Design

I have been sitting here on the taxi rank poring through pages and pages of pictures of beautiful places on my computer. 

I do not mean naturally beautiful places. If I wanted to see those I only need to look out of the window, being in the Lake District. I am not short of vistas packed with mighty oak trees and chuckling becks and haywains if that was my concern.

Actually we don’t really have haywains. It might be a tourist area but we still have round bales and silage just like everybody else.

I am looking at pictures of beautiful rooms.

This is because I want to create one of my own.

This week I am going to paint our new living room, and it is a matter of very grave concern.

I am looking really hard at lots of rooms that I think are very beautiful indeed to see what the designers have done and how they have done it.

Most of them are in the Disneyland Hotel, or in similar architectural extravagances all over the place.

This is not because it is the Disneyland Hotel. I would sooner eat my own paintbrush than fill my house with images of Mickey Mouse. It is because I am constantly awed by the designers’ use of colours and curves. I once listened to an interview with one of Disney’s designers, who said that he had eighty four shades of white paint in his palette, and that it was important to get exactly the right one.

There are some wonderful, beautiful rooms.

Right at the moment I have got no expectation whatsoever that we will ever be able to go anywhere beautiful ever again, apart from perhaps Blackpool occasionally, and so I am looking very hard to see what I love best, so that I can make one of my own.

It will need to be a colour scheme that will complement and enhance our beautiful raspberry pink sofa. I am going to paint stripes.

They will not be circus tent stripes this time. They will be birthday present wrapping paper stripes.

They will be pink and pale blue and cream and gold.

I do not think Disneyland has decorated any rooms like the inside of a birthday present, and I am mildly concerned about this, but nevertheless I think I am going to proceed anyway.

It was another very short day, and quite a bit of it was taken up with emptying dogs, but after that I started painting PVA on to the newly plastered walls.

I could do this because today we discovered it in Mark’s shed, which really he needs to tidy up a bit.

I mixed a load of it with water and sloshed it on.

It is quite difficult to spread on the plaster of Paris stuff, but once it is on it works very well, a bit like a glaze. It will stop damp marks and stains seeping through from underneath.

I have not nearly finished because of coming out to work, actually I think probably I have done about a quarter. Also there were quite a few bits that I couldn’t reach even when I stood on the stool. We don’t have a stepladder so tomorrow I shall try standing the stool on top of a box. It is quite a long way up so it might need to be a couple of boxes.

If there are no diary entries tomorrow night you will know what has happened.

Mark has occupied his day sanding the dresser.

You will recall that we have done this once before.

We sanded it and oiled it and then I looked at it and decided that it was still too dark.

I wanted it to be a nice light oaky honey colour, and it wasn’t.

I knew really that I ought to sand it myself, because Mark has got quite enough to do as it is, but I didn’t.

I made sandwiches whilst he sanded it.

It did not sand very easily because it has been oiled, but when he had finished it looked beautiful. It was silky-smooth to the touch, and a beautiful warm milky-coffee colour.

  It is going to look absolutely beautiful in our beautiful new room.