Perfect For The Kitchen

Today we picked up 4 chairs for our breakfast bar.  A friend was selling them since she is moving house and they are not the right style for their new home.

The are perfect for ours and the fabric even matches with colours in the benchtop.

Our previous ones were black vinyl ones on a chrome base.  They had an adjustable height but 2 of them have lost the gas in the adjuster.  They will probably go on Freecycle.  The other 2 have gone to Belle who has just moved and has a small breakfast bar so they will be perfect for her children.

We have spent the weekend helping her to move house and also sort out and declutter lots of ‘stuff’.  Things are looking much clearer and more streamlined and I know she is happy with the result.

As well as giving our stools to Belle, we have brought some things home that are useful to us.  One is the lawnmower, which originally belonged to my mother but was no longer required when she moved into a unit.  Now Belle has moved into a townhouse and is no longer responsible for the garden maintenance so the mower can now replace ours which recently died.

With family at all different ages and stages of life we often find that furniture or other items that are no longer required can be passed on to another family member.

New From Old

A couple of weeks ago, in this post I outlined what I was planning to do to rejuvenate an old bed.

Firstly, I covered the mattress in plastic, using one of the heavy-duty bags that was packaging from the new mattresses.

I stitched it to fit using my sewing machine.  It was a bit awkward but I was happy with the result.  Here is a close-up of the stitching.

Then I trimmed the excess plastic and set to making the fabric cover.  I made it so that it fitted neatly and at the open end I made a velcro fastening.

Here it is on the bed and you can see the straps which go underneath to secure it.  I don’t want to find the mattress at the other end of the verandah after we have a storm.

The straps are elasticated so that they easily slip over the ends of the frame and hold the mattress snugly in position.

All I need now is some nice warm days to invite me out to use my new creation.

Minimise For Multipurpose

I know that keeping our stuff to a minimum and simplifying as much as we can is a good thing but sometimes it is difficult to articulate why this is the case.  It is not until something occurs that we are reminded of just how useful it is to live with less.

Last weekend we had 20 guests for a BBQ lunch on the verandah.  About an hour before they arrived, The Duke announced that we could use the folding table as well.  This happens to be my sewing table and it was far from perfectly tidy.

I quickly tossed a few pieces of fabric and UFO’s on the spare bed and almost instantly we had an extra table for our entertaining.  Even though I had to move a few things it was no real imposition.  It makes sense that this table is being used almost every day rather than being folded up and gathering dust, waiting to be used once or twice per year.

This is the spare bed with everything that was on the sewing table.

The BBQ is over and the table is back in the room.  Everything is still on the bed as I am going to take this opportunity to sort out a few more things and find proper homes for them.  The table is pretty well bare at the moment apart from my sewing machine.

I will have to get the sorting done before Saturday afternoon when Miss O and Izz come to stay the night as this is the single bed and trundle bed that they use.

Make Do

Last year we swapped the single bed in the sewing room for a new (to us) bed and trundle bed.  Miss O used to sleep in the single bed when she came to stay but once Izz was also sleeping in a bed we had to re-think the sleeping arrangements.  I was not prepared to give up what is primarily my sewing room to have 2 single beds available for occasional use so I had to think laterally.  Bunk beds were not an option due the young age of the children and the proximity to the window, so we opted for the single bed plus trundle.  We found it on Gumtree, in perfect condition and only $50.  We bought new foam mattresses and were very happy with the outcome.

The next question was what to do with the existing bed.  No-one I knew needed one and I could have advertised it on Freecycle but there was a degree of emotional attachment.  Sentimentality is the last thing a minimalist needs but this bed is one that my father made over 50 years ago and I was not keen to let it go.  However, it had to justify its existence in our lives.

We had an old day-bed which we had acquired from Freecycle about 10 years ago with the goal of restoring it for use on the long verandah – imagining lazy afternoons lying reading a book and listening to the birds in the shrubs nearby.  This was a great idea but one that was unlikely to happen due to the very poor condition of the timber.

Finally, we agreed that the day-bed could be dismantled for firewood except for the wire mesh base which The Duke has appropriated for use as a sieve.  The single bed which is quite narrow (750mm) will be a day bed.  It has been on the verandah for some months now, waiting for me to make a cover for the mattress.  Although it is undercover there can be rain blow in to that area so I had to consider how to manage this.

I decided to cover the mattress in vinyl which can be bought by the metre from Spotlight.  A few weeks ago I did some measuring and we went to Spotlight with intentions of buying the vinyl but I discovered that it would cost me about $120.  I gulped and wondered whether it was really worth spending that amount of money on something which was certainly not essential and was really a way of retaining something I did not want to part with.  So we went home and I looked for alternative ideas.

I found this heavy cotton bedspread (actually I have 2 of them) in the bottom of the linen cupboard.  I am going to use it to make a cover which can be removed for laundering.  This does not address the issue of the mattress getting wet so I found the large, heavy-duty plastic bags that were the packaging from the new mattresses we bought for the trundle beds.  I will make a cover for the mattress from one of these.  We will bring the mattress inside if bad weather is imminent but otherwise I will only have to wash the cover and the mattress will stay dry and clean thanks to the plastic cover.

This project will be completed with no extra cost.  The bed will have a new use and I don’t have to part with it just yet.  We may even put a headboard and footboard on the bed but in the meantime it will be perfectly functional.

I am looking forward to finishing this and enjoying some lazy afternoons.

Repaired and Refreshed

Today we did not need to go anywhere so The Duke and I spent the day working on various projects around the house.

I mended a pair of The Duke’s jeans which were starting to look a bit threadbare but he had declared that they would be OK for working around the yard.

I used some double-sided iron-on backing which is normally used for applique work.

I ironed a piece of this to the wrong side of the jeans where they were very worn and then added a piece of strong, black cotton fabric.

Using a zig-zag stitch I overstitched the torn areas and around the entire patch.  Here it is from the wrong side.

And the final view from the right side.  Very classy for wearing at home!

I also reassembled the newly-painted chest of drawers and mirror and here they are in the corner of the sewing room.

I lined the drawers with some used gift-wrapping paper and have sorted out some more fabric which will be stored in them.  I am gradually making progress with the sewing room decluttering.