Furniture.

This is the chest of drawers that I painted yesterday. It was only today that I remembered its history. We've had this chest of drawers all our married life. In our rented flat it lived in our wardrobe alcove behind a white curtain. Then we bought a house and started a family. The chest was painted white and put in the baby's room as it was the perfect size for a changing unit. The top is exactly the same size as a baby changing mat, it was nice and steady and the drawers were very useful. Funny to think that all 3 of my big strapping lads have lain there waving their little legs in the air! When we moved here 18 years ago the drawers went back into another wardrobe alcove this time behind a cream curtain. That is until I decided to keep my clothes in large clear plastic boxes with lids. Then it was time to send the drawers to the spare room and this good weather gave me the chance to spruce them up with a lick of paint. The chest of drawers would have originally come from a London junk shop (second-hand furniture and household items often from house clearances).

In this house, apart from the beds, none of the furniture has ever been bought new. In London my mother had a route that she often walked that took in at least half a dozen junk shops. She greatly enjoyed looking for furniture that could be restored and for antiques hidden amongst the dross. This is where the 'antique shop' dealers would come and look for treasure too. Many specialised in buying old pine furniture which they stripped and waxed and resold. Some of my mother's better pieces of furniture, which we now have, came from these shops. When we moved here we would go to farm auctions and the local weekly auction in town for furniture that we needed and then of course came the Internet and eBay. The only other furniture we bought new was a set of chrome and glass coffee tables which have long since fallen apart and been thrown out.

Today I finally came to the end of stone scrubbing, well almost. This is a 'before' view of the raised bed under the sitting room window.......

...and this is the 'after' view. There are still some big stones left to clean and really the brick wall could do with a going over by a pressure washer. In this damp climate the stones get covered not only with green algae but with black and grey algae/lichen ? that makes them look very dirty and unattractive. It was worth all the hard work to see the stones in their natural colours once more.

And then even when it is wet I will have this view to look at through the kitchen window.

PS We didn't get any rain but the sun did not appear until the afternoon where it dodged in and out of the clouds so that one moment it was roasting and the next quite cool.

WARNING Anyone with an i-phone that uses Apple software is being tracked 24 hours a day. Apple are storing this data and refusing to say exactly what they are doing with it - selling it seems the likeliest option. Thank goodness I only have the cheapest most basic pay-as-you-go phone.