Drawing nearer

Working on the drawing room of Ramsay House. I had decided to add an extra layer to the ceiling trim, I used wood from the blind as usual. This wall is not yet fixed or the top corner finished.

I drilled a hole for the cable for the 'picture light' which I ordered from eBay. I am going to put the ivory miniature under it and a table below.

Here some of the wood is dry fitted before painting.

The extra panels are glued in place and painted up to match. I cut the ceiling panel which will take the ceiling rose and chandelier. There will be another layer of mdf above this on which the next floor will be built. I think that these layers make a good cheap effect to replace pricey plaster trims. I will use some Sue Cook trims in the bedroom above this but not in all rooms and not only for economy, simply because it makes for more variation in the overall build. As many miniaturists know when we want something for our build we tend to find a way even if it means having two or three birthdays in one year!!!!! 

I cannot fix the last wall in place as I have ordered my third pair of overmantle lights from Etsy. I hope that this time I will like them and fix them in place, I am running out of options!

Showing off ! I decided very warilly to test the level of the two opposing walls before setting in the ceiling and what do you know it was perfect ! I was so pleased with myself I had to go make tea and have a lot of cake with strawberry jam on it. 

I realised that I had to fill the bookcase before glueing it in place as afterwards access would be tricky. I fished out my box of first made books, varnished the spines and glued up bundles to squeeze in to shelves. I made the books from a download via Etsy. I filled them will real pages. 

I like this view, it 'almost' reminds me of the Thorne Rooms ! The floor is not yet in place and the ceiling needs the large ceiling rose I bought from Sue Cook some time ago.

The wall colour is still under debate, one of me still lthe pink and the other me is thinking of yellow. Who will win?

The bookcase dry fitted and full of books. The table is an Etsy purchase, not sure if it will be used in the finished room.

A lower view taken from the viewpoint of the dog! The log basket is made from Carved bone, found in a charity shop in Scotland for 1 euro. 

Below, a pair of brass fenders found on eBay some time ago and forgotten in a box. I had remembered them as being too big in scale so unused. 

Turns out they are the right scale and look quite good. 

Miniature heaven

I wanted to do a quick post on Henry ' Hank' Kupjack who I just learnt has died suddenly this year!

Hank was a really well know miniaturist from a family of talented people. 

Eugene Kupjack, Hanks father, had worked on most of the famous Thorne Rooms so the pool of talent was certainly very deep! 

Hank was only 67 !! 

When Eugene died Hank became the principal miniaturist and both their work is in muséums and the collections of many a wealthy patron. 

I so often saw his name in print when admiring amazing miniatures and dreamnt of owning something, a pipe dream now impossible. We have to just love and support all the amazing miniaturists that we still have with us, there are so many. 

For the full article in the Chicago Times, see link. 

https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/2/18/18314021/henry-hank-kupjack-renowned-for-museum-worthy-miniatures-dead-at-67

Up and down and over and under

Since yesterday I have been reading the blog of the amazing David Johnston who has purchased Balintore Castle ( figuring on my last post ) and he explains how he approaches the task and all the items he sources to furnish it. It's a wonderful read. 

On his blog he mentiones this castle called Chateau Miranda in Belgium. It is similar to Balintore Castle being Victorian Gothic and is a gorgeous Chateau or should I say 

WAS 

In October 2017 this happened! Incredible that today we are STILL doing this! The owner had always refused to sel land apparently prefers a field of rubble than a castle albeit in ruin!

They could not even leave the tower as a Landmark! How sad is that! 

Check out the photos of David Baker, gorgeous but sad.

https://www.davidbakerphotography.com/location-history/residential-urban-exploration/the-history-of-chateau-de-noisy-chateau-miranda-belgium

On a lighter note I received my order of silver from the great Stephen J Randall.

When you are a bit down, this happens to everyone, its good to buy some stuff!

I apologise for the dreadful photo, I wanted to show the scale which is of course perfect.

I love these sauce boats !! Such detail.

This is toooooo cute !! with its little wooden handle and removable lid.

I must have at least six pairs of candle sticks but these are my first silver ones. 

He even sent some mini candles ! Wick-ed ! 

I am slightly stuck on my build as my mum is in need of my presence so I am organising a trip to Scotland which wasn't planned, so having friends come to watch the dogs etc has to be done.

I had intended a trip to paris to do medical stuff but that will have to wait until November.

On a really positive note I have just received some great news. 

I told you that I had to move from here after four years of getting the house in order and doing the garden. The reasons are divers but mainly the lack of shops and 'life' in general here .Years ago I had fallen in love with a house in a nearby village and each time I passed it I told people 'that is my house' and one day our antique dealer friend invited us to 'a house' in the village that he was emptying for the family and it was 'my' house ! I was in love with the whole house, the situation, the old fashioned garden the outbuildings, the high ceilings, the black and the white floors. South facing double living room with a french door leading out to the garden that looks onto countryside.

I then spent weeks looking at houses for rent and they were either terribly 'modernised' or way too big or had tiny gardens. I even hesitated on a sixteen roomed chateau with park but it was too much upkeep. So I found out who owned 'my' house and wrote him asking to rent it and he has agreed. 

I don't want to jinx it by talking too much but in short the whole house is to be restored and he has agreed to allow me to talk to the builders to have things done as I would like within budget, how great is that! The work will take all winter, new windows and heating and plumbing. It will be finalised at the end of the month but I have already begun packing boxes! This is going to be my 'last' home as over the years I have lived in 30 different places!    

Here is a sneak peek for now. 

The village has a bakery and tea room and small supermarket full of organic local produce and the entire area is one huge walking area for daily dog outings !! how great is that. 

To top it all the owners are really lovely people to talk with, the house had been designed by his grandfather as was the whole village. the familly live in the old abbey in the village.

When good and bad news come at the same time its hard to focus without guilty feeling on the good stuff but life in general is a mix of sweet and sour, both are neccesary to appreciate the other. 

There are two ways of looking at life, 

' live each day as if it was your last day' 

and 

' live each day as if it was your first day'.

Mega hugs to all my followers and many thanks for your views and comments. 

The Destruction of the Country House.

Something I feel passionate about is the staggering loss of Britains large house since the first world war and up until quite recently. Since 1900 more than 1200 large country house have been destroyed and amongst them some 378 very important ones due to age or their architectural value.

Now many people would say ' but this only concerns the very rich' whereas was are talking about our heritage, our past, the thing we build our future on. One is six country mansions have gone in this period. One of the reasons the owners allowed this is due to inheritance tax or death duty. 

In 1910 it was 15% on taxable assets over 1,000,000 pounds but by 1949 it had gone up to 80% ! Left wing governements saw no reason not to impose this but when both a father and son died, say during the war, the taxes had to be paid twice! This was a period when great paintings and furniture were not fetching the prices they do today so selling off the assets to pay the taxes wasn't an option and institutions like the 'National Trust' either didn't exist as such or would only take on properties with an endowment to sustain them. Owners could just go ahead and demolish their homes, selling off the stone and trims for mere pounds.

In 1994 Sir Roy Strong, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London put on an exibition on ' The Destruction of the Country House', which was not only a brave move but it brought home to visitors just what had been lost of their heritage. Some of the surviving houses pale in comparaison to what was demolished.

I bought this book some time ago, you can still find it for between 60 and 150 pounds on Amazon.

As a teenager I used to play in a huge Georgian mansion near my village called Tarbat House, built in 1787 that had been empty for some time. It is actually grade A listed!  It had a huge hallway with a pair of marble fireplaces opposite each other and the plaster work around the top of the walls depicted stag and boar head in relief. The huge staircase would up to three floors and at its base sat a huge enamelled iron stove used to heat the stairwell. Each floor had suites of rooms behing green baize doors, all very Downton Abbey. The windows were shuttered and huge curtain poles still had their ornate brass rings on them that once held velvet drapes. There was even enormous mahogany wardrobes in the bedrooms, too large to be taken out in one piece. On the top floor there were the servants rooms with their brass beds and small wardrobes still in place. The walls still had their original wallpaper from the late 19th century and there was even some clothes in the cupboards. A small stair led up to the roof from where you could see the whole estate. The kitchens in a separate building still had their huge cast iron ranges and long kitchen tables where food was prepared in the past. This building was linked to the house by a corridor and the reason this was so was in case of fire mainly. 

Across from the house lay a huge walled garden for vegetables and fruit and on each corner was a pavillion in divers styles. One such building was Chinese in style and held the laundry and another was a thatched cottage for the gardener. This area was severly neglected and overgrown but there was still a lot of fruit trees.  The rododenrons were ten metres high and gorgeous.

I went back some years later to see that the lead roof had been stripped off and the stove and wardrobes and kitchen fitting had been stolen. the rain did it's best to rot the wonderful wood floors and slowly it fell in until some idiot decided to set it on fire. Today it is still standing and clad in ivy and on the 'Buildings at Risk register'. 

Below is Tarbat house as it was and Following the state it fell into.

This was how I last saw it.

I had not the courage to go back and see this terrible site.

I will add here a strange coincidence. On my recent flight to Scotland I sat next to a piano teacher who was going to the Ullapool to give a concert and when I said where I was from she said ' oh my nephew has a property near there'. OK what are the odds ! Yes it was Tabart House. Years of asking who owned it and there was the answer. She said that he had turned the kitchen quarters into a house, keeping the full ceiling hight so maybe he has some good taste but the house itself he cannot afford to restore, much is the pity. I used to fantasise as a kid that one day I would own it and restore it but the sheer cost in today's money would make that impossible.

Below is Rosehaugh House that stood near my home and was a most impressive house. It was demolished in 1959, the huge tower was the last to go and schoolchildren were invited to Watch.

A picture of its final days. Today it hardly seems possible especially when we know how much it costs to actually build in stone and have woodwork done specifically.

Here is Balintore Castle Scotland still standing and in the process of restoration by a lovely enthousiastic young man called David. You can follow his amazing Journey on his blog.

https://balintorecastle.blogspot.com/

Below are some of the lost houses that figure in the book, all gone now.

The house below is absolutely vaste but that didn't save it from demolition. Some of these houses had up to 400 doors alone! One such house so resisted demolition that they had to dynamite it.

Some links.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_country_houses_in_20th-century_Britain

http://www.lostheritage.org.uk/index.html

Riding the wave.

I had wanted to do the parquet in one day, a long day but in hindsite not the best idea.

You may think that this looks quite good but below you can see my boobies!

I cut all the pieces on my Proxon table saw after many attempts to get the size right for both pieces.

Another dry fit to trim the half millimetres here and there.

When it was all done I went over and filled in the gaps with slivers of wood, painstaking but worth it and better than wood filler.

These close ups don't do me any favours! 

Before and after.

Now this is the reason why I said that doing it in one day was not a great idea. I had laid out a 2 cm grid to keep me parallel in both directions but for some reason at this area it just went OFF! Yikes.

I chose to finish all the areas around this one and get back to it later. I had to cut a few pieces to fit and just accept that parquet floors are not perfect in any house and besides what are rugs for!

I hesitated over the best way to do this junction and finally went with small strips, Don't sweat the stuff that will not be seen folks.

I might glue in a small strip of brass for effect later.

It's a very basic pattern finally after much research concerning parquet design.

Another little gap, I will stain the area around the edge of the base mdf before fixing the floor so that any gap will be the same colour as the floor.

After staining, it looks rather red and will affect my final colour choice for the walls. I had intended on faded pink but I will have to do more tests. 

Here it doesn't look so red, it's more like the above photo in reality.

Now onto finishing the cornicing around the ceiling and cutting out the ceiling board on which I will glue the ceiling rose and then the final floor board in mdf on which the room above will be built. The gap between both will hold several wires. I have just sourced a 'picture light' in the UK to put on the left wall over the miniature picture I bought previously so that has to be calculated and a hole drilled.

I have once more changed my mind for the over mantle lights and until they are chosen I need to keep access to the room and not glue in the side wall. 

Glueing on the finished floor will need a lot of moral strength and maybe some alcohol but I don't drink more the pity. 

I will pre glue the mdf base and let it dry then glue the card and quickly weight down as much as I can, I think the best way is large pieces of scrap mdf over the floor then weights rather than just weights. The pre glueing will give it something to 'bite' on and stop one side sucking up the water in the glue too quickly, I will keep you posted, off to look out some vodka!