Life in lockdown - Being Practical (ha ha)

I cannot believe how tedious scraping anaglypta wallpaper is - wallpaper that seems to have been stuck on with cow glue leaving a grotty sticky mess even after being scraped, rubbed and and washed down with sugar soap!!! its a foul job and I will NEVER buy a house so covered in it again!!!

However it is keeping us occupied in this lockdown period - I am still suffering from lost mojo for the more creative projects so a practical task is the next best thing..... I'm not really patient enough for all this prepping malarkey but I do know that it needs to be done and believe me I'm only doing it once so it needs to be done right!

We have spent over a week engaged in the thankless task of clearing the paper from the hallway - it feels like three months but its done and its job well done as its a task I have been dreading ever since we moved in. Some of it came off in massive satisfying strips but for every big piece there were a million wee nasty scrappy bits that took forever scoring wetting scrapping and scrubbing....I don't think it helps that we haven't got a coherent plan or idea about what we want to do with the decor once we clear the hideous blown dirty cream paper off - I've been on Pinterest for inspiration but most peoples hallways are pretty boring and that wont do for us! Everything is very clean cut and bit too shiny for me although I do like these dark brooding colours they will be too dark for this space.

upstairs downstairs..

Our hallway is an interesting space - its quite big and has some of the original Victorian features - (sadly not the floor tiles) and its other disadvantage is that its not really our main point of entry. The house is kind of back to front with no road so only a path leading to the 'front' door and porch - most visitors arrive at the back door and enter the house through the kitchen so the hall only becomes apparent when you leave the kitchen for the rest of the house. We haven't had a house with a proper entrance for a long time - our previous 3 (rented) dwellings have all been small cottages - with entry straight into the living area and I have to say while this a cosy arrangement it is very nice it is quite a luxury to have a hallway space again. But how to dress it to get the right reception!!! A big win will be the removal of the pink carpet - but we figured keep it for warmth while winter is with us.

Privileged problems I know - and I realise how lucky we are to have this dilemma especially as we are in lockdown - were we still living in the village of the doomed we would have gone seriously bonkers with nothing to occupy ourselves with no lush garden to enjoy and so really the anaglypta is worth the trade off...... but its now ready for the enjoyable bit - no pain no gain and less sense of achievement! That's my pep talk for today!!!

When the paper came off it left an interesting pattern both on the removed paper and in some places, the wall itself - if the pattern on the wall was more uniform I would kind of like to live with it and even the less uniform bits where the original possibly Victorian wallpaper is left are interesting but a lot of the wall has been butchered and re plastered to put electrics and a new window in so I don't think it something we can make a feature of...

if it was all like the left hand side I'd keep it!

Alesund

Our final destination stop was Alesund. This is a very pretty town in southern Norway built on a peninsula. All the houses are painted pretty colours and a lot of the architecture is all very Art Nouveau based. This is because the town itself was completely burnt to the ground In 1904 by a fire for which they never found the original cause. The whole town had to be rebuilt and this became a huge National Effort and a lot of prominent and up and coming architects flocked to the town to stick there 20 pence in. Consequently the town is very heavily Art Nouveau which was very fashionable at the time. There is this wonderful Museum just off the harbour which is a very beautiful Art Nouveau house. It has amazing panelling, doors, wallpaper, and it's all furnished with beautiful art Nouveau Furniture. It also house a collection of of enameled Art Nouveau Trinkets,boxes, spoons, jewellery, very very beautiful. There is an interesting collection of old books and paintings a...

The Blue Dot

Excellent evening spent at the first Blue Dot festival held at Jodrell Bank. Clever use of the radio telescope as back drop for the main stage... there were some major teething issues which hopefully will addressed if this event happens again - mainly access and parking.. it was a nightmare approach to the festival and fortunately as we were only doing one night we decided to ditch the car and chose to walk the last mile and half into the site... what a relief as if we had queued we would most certainly missed Public Service Broadcasting which was one of the reasons we were going.. anyway we caught them and then enjoyed fantastic set by Underworld - danced much of the night away in the rain - my trusty solfest poncho almost kept me dry.. it was a splendid evening and the telescope looked brilliant when lit up when it got dark. There was a rather fab "installation" called a luminarium, lack of site information - another hiccup meant we were really lucky to catch it just ...

Goodbye Dissertation!!!

The dissertation is finished... it took me ages to do all the detail stuff Harvard referencing ect... the simplest tasks were starting to drive me mad!! I cant believe how long it took me to work out how to number pages excluding the first two pages aagghhhh... I suppose I should be grateful that its not like the olden days where you had to get it typed and bound before hand in - this essay has been a hard slog, a subject which I felt was interesting - how the digital explosion is ruining traditional creative methods turned into a fairly unexciting - pretty boring unexceptional topic! there will never be a next time but my advice is think of something funky - does Danny Boyle like garden Gnomes - Racoon meets Lady Gaga - anything that might surprise you but not too grown up!! I have worked hard and will be rewarded with a mid grade because there is no passion in this essay - the hard slog is evident as is the lack of enthusiasm - C'est la vie you cant win them all....

Planet Ruby Starrs

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