Tag Archives | General DIY
Out of an old sewing machine came forth a kindling box
Our homes should be places where we can be expressive of who we are. Even if we can’t afford the furniture or paintings we would like, we can always make comfortable compromises by putting an attractive throw and bright cushions over a tatty sofa or, as I do, photocopy pictures of paintings (in high resolution) that I love and frame them.
As I have said before, I am deeply uncomfortable and perplexed when I go into a house where everything is white and there are no books or pictures, precious few ornaments or fol-de-rols and no clues as to the identity of the inhabitant.
The ability to make things oneself comes in so useful, particularly when money is short. Using up old materials to make new things is not only deeply satisfying; it makes your house more individual and exciting but also means fewer items going to the tip. For good examples of this, you need only visit Sue at the Quince Tree or The Vintage Knitter to see the lovely things they do.
As usual for a Sunday, I was wandering around the Market Harborough Antique Market and spotted an interesting looking box, half under the table of a stall that I frequent. It was a slightly unusual shape and it drew my eye, something about the shape nagging at the back of my mind. The vendor had put a few small logs in it and I thought “What a super, neat little box for kindling”. I’m currently using an old straw bag for kindling which does the trick but it looks untidy and just ‘not right’.
The cover off an old sewing machine
I asked what price she had on it and immediately beat her down a few quid. It turned out to be the lid off an old Singer sewing machine. How completely perfect.
which became a kindling box
I am the owner of four sewing machines; an 1890s treadle, a 1910 flower-enamelled Singer, a miniature 1950s Sew-ette and a fancy new modern jobby that goes shopping for its own bobbins and advises you on your colour schemes.
Everything in your home should tell a story – your story. So make it an adventure.
More cold weather tips
In January of this year I wrote an article telling you how to double glaze your windows for about £1.50. I also gave you Andy & Teddy’s Guide to Cold Weather Clothing and I would urge you to re-read both these articles as I think we’re in for the long haul.
There are also a few more tips in Not Enough Thermals in the World.
At the time of writing these articles, I was living in the house across the road which was positively tropical compared to this one. Last night I decided to have a bath. My bathroom has no heating other than a small fan heater on the wall which cuts out after eight minutes. I ran a bath that was as hot as I could possibly bear without actually taking my skin off and, at 11o’clock precisely I jumped in. By 11.10 it was lukewarm and I was in that horrible dilemma of being miserable in the bath but being unable to bear the consequences of actually getting out.
So here are some more general tips for dealing with the cold and keeping your bills down.
House
- Keep all interior doors shut
- Only heat the rooms you are actually using and keep curtains closed whenever you can
- Put thick curtains across outside doors to keep out draughts
- Stop using any outside doors that you don’t need to. Tape up others with masking tape to keep out draughts
- If you have dripping taps, get the washers fixed or your pipes will freeze. If you have overflow drains, put the plugs in sinks and basins as a further precaution.
- If your water tank is insufficiently lagged, you may be able to get a grant from the council (also for loft insulation). Failing this wrap the tank in old towels or jumpers – anything to stop the heat escaping.
- Make sure you have some camping stoves with spare gas bottles and plenty of tinned food – there could be power cuts
- Keep your calories up for your own internal central heating. Make sure children have a good breakfast before they go to school and that they drink plenty – dehydration happens in cold as well as heat
- Oil filled and oil free radiators and halogen heaters are very cheap to run and are a useful boost in a cold room
Driving
- If there is heavy snow about, keep your journeys to a minimum – coffee with a friend is not an essential journey
- Keep an emergency pack in the car at all times with blankets, first aid kit, cereal bars and, if you’re going on a longer journey, a thermos of hot tea or cocoa
- If the road is white, it is likely to be slippery. Drive slowly and if you have to brake, pump the brake in light short bursts. If you have to brake suddenly and start to skid, take your feet off all pedals and steer into the skid. This may seem obvious, but if you saw some of the mothers at school …
- Always, always have your mobile ‘phone switched on and topped up
Wider Community
- Please check on your elderly neighbours or relatives – don’t assume someone else is doing it. They might be stranded and need some shopping but they might also just need some company – if they can’t go out they could go for days without seeing another person. Make sure they have their heating on.
- Get together with your neighbours and shovel snow if your street is icy.
- Make sure that you know the procedures for if your schools or businesses are closed. It would be ghastly to take an hour to get to school only to find no-one else there
- If you have friends with 4×4’s consider lift sharing and chip in with the petrol
However, I am sitting in an unheated room and my hands have stopped working. This is how much I love you. I also have to clean the bathroom and kitchen as a plumber is coming at 8am to fix my dripping taps. It’s amazing what the landlord will do when you refuse to pay your rent until basic maintenance is done.
Yours in thermals
WH
Hard at it
This weekend has been nothing if not productive. I, and to a lesser extent The Boys, knuckled down to some serious house tidying, organizing and DIY. The new house is significantly smaller and less well appointed than my former residence, despite having one more bedroom, and it therefore takes skill and imagination to fit all our stuff in.
Now before any smart-arse suggests that I should get rid of my stuff, I would like to point out that I have been downsizing for the past three and a half years. I am a fascinating person with lots of interests and I therefore possess the accoutrements necessary to service those interests. Nothing more can go. Glad to have cleared that up.
The important thing to remember about DIY is that no-one, not even boys, are born with the God given knowledge of how to do things. We have to be taught, or in my case, buy a book on it. Unless you can afford to pay someone, it’s important to learn to Do It Yourself. There’s no mystery and the only barrier to a woman handling a Black and Decker*, Sigourney Weaver style, is the possible lack of physical strength.
So this weekend Matthew, we have:-
- Put up 4 big shelves with metal brackets in crumbling, crappy walls
- Unpacked 6 boxes of books to put on the shelves
- Completely tidied Boy the Elder’s room
- Hung 6 pictures
- Put up 1 bathroom cabinet
- Put up one 1 loo roll holder
- Removed a defunct shower bracket and filled the holes
- Put up 6 candle sconces and a Green Man
- Established a system of large cuphooks screwed into a lower shelf for the hanging of brushes and flannels
- Unpacked 2 boxes of ornaments and bathroom stuff and placed them appropriately
- Washed and replaced all the cushion covers in the sitting room
- Hung 3 mirrors with plates (smashed the largest and best one – wobbly moment)
- Half tidied Boy the Younger’s room, which had never actually had any boxes unpacked and had therefore been totally trashed before a single toy box made it to the shelves
…and in between that, broken up almost continuous fights, shopped, cooked, serviced the blog and even made it to Evensong. Fish and chips tonight though. Lovely.
Still to be done:
- 1 kitchen cabinet – never done one of these before so that’ll be interesting
- Re-organise kitchen contents to utilize new cupboard
- 6 more pictures
- Repair Boy the Younger’s curtain rail and re-hook and -hang the curtains after they pulled them down whilst makes a jungle shelter
- Filing – huge pile
- Mend large gouge in the landing wall which the previous occupants gouged with a bed frame
- Re-hang the sitting room door
- Gouge out badly done and therefore repellant sealant and grouting from bathroom tiles and re-do
Round of applause please.
* other makes of power tool are, of course, available
My experience in a Great Big Shop
Right. Let’s get back to power tools.
My new house is small and rather poorly equipped and in order to accommodate my books and all the other stuff with which I surround myself, I am obliged to put up shelves, perform some necessary repairs and put up a new kitchen cabinet. To this end, and with the help of ‘Sean’ the rather scrumptious Southern Irish manifestation of my SatNav, The Boys and I set sail for Ikea in Coventry.
When we arrived, we thought we’d start by finding the cafe and having a drink and a biscuit to fortify us on our quest for cheap, mass-produced, flat-packed items. We were herded into a fenced off queueing area such as one might see at a livestock market at the end of which was a long counter with food of various kinds. We were instructed to take a tray and a mug or glass for our drink and make our choices.
This should have been simple but it just wasn’t; where would I get tea? At what point should I pay for it? How much was anything? It turned out we had to pay for our drink before we actually got it, then go to another shelf where we picked the tea from a bush on the next floor, milked a cow then proceeded to the nearest steel plant to press out our own spoons. Then, and only then, could we have the longed for cup of tea and an, admittedly tasty, slice of apple cake.
Just be aware that at this point we have not even ventured onto the shop floor. I decided to try to get my kitchen cabinet before I did any browsing in the Market Place – always do the Work first – and found a pleasant looking man to help me. I described exactly what I wanted, showed him the dimensions by stretching my arms out to the required width, picked my cupboard door and prepared to get my stuff. But oh no, it couldn’t possibly be that simple. First I had to go to some enormous shelves to find the cabinet and load it onto my trolley. Then I had to go back to the man at the service desk and get a chitty for the door that I could take to the till and pay for and thence to the Customer Collection Area to collect the door.
This was a complete pain but about 20 minutes later I was at the Customer Collection desk with …… the wrong door. This meant, of course, that I also had the wrong cupboard. A terse conversation with the retard behind the desk revealed how I was going to spend the next hour of my life.
I put the children into the Play Area after managing to convince the woman behind the desk that Boy the Elder was only ten (when he is well on the way to being 13 – “mmmm – very tall for his age”) and proceeded in the general direction of Customer Services. Here I had to explain my problem to another half-wit who eventually refunded my money and sent me back to the shop floor to select the proper cabinet. Except that I suddenly realised that in order to do this I would have to go back to the main entrance and go right round the entire shop to get back to the department which was a tantalising 20 yards away behind a row of tills that was protected by gun emplacements and searchlights.
I went into Mad Woman Mode. I put my arms in the the air and said in a very loud voice to the many, many lines of people, “I have lost the will to live and I can feel my life force ebbing away . I have been in this shop for over three months now and I cannot face going right the way round this massive store just to get to those shelves 20 yards away. Please let me through before I start crying!”.
It was like tha parting of the Red Sea – some people laughing, others backing away nervously – and I pushed my trolley straight through to the kitchen cabinet district (left bank). I collected the cabinet, paid for it, queued to collect the door, picked up the children and left. We were the last out.
If anyone from Ikea is reading this, may I make a suggestion? When customers come in through the door, ask them if they’ve ever visited an Ikea before. If the answer is no, whisk them off to a training area where they are given a short induction course in The Way of the Swede. If they refuse, hand them a leaflet which has a map of the store and instructions on how to use the cafe and how to purchase tricky items. Failing this, a meditation room with soft lights and pan pipes might be in order. And perhaps a punch bag. Or better still, the presentation of a GCSE in Retail Exploration. Only a matter of time……
Double glaze your windows for about £1.50
The Wartime Housewife and The Boys live in a Victorian red brick cottage with sash windows. The downstairs windows have been replaced with unexpectedly tasteful upvc sash-alikes, whilst the upstairs windows still bear the fingermarks of an artisan, probably called Reuben Wellbeloved, who popped them in in 1886.
In the summer, the ventilation afforded by these windows was refreshing and delightful. This being my first winter, I have discovered that the howling gale issuing forth through the bathroom window turns the longed-for hot soak into something more reminiscent of a Victorian health cure in the North Sea (or a summer holiday in Skegness).
Naturally I have curtains, but the radiators have been placed helpfully under the windows, thereby allowing me effectively to throw bucketfuls of pound coins out of the gaps in the windows directly into the pockets of some thieving scumbag energy company, whilst representatives of Friends of the Earth beat my blue, shivering arse with elderly, mildewed loofas. It had to stop.
I remembered a trick I employed many years ago in a similar crisis, in the draughty ,1950′s, ‘lavatory brick’ house where I grew up.
Utensils:
1 large roll of cling film
1 large roll of Sellotape – wide gauge if you can get it
1 pair of scissors
1 willing helper if you can get one
1 hairdryer
Method:
Pull out a little of the cling film and place it at the top of your window, so that it will overlap the outer frame and side
Secure it in place with a couple of bits of Sellotape to hold it temporarily
Pull the cling film right to the bottom of the window and tear off
Apply Sellotape to the edges to completely seal them to the window frame
If you don’t have a helper, I would suggest applying the cling film horizontally as it is easier to manage this way on your own
Continue until the window is covered
Seal the seams with more Sellotape
Stick strips of Sellotape cross-ways to strengthen it.
Make sure that all gaps are sealed and secure
If you have access to an electric socket, turn the hairdryer to a hot setting and blow it over the cling film to tighten it up
Remember to do offending loft hatches as well
Voila!
This is a very cheap and disposable way of doing it. One can buy rolls of plastic from hardware shops which are purpose made for this job. It costs roughly £10 and the label says it can do up to eight windows (although it didn’t specify what size). I have not used it and therefore can’t say if it’s any better than cling film. Alternatively, you can withhold your rent until the landlord replaces the windows and mends the gaping hole in the rotting back door with a cursory smear of wood-filler.
FURTHER TIPS:
Stick to using one outside door if you can. Tape up the gaps in any others with masking tape.
One leg of a pair of tights or a stocking stuffed with rags and tied at the open end, can make an unattractive but effective emergency draught excluder. As can old pillows. Or small children working in shifts.
Hang a curtain over outside doors. If you only need the curtain in extreme cold, buy a couple of curtains from your local charity shop – it doesn’t matter if they don’t match as long as they’re wide enough to cover the door with a six inches to spare on either side. Cut off the bit you put the curtain hooks in on one of them, then stitch them together so the curtain is long enough to cover the door with a good six inches to spare at the bottom. If you’re feeling really cocky, you could sew a few loops down the side, screw some little cup hooks into the door frame and secure the curtain still further. But that might be verging on smug.
Put on another jumper.
Emergency Sledge
If you find yourself in the disturbing position of having no sledge on a snowy slope (10/- to anyone who can say that after a bottle of the Wartime Housewife’s Sloe Gin) you will need the following:-
Utensils:
1 x large piece of thick cardboard – 2 if you have them
1 large thick bin liner with handles
1 x snowy slope
Method:
Place the large piece of cardboard into the sack, trimming to fit if necessary
Place your bottom on the bin liner, grasping the handles firmly
Hurl yourself down the slope
The Wartime Housewife takes no responsibility for anyone who recklessly hurls themselves into the path of oncoming vehicles, livestock, the waste products of livestock, or barbed-wire fences.
Michelle Obama and I have salient points to make about relationships
Michelle Obama making an unforgivably sexist comment
One of the great things about getting older, is that you realise that you don’t have to compromise in the field of relationships. One has the confidence to say things like “I deserve better than this”, “It is reasonable to expect good manners”, “I am not feeling happy therefore I withdraw”, I am with you because I want you rather than because I need you” and other personally empowering things.
Last week, Michelle Obama was in the news saying that she thought that young women sometimes chose men for the wrong reasons. Despite frantic Googling, I have not managed to find the exact quotes, but if memory serves, she said something along the lines of:
- Don’t chose a man for his looks or his money
- Choose a man with intelligence and a desire to succeed
- Look at how he treats his mother
I’m with her all the way on this although I would naturally extend the criteria to women as well. I would go further:-
- Ask yourself “Do I like who I am when I am with this person?”
- Incredibly good looking people almost always know it
- Do they like your friends?
- Do they introduce you to their friends?
- Choose someone IN their potential, not WITH potential (c.Lady Somerset)
- Does this person treat you with courtesy and good manners?
- Do they make an effort with their appearance when they go out with you?
- Do they fit in with your family?
- (For older people) are they at ease with your children?
- Are they interested in what you do and who you are?
- Are your values and ethics compatible?
- Do they like you for who you are now, not what they want you to be?
- Do you want a project or a relationship?
- Never, EVER mess with someone who doesn’t know what they want. You will never succeed
- Love is not enough on its own
Relationships are potentially much more complicated as we get older, because there are so many more variables. When we are 20, everyone is on the prowl, everyone is playing the same game. When we are out there second or third time round, it is not just us with whom they have be compatible. They have to get on with your children, your family, your long established friends and probably even your ex (or indeed ex-es).
I have stayed friends with quite a few of my ex’s, because I firmly believe that just because you don’t want to carry on a ‘relationship’ with them, it doesn’t mean you have to lose all the positive aspects of a friendship that has simply changed dynamic. Also, if you have children, it is really important to demonstrate to them that grown-ups can be civilised and that break-ups don’t necessarily equate to break-downs. Obviously this can’t always happen; it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
I once asked Lady Marjorie to what she attributed the success of her sixty year marriage. After much thought she came up with this: tolerance, flexibility, starting with nothing and building something together, mutual goals and a sense of humour. Can’t argue with that.
I am clearly an expert on relationships. Despite more boyfriends than I care to mention (admittedly over a thirty year period), and a twelve year relationship, at 44 I am a single mother of two children, starting all over again. However, having rigidly applied my own rules to my recent relationship of ten months, I have just presented my Former Favourite with his P45, and I only spent one day eating Ben & Jerry’s straight from the tub.
I remain obnoxiously cheerful.
PS. If they’re rubbish in bed and refuse to improve, I leave it to your discretion, but make sure they have some seriously compensating qualities.
Syrup, String, Bubbles & Cat Food
No – these are not the names of my sisters. As I have said before, one’s home should be an interesting and personal place. Anyone can furnish their house with homogenous items from Great Big Shops, but truly interesting houses that contain interesting people have things that are out of the ordinary, that they have made themselves or collected or created from something else. Let your possessions have a story.
As you know, I am a tremendous scavenger and there are few things I like better than a village fete, a charity shop, a bric-a-brac stall or a jumble sale. They bring three-fold benefits in that one can find wonderful, cheap treasures, you can use things in unusual and decorative ways and they usually benefit a charity at the same time.
I wish immediately to give credit for this string dispenser to Diplo, who I know reads this blog. (Have a look at his own eclectically interesting ‘Sweat, Steam & Gasoline’ in my Interesting Blogs list).
A STRING DISPENSER OF DISTINCTION
Thoroughly wash an empty golden syrup tin left over from your storecupboard. Using a bradawl, make a hole in the centre of the lid, then use a slightly larger Phillips screwdriver to widen the hole. Turn the lid over and place the hole on something hard and just flatten any sharp bits with a hammer. Thread your string through the hole – it keeps string neat and tidy and looks great.
A BOX FOR PRACTICAL CATS
I found this bread bin for 50p at a jumble sale. At some point I may go mad and stencil it, but at the moment it is simply an excellent container for dried cat or dog food. I keep a measuring cup (an old plastic baby cup) inside and the food is kept dry and fresh.
BATHROOM BOUNTY
I love to wallow in the bath and I like my bathroom to be a calming place with nice things to look at.
These three decanters cost me £1 each from charity shops. They are a common design and turn up all the time so you can collect a set over time. I fill them with brightly coloured bubble bath – shop’s own brand aromatherapy type at 97p each – and bingo! they look great and smell lovely.
Incidentally, the mirror just visible behind the decanters was found at the local tip with a chunk missing from the frame. It measures about 48″x36″ and I paid £4 for it. I built up the frame with plastic wood (available from DIY shops) then sanded it down and bevelled the edge with a chisel. A couple of coats of white paint and the job was done. I bet you can’t see where I repaired it.
I live in a rented house, so I don’t want to attach too many things to the walls. This little wooden corner unit cost me 10p from a village fete and is so light I just nailed it up. The plants are artificial and were bought in a sale for £3 each from a company on e-bay and the corals have been in my drawer for about 15 years, but you could use shells or glass things to catch the light.
