I do like furniture that incorporates books, doubtless due the ridiculous number of paperbacks we have. This chair from Italian designers Nobody&Co is just the kind of thing I dream of owning. The pouf may be more practical in our tiny house though.
This print, by American Tang Yau Hoong, has a lovely dirty yellow, which makes me think of sodium glares. It’s also a great design, evoking the fact that all those pinpricks of lights are individuals.
This is quick “how to” post, looking at what I’ve been doing this last week.
This simple green bench is now just inside my back door and holding various gardening things like my trug. Also a box for recycling, the kid’s play gardening kit and other stuff that had just been stacked up any old how. Nicely retro, yes? Suitably vernacular for an old farmworker’s cottage?
It’s IKEA. It’s a Molger bench which comes in birch and is £39. It’s also in the buy online section, so I added it to an order for something else without upping the delivery charge. Here it is as supplied.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with this, and it’d be ideal in, say, a shed. But I wanted it for a kitchen that is custom built, with a table made of a barn door and a 1950s kitchen cabinet in dirty primrose yellow. Pale Swedish birch just looks out of place, colourwise.
I roughly sanded it all over with grade 80 sandpaper. This was the most frustrating bit and had me cursing that IKEA don’t supply unfinished furniture kits. I then primed it with a gray combined primer/undercoat. The bench is likely to get a lot of wear, so when the undercoat starts to be revealed, I wanted it to be gray, not white. It also dampened down the top colour to make it a bit more 1950s in palette.
I then gave it two coats of Craig and Rose’s Deep Adam Green in an eggshell finish. I know the Adams were Georgian rather than mid-century, but it was the perfect shade.
Total paint costs were £22 and I used maybe a quarter of the primer and half the eggshell. But there’s still enough left for me to be considering it for a 1950s wicker chair that needs a lick of paint and a reupholster.
So the total for the bench is under £50. I got it in place this afternoon and can’t get over how much smarter and planned that old corner of the kitchen is. I’d take a photo but I don’t have nicely co-ordinated boxes yet – that’s next on the list.
One for 1 May – a date that always make me think of both politics and spring. With the local elections this Thursday, it seems appropriate to post something that covers those themes. As with all elections since she was born, I’ll be taking my daughter to the booth on Thursday and explaining why the vote matters even if the election seems meaningless.
This striking design was originally by Margaret Morris, and was to illustrate the songsheet of “The March of the Women”, composed by Ethel Smyth and dedicated to Emmeline Pankhust.
