, this would make work in the back garden next summer a lot easier.” I immediately noticed what I was doing, put the strimmer back and quickly made off in the opposite direction.
Last weekend I was out with the dog for a morning walk. The sun hadn’t quite come up yet although there was enough light to make out the specific details of each house as we passes them. I saw one on the other side of the road with what seemed to be a brand-new roof that seemed to sparked in the almost dawn. “That is a fine-looking roof,” and I almost spoke out loud, the words dancing on my tongue, the thought hanging in the air with the morning frost.
What is happening to me? Why am I behaving this way? Should I seek help or am I a lost cause?
In the last few years, whenever there are renovations to some part of the building where I work, there have been some common design elements. They’re always more colourful for a start, which is nice because the building’s original colour scheme was mainly shades of grey. They also involve little holes or indents in otherwise blank panels that spell things in morse code.
In reception, for example, there are large dark coloured panels with a repeating pattern in morse code that’s lit from behind, which spells out the name of the building over and over again. It’s like a little interior design Easter egg.
Lately, a shared kitchen area near our room was refitted and gained new green cupboard doors. One of them just covers the equipment for the instant hot water tap. It has a pattern of holes that form a vent so the cupboard has some air circulation, and the holes are in morse code.
Eventually my curiosity got the better of me and I looked up a morse code translator to see what the vent spells.
I am knee-deep in the middle of lots of boring house chores. This is my first time on the house purchase bandwagon so whilst I have had some experience painting, decorating and very basic DIY from living in my flat, there’s still a lot that I don’t know.
That’s fine, nobody comes into the world with a drill and the ability to rewire a kitchen. I do what I can and accept help from others when it’s necessary to do so. What I am learning though is that wallpaper is a pain in the arse and should never ever be considered.
Why’s that? What’s so wrong with wallpaper I hear you ask? It looks great when it’s on the wall but flip reverse that sandwich and consider when taking it off. Vikki used the wallpaper remover which turned the room into a sauna from all the heat. Even then, you still have to scrap it off. Once that’s done you have to prepare the walls because you can’t paint over that. This is where the big scandal comes in.
Sugar soap is awful. It’s useless. I think personally it’s the biggest con. You spray or wipe this gunk on the wall to help remove the old wallpaper paste and clean the wall so you don’t have ugly bumpy bits when painting. That all makes perfect sense. You know what’s actually doing all the work though? A combination of the warm water, the sponge / scouring pad and my fucking arm. It’s got nothing to do with the bright yellow liquid we’re forking out 3 to 4 quid a pop on. I had one of those squirty bottle versions and it was three quarters done on one bedroom. The label itself says to, “use liberally”; no doubt to send whatever poor sucker who purchased it back to the shop to buy more of it.
I am never, ever using wallpaper. I have made this decision based on scrubbing eight walls in two rooms and not seeing any difference. Wallpaper can get to fuck. Sugar soap can get to fuck.
