Art and design

Green green green is driving me crazy

| Jessica

Talking colour again. The pretty Taubmans Sweet Clover I selected for the exterior trim DOES NOT WORK. Sure, it’s currently sitting next to depressing kill-me-now dark green but it’s just too muted for me and there’s not enough point of difference. Thank goodness I only bought a sample pot! I’m trying the Klavier as trim and it’s working ok, but it’s not popping the way I had hoped (once again, the beige trim is doing us all no favours). I’m waiting until the white on the walkway and guardrail is done and then we’ll see whether it will look good against the Natural White, and then I might just go a bit wild and try teal or something. Because I cannot live with the depressing nothingness of our exterior! Linseed was not the right colour either – I’ve found a couple of very similar colours in both the Taubman and Dulux colour charts and cannot believe that something so pretty could look so dessicated on our house. Natural White is perfect against the horrible base colour – it’s just getting the trim colour to pop a little more. The two colours at the bottom are Taubmans Sachet Pink and Green Cottage. The green is lovely in theory, but in practice dreary. The bottom aqua is called Hummingbird – a bright pop of aqua that is complementary according to Taubman. I may yet go there.

Here’s a new series of colours that we’re trying. See what I mean about the Celery Green? On its own it’s pretty and bright. On our house it looks dull and tired. Dulux have a lot to answer for for their poop colour of the year, Brave Ground. It’s hard enough to get our house to look excited about anything, then add a poop colour and we may as well give up trying to look even semi interested in life.

The new Snug

| Jessica

Right. I’m definitely putting off doing any work at the moment by posting another blog, this time about our lovely new snug. In truth it’s not that different from when the furniture was in our old house, but it’s no longer a thoroughfare and we have built in bookcases! I’ve had a ball dressing them and making the room look as lush and warm as possible. The couch is from Freedom; the lounge chairs from Camp Hill Antique Centre (one of the vendors there who specialises in Mid century Modern styles) and the cushions mostly from West Elm; the Noguchi style Coffee table is from Matt Blatt; the TV is an LED Sony 55″. The TV console is from Vast (no longer trading). We have Apple TV for all our streaming options which includes STAN (an Australian streaming service), Netflix and Amazon Prime. I’m not ready to book Disney – maybe never, and Binge (Foxtel lite) is on my radar but we don’t watch enough TV to make it worth the extra cost. In total our streaming services cost less than $AU40 which is pretty good, and I have a free subscription to Apple Music for the year bundled with my phone service. We bought a fantastic Bose Soundbar and I think I’ll buy one for upstairs too; they’re terrific. We didn’t need the subwoofer as we just don’t watch TV that loud, nor am I interested in loud music.

The artwork was nearly all sourced in Australia, including Constantine Popov and indigenous artists Nellie Marks Nakamarra, Gloria Petyarre and Evelyn Pultara. There’s also a 500 year old music manuscript on vellum from a Spanish monastery and a lovely little Cossack image – red and black – by a local Brisbane artist (lost her details, sorry!) All trinkets were sourced from around the world. One of the things we used to do before COVID-19 hit (BC to you!), was travel. We would buy simple little sketches or woodcuts or etchings of the cities and places we visited, and I would also buy some pottery/ ceramics or craftwork from artists who live there. Some ceramics and art works would have long standing origins in that region, or the artist would be a permanent resident. I love ceramics and art, and these, after my family and animals, are some of my favourite things. Most other trinkets were bought from Waverley Antiques in Melbourne, Empire Revival in Paddington (Brisbane) or CHAC in Camp Hill. So no more talk: here are some photos of the space!

So much to say, so many photos to upload!

| Jessica

I didn’t realise it has been 6 weeks since my last blog post (this sounds like a Catholic confession ;)) and the last thing I posted had me all excited about fabrics. Well, good folks of the interwebs, I’ve gone and spent a small fortune buying lovely things for the new home and I can happily say it’s been totally worth it!

To start with, we’ve upgraded all the electricals. We’re not yet finished but we’re replacing all the metal, rusting ceiling fans, and adding power points, and sensor lights for outside, and changing out almost all of the old, not very attractive pendant lights. We’re halfway there. We’re adding 2 new split air conditioners and I’ve decided we’re going Solar. Finally! We also upgraded the locks and added keyed locks to all the accessible windows, and we’re doing some landscaping and general maintenance. We’re not ready to paint the exterior even though the colours are super drab (greige and dark green, y’all. SO tired), and there’s plenty more to keep us busy. But I guess you want to know about the cutest new room in the house, right?

Lemme get right to it. No, it’s not the snug: even though it’s our very favourite evening room and so cool and lovely to be in at night. Drum roll…. it’s our new green room! And here we are:

Remember my mood board? Lots of pretty greens and palm trees etc. Well, it’s now done. We still have one or two more pieces of furniture to add – nothing big; just a couple of ottomans/ footstools and a side table or two, maybe one more artwork, but essentially we are finito bar the shouting. Pick your favourite image from the MANY MANY ones below:

I love everything about this room except that the cream carpet needed ANOTHER carpet over it to protect it from the dogs. Pesky dirty animals. Speaking of which: introducing Poppy (black) and Dougal (blonde).

I’m not sold on the placement of any of the objects on the little table: they’re just place holders for a better arrangement. Maybe a flower arrangement even. I’m also trying to pull some of the colours out of the lovely little Davida Allen painting above. I love her work but many do not. This one’s a sweet little serene number called Floating in the Mangroves. I’ve got some of my Majolica ware on the wall now and we recently bought a few new art works to complement the room. There’s a lovely little Australia Hermannsberg one next to the mirror, and I’m not quite finished dressing one of the walls. Most of the other walls are complete, but I might even add an antique mirror to the mix.

So there’s not much else to say except to name and shame the vendors. Carpet, couches and curtains by Pottery Barn. 1 of 2 coffee tables and the dark green lamp by West Elm. Palm cushions and parrot cushion by Rice Furniture. Olive cushions by Bed Bath n Table. Olive and white cushions by Coastal Cushion Company. Pale green lamp from One World Interiors. Antiques and vintage items from various vendors in Brisbane and elsewhere and my mum. Ormolu side table from Jubilee Antiques. Knick knacks all thrifted, many (most?!) from Camp Hill Antique Centre. Artwork from Lethbridge Gallery and David Bromley. Plants from a bunch of places around Brissie such as Ross Evans etc.

Next blog I promise I’ll show you the snug.

Fabric Finding

| Jessica

You’d think I could get my act together to start planning our new garden shed/ storage boxes, wouldn’t you? Instead, I have spent a rather enjoyable hour looking for fabrics, and I’ve found this terrific online shop called Spoonflower that prints your selected design onto a choice of fabric, including Belgian linen (my favourite linen, although I’m also partial to French). So before I drop $$$ on a fabric I might hate, I think I’ll get a few samples made in a fat quarter (typical width for a sample) and then select the one I prefer. That also gives me lots of lovely cushion textiles to have made into cushions after I’ve selected the one I prefer. I’m interested in a range of green quatrefoil and lattice style images for my curtains, but I want them to be super subtle. I love this design by mrsmberry but it’s probably best for cushions:

Here are a few more by some super talented designers including mistiina

This is by Willow Lane Textiles and I think it’s my favourite.

I’m loving that I can find a design that already exists, and have it made to my specs. The above one has all the subtle feels that I want for my curtains, although I might yet go unpatterned plain ivory/natural linen, because I need to be able to change out the look if I want. At any rate, I’ve been sucked into an interior design wormhole, and I like it!

And of course, this is for my green room. Living!!

So it’s 4 months between posts.

| Jessica

Don’t judge me. It’s not that I haven’t been working on the house: it’s that I hightailed it to Melbourne as soon as my teaching year was over and spent a blissful six weeks just hanging with my homies. AKA my family. We actually like to hang out together. I know. Odd. (Also took the opportunity to redecorate the beachhouse for presents for mum and dad. Which now looks AWESOME.)

Anyhoo. So remember when last year I was moaning about the house being too noisy? Well it still is, but an amazing, wonderful thing happened. My daughter moved out. Yep. She and her partner were handed a house across town and she leapt at it. So she’s been gone since Australia Day/ Invasion Day and guess what I’ve been doing? !

Painting, y’all. Painting. While I wait for the agonisingly long time it’s taking for my iphone to upload its photos to my dear old, tired MacBook (now that’s a design story for another time), let me tell you what I’ve been up to these last few weeks.

At the time I was moaning and bitching about the noise, we got a bunch of real estate agents through to look at the house. Turns out we could get a good price for it, but there is an ever so slight correction in the overheated Australian property market and I think to suggest we’d make $1,000,000 on our little home (and land) is a bit of an overreach. And now we’ve had a bit of a mind change about wanting to sell, because life, the agents keep bugging me and I’ve had to ignore their calls.

And then I went away for a long, long time. So I’m back home, daughter’s out, and now WE HAVE A SPARE ROOM. In truth it’s not really a spare room because my step-daughter needs it, but she has to share with visitors now. Sorry not sorry.

So of course, being one to grab an opportunity when I see an empty room, I PAINTED it. And now it’s beautiful. I’ve complained before about the length of time and effort it takes to paint VJs, haven’t I? Suffice to say, once again hideous. But the result is stunning. The room is south facing, which in Australia means the cold side, but which in hot QLD means the comfortable side. I painted the walls with 3 coats of Dulux Vivid White, and finished the woodwork with 2 coats of Dulux Natural White Enamel. God it looks good. Then, and this is where I give myself the biggest pat on the back, I McGyver’d the ceiling fan. It was an old rattan-inset wooden-bladed thing. Dusty, a horrible cream colour, it had a horrible amber glass light shade and was ERGLY. Parts of the blades were coming apart because old, and really it needed to go. But we can’t afford to do that right now, because then there’s a whole thing with lights and electricity we need to deal with and we can’t afford it. So.

I spray painted it with 2 cans of British Paints White Satin Spray paint. I glued and clamped the dodgy fan blades back together, and replaced the light shade with a simple round white one from Beacon Lighting. Sometimes, I amaze even myself. The darned fan looks like new.

Then, and this is where it all gets a little bit exxie, I bought a double bed for the daughter-of-step (and visitors), and now we have a beautiful guest room decorated in shades of wood, white and blue. It looks amazing. I’m about to decorate with a mirror wall, (no, NOT that sort of mirror wall), in which all our old mirrors and some new ones will be artfully placed on one of the walls to give the impression of even more space in there. I’ve bought a bunch of cheap vintage mirrors in gold plaster frames, and we already have some regular wooden ones, so one whole wall will be devoted to this decorating extremism.

Also in my painting adventures, I finally painted the woodwork in our ensuite and WIR. While it was all given undercoats etc, I hadn’t quite gotten around to finishing it all off. So I used the hottest ever recorded months of January and February to do this. Because I’m a masochist. And because I like sweating into MY EYES. But the effort was worth it (of course).

The NEXT thing I did, because my daughter moved out and we gave her all the crappy stuff under the house we no longer wanted; well there’s this thing in Australia we have called the nonburnable rubbish collection (AKA the hard rubbish collection, AKA the “we collect your shit so you don’t have to take it to the rubbish dump” collection). Yep, you guessed it. I’ve been clearing out the basement. When I say basement, what I mean is the ground floor of the house that is open to the elements and only has timber battens protecting all the stuff from the weather, thieves etc. It gets wet, and dusty, and dirty and all the things are not really protected.

We offloaded 2 broken fridges, some old broken chairs, a bunch of old electronic equipment, heaps of broken Ikea shelves and stuff, and then I cleaned nearly all the corners under our house. And swept the concrete. And now I feel lighter and cleaner. It feels SO GOOD, y’all!

I have to reconfigure my workspaces under there (I have 2 workbenches: 2!), and clean up some more bits and pieces, but OH BOY was it good to finally do this.

So in the next few weeks, I’ll be painting the ghastly 2nd bathroom a fresh white, cleaning out and painting the Oh Jesus room, and painting the rest of the house interior. Only 5 rooms to go, and the entire ceiling.

Oh yeah. Remember how I fell off that ladder last year and had a cry? Well, we offloaded that old thing and bought a brand new 2.4m ladder with paint tray, and a trestle board. Imma painting the ceiling now. Even though I don’t want to.

Y’all, my iphone and MacBook have decided that uploading 700 photos all at once is a bit difficult, so I’m going to suggest you take a look at my Instagram account, @brivegashome and you’ll see all the great photos there of my house and such. Because it appears the world will end before I get to upload any pictures from my phone!

Have a great week and I’ll be posting more frequently now.

Cheerio!

Jess

Finishing off the interiors

| Jessica

It’s still a little way off before we can declare the renovations fully finished but there are signs that it’s close. John the builder wasn’t here on Monday, which gave me the opportunity to do some filling, sanding, undercoating and topcoats. The East Wing is now a pristine white, and it only needs some window painting for it to be complete. Even the woodwork and architraves are mostly done! I’m a little worried about the gorgeous but messy French doors. They need a proper strip-back and clean, and they’ve already been hung, so it’s unlikely this will be done properly. I’ll be scraping back paint off windows and sanding them back for months yet.

The WIR needs its louvre windows (we’re having half clear, half etched and the etched ones aren’t finished yet – or maybe the factory lost them), and then a couple of patching jobs and some architrave. The ensuite just got its window frame finished on the outside, and the vanity finished off. There are some repairs needing doing to some broken tiles (apparently it’s normal for tiles to be broken when fitting ceiling beading – the staccato pounding of the nail gun breaks them), and then some finishing off with silicon. I need to sand back and paint the beading, then the whole ceiling gets a topcoat or 2 (even though it already has one) and then I get to tackle the wood trim, the door and the windows. UGH.

The lads have taken off while we wait for the shower glass to be ready, so it’s painting time for me.

Dulux Vivid White on the walls is great for the outside rooms because it is so bright and clean, and considered a “pure” colour. However, I’m choosing a warmer colour in the interior rooms, as they don’t get all that much natural light, maybe Antique White or Lexicon. I’ve chosen Dulux Natural White in oil for all the woodwork. It covers amazingly well, once the woodwork is undercoated with Dulux 3-in-1 Primer, Sealer and Undercoat in Vivid White. Mostly it just needs one coat on the new wood.

I’m feeling a little trepidation regarding the front windows. We have a small problem. Some of them are old and crusty, and need a lot of preparation before painting. They are also rather delicate, so I can’t use too much force on them. One even has a cracked window pane that I can’t really replace because the glass is so old and delicate it’s not readily available. Therefore ALL the panes will then need replacing. On ALL the windows in that room. Laminated. Not cheap.

In truth, I’m dreading the precision work. I have a lovely little brush for the woodwork but it’s really hard to get a clean line without brush strokes mucking up the vertical and horizontal joins, and getting paint on the glass (which I think is pretty awful, unlike the former occupants of the house, because there is so much crusted paint on ALL of the window panes that it will take until hell freezes over for me to do them all. Even DH has offered to help). So I’m kinda putting it off until I gather up the nerve!

So, for now, it’s back to Bunnings for more Dulux paint. But while you wait, here’s a little picture of the near-finished vanity. All it needs now is the mirror and some bath utensils. We even have the towels! For soft furnishings: Freedom Furniture for the patterned towels and baskets. Adairs for the white and charcoal towels. They are so new I haven’t even removed the store labels.

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I’m off to Pillow Talk for the bathroom accessories. We decided that the gorgeous amber/brown bottles of Aesop work perfectly on the vanity but I can’t bear the cost of replacing Aesop products (SO expensive), so we found these instead:

muse bathroom accessories

So lovely! And of course I found my white orchid is, of course, alive and well. It goes in too. Finally, we need to choose a toilet brush holder (tried my cream and black Victoriana one, doesn’t work at all, too busy) and a bin. For the bin I’m thinking a natural woven grass with white base. For the toilet brush: ugh. Probably a charcoal or dark one for contrast. Not yet decided. Too much white will kill the look.

So why finish off this room? Because I want just ONE room in the house completely renovated and finished. Once the accessories are in, I don’t want to touch this room for a VERY LONG TIME. Also, it means DH and I have a great bedroom retreat (not that the bathroom is somewhere to retreat to, but you get my drift). I have to finish the painting in the bedroom (a whole ‘nother story), but once that’s done, hey presto. Only some plantation shutters to install and we’re done.

Also, it means that the East Wing is completely done as well. Then, only 6 rooms to go. SIGH.

 

 

 

More art.

| Jessica

Bought another beautiful piece of Indigenous art at auction on Monday. It perfectly complements the crazy over-crowded table of cheerful glass and pottery I keep buying. By Betty Mbitjana, (daughter of Minnie Pwerle), the work is bright and I’ve always fancied a small piece of hers. Very reasonable price, although not as coveted an artist as her mother. Pairs quite well with Toni Bucknell, too! Still waiting to paint the room bright white, which will complement the art better than the pale sand colour currently on the walls. And please ignore the awful curtain – it’s a privacy curtain and I hate it.

 

Colourful corner

 

Sourcing the architect

| Jessica

Studio oil painting Toni BI always knew it would come to this. In the end, given my preference for using Dylan McPherson’s company to build our home, we’re going with an architect who has worked with him before and who trusts Dylan’s excellent product. This architect was coincidentally a sound engineer in a former life so knows and gets musicians and understands my need for a sound proofed room that still resonates on the inside.

He’s not afraid to put together some new ideas for us too, seeing as I want a complete renovation plan prior to building the first stage. There is (as he put it) so much potential for our house, and if we plan carefully we should have a wonderful end result.

His fees are reasonable and he works by the hour. This is good for us as once those plans are in place he can step back and our designer Lisa can step in as liaison between the relevant parties.

This whole process is very crazy but not as far as I can tell unusual. And renovating our home is STILL preferable financially to buying elsewhere. Sigh.

In other news the new art is now in the house and for Xmas my mum gave me a rather gorgeous oil painting by Toni Bucknell of a studio I have always liked. I was surprised when she asked what I wanted from her house, but it appears she’s divesting herself of some stuff. When I said I liked that picture she thought for a moment and then said: yes. None of the other siblings wanted it. It’s not worth much I think but I love it as a reminder of my childhood. So it’s in our kitchen, bright and cheerful and we’re nearly done with all my own paintings (done in high school!). The last remaining similarly cheerful print of a kitchen table is about to go to another happier place in the undercroft.

 

 

Bought new art. Whoops.

| Jessica

Now that I’ve been introduced to Charleston’s Art Auctions I’ve realised this is a very dangerous game. Need to stop going to art auctions now. So on Sunday we went in with a strict budget and I’m happy to say didn’t go over the budget. I’m not sure we needed even more art when we have a fridge on its last legs and and a cooktop that is not only tilted but 2 of the 4 heating elements don’t work. And a bathroom that is so diabolical that even the professional cleaner couldn’t get rid of the black mold in the shower recess. (We’ve retired the cleaner and the grocery deliveries because I don’t have an income for 4 months. Therefore, I have lots of time for cleaning and grocery shopping. Apparently.)

So here are our lovely new paintings. Not expensive, but I rather like the cheerful red and orange one called My Country by Nellie Marks Nakamarra. Every time I go into the kitchen there it is, all bright and present. It’s delicious and a great blast of cheer in that rather dark room. I’m not sure about the Patricia Kamara Bush Medicine blue one. We’ve bought it for DH’s office but I’m not sure it will work there, and it’s quite strong in our blue-themed bedroom. Nevertheless, it will look great over the bed if it doesn’t suit the office. The great thing about buying art is that if you don’t like it or it doesn’t suit purpose you can sell it again. Huzzah!

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Buying at auction is great because there is no gallery fee, which is normally 100% mark up or more. These works are each valued at triple their auction price. Auctions don’t really reflect the value of these types of pieces, even at resale. Nevertheless they’re beautiful and dynamic and add colour and vibrancy to our home. There were some truly beautiful large-scale works  by prize-winning artists, that went for a steal, which we sadly cannot afford and also can’t hang due to lack of wall. There were a couple of really gorgeous works I particularly coveted but hey. There’ll be other opportunities in future.