Ever wanted to pressure wash the banking system…..

Back before the big crash, I transferred some property mortgages to the Heritable Bank Plc, a 132 year old Scottish incorporated Bank which had “a long tradition of providing specialist finance solutions to companies and individuals in the UK” and which had been bought by Icelandic bank Landsbanki in 2000. You used to go with who you trusted in banking, to secure the long term success and stability of your business and Heritable seemed like a good business to trust, long history and all that. Yes, yes, we all know better now. In October 2008, Heritable went into administration, due to the massive over extension of the Icelandic banking system and collapse of parent company Landsbanki. DOH.

There’s been an in limbo period of almost five years where I’ve been paying monthly ‘as per usual’ to administrators but nothing else has happened. I’ve written to them to try and redeem the loan by funding with another lender but was ignored. Then today I get a letter telling me that there has been “a change in your mortgage account” and that the mortgage has been “assigned to Mars Capital Finance Ltd”. So I go on line to look for them and the web-site doesn’t work. So I call the Heritable Bank (in administration) number for information and Mars Capital Finance Ltd answer, but moreorless refuse to give me any information about themselves, e.g. who they are, are they a British company, how long they’ve been trading, etc.

Completely bizarre and not just a little disconcerting. What a strange world we live in where people’s lives and livelihoods get transferred willy nilly across companies and you end up dealing with a business about whom you know and are apparently allowed to know absolutely nothing. But it’s ok, because, as the boy from Mars Capital Finance Ltd said, it’s “all in the terms and conditions”……. I honestly don’t think he could comprehend why I would want to know who it was I was now going to be doing a considerable amount of business with, or more precisely paying a considerable amount of money to.

If I had my way they’d all be hosed down with a high pressure jet wash to wash the bullsh*t away and then we’d all start over again doing banking the proper, old fashioned way. Well, a girl can daydream, can’t she……

PULSE 2013: A homeware trend for neon lights and brights

Are you ready for a POP of neon brights in your home and giftware for 2013 & 14, ’cause that’s what’s coming!

Spotted at Pulse 2013, here are my favourite products which captured the trend for eye-wateringly bright splashes of colour. They do say interior design follows fashion and as the 80′s have definitely been on radar on the fashion front, it was only a matter of time before they leapt into our homes

Featured: Urban Bird, La Cerise Sur Le Gateau, Beulah Home, Quirk and Rescue, Under Cover, This Is A Limited Edition

Bridal Veil Spiraea, a dovecote and bee friendly planting

Another beautiful Spring weekend meant some more external taming of the very unkempt Moregeous Mansions. We’re lucky to have a big garden, but it needs an awful lot of tlc so has been a work in progress for quite some time. Much of the planting I’ve done is designed to attract bees and butterflies and this is SO easy now clever retailers have taken to using whopping great BEE FRIENDLY labelling, like the ones at the lovely garden centre in Posh Prestbury I popped into this weekend. Newly planted just a few hours later were some pretty but hardy Scabious Butterfly Blue and two colour Muscari pictured above, and also a shrub I’d not seen at my local plant haunts before, Spiraea Arguta or Bridal Wreath. How pretty is it? I think it gives a gorgeous backdrop to my purple Snake’s Head Fritillary and vivid green parsley for summer cooking

Further inspiration came from a cute little pine restoration place in Poynton – handles galore and I now want a dovecote….

How to build and plant a reclaimed brick raised bed with Springtime purples, yellows & whites

Raised bed with Marguerite Daisy trees, French lavender and gold edge thyme

Mr M and I were away working in Spring 2012, missing out on Springtime in our garden, so it’s been just lovely this week to have some Easter sunshine to get my bulb burying & planting kick-started. We STILL haven’t got round to renovating our house and it takes my mind off the interior by concentrating on at least some nice exterior areas to look at! All of our outside path needs replacing but there’s no point doing it ’til inside is done  - Catch22 – however inspired by the beautiful show gardens at the Ideal Home Show the other week, I got a bee in my bonnet about a raised bed on the entrance path….. cue Mr M being roped in on a sunny Saturday to dig me a trench and build me a wall whilst I cleared another bit of the garden. He knows how to keep a girl happy

We did a B&Q run for plants….

…and then watched closely by the gaffer:

…we got started. Do ignore that awful drainpipe, which I HATE and is going very soon! Mr M broke up the knackered path to a width of about two bricks from the wall which gave some depth to the planting. We had some reclaimed bricks saved from another job, perfect for building the new wall. I ran damp proof membrane material (the black stuff you can see on the wall) between the house external wall and the soil inside the raised bed to prevent moisture damage on the bricks from wet earth.

Here below you can see the membrane more clearly. I didn’t bother fixing it to the wall as the soil holds it in place. As I was planting lavender and thyme, both of which adore & need good drainage, I used gravel as a base under the peat free soil to stop the roots getting water-logged. I was so sick of losing thyme plants that I did this last year in one of the communal rental gardens and just sat some thyme on two inches of gravel, then soil around. It grew all through the winter & is still flourishing #toptip. Fingers crossed it works in my garden too I want purple, white and yellow flowering in the garden so opted for:

• Marguerite daisy mini-trees which flower May to September
• French lavender (stoechas) with its large butterfly type flowers
• Pretty daisy like Bellis White which should flower til June
• Neon Violet Polyanthus for a bit of height
• Golden edge thyme for it’s gorgeous smell and my cooking!

Raised bed with reclaimed brick wall, Marguerite trees, lavender and thyme

Delighted with it! Ok, that’s 7% of the garden done, just the other 93% and the whole house to do next.

Teapot fizz, a Passion For Homes & a Pitfield cockatoo

Life so far in 2013 has been a whirlwind of industrial glam, swimming pools and a flurry of tenants in & out… with little time for anything else! It’s all calming down now – the madness of moving season is abating, the Baths tsunami has settled into a gentle wave and Project Rivet is complete… so I can finally get a bit of blogging done! I have such good intentions every week, then time just slips away. Must. try. harder.

Thought I’d share some images from a lovely London launch Mr M and I went to for A Passion For Homes, a web-site wholly devoted to amazing, dream homes & all things property, and borne from Andrea & Jo’s complete obsession for houses – two women after my own heart. Fab to meet @SpaceAlchemist, @rightmove & @WhatSamSawToday too and highly amusing to watch Mr M being poured fizz from a china tea pot

The launch was held in a really interesting space, sort of part commercial, part residential, and attached to a real renovation project. Best of all, we could have a snoop round the owners house #bonus. Lots of brick, original features, exposed beams and interesting interior design. I especially liked the indoor swing and the stitch detailing on the sofa arms but I’m a bit upholstery obsessed at the mo, as you know.

After that it was a quick scoot over to the fabulous Pitfield for drinks and a catch up with the Designersblock boys. Back at Interiors UK in January I’d spotted some cool looking Cockatoos but couldn’t carry yet another bag…

So I was delighted to see them in the Pitfield shop and snaffled one for Moregeous mansions. I love him! He’s now perched on my mantelpiece in the bedroom Thought it was a bit much to go for the giant golden squid…. but I definitely want a Lauren Baker skull at some point soon too.

How to make a landlord’s day with the perfect thank you card

Sometimes being a landlord is a bit of a thankless task: endless hours of boring as hell paperwork, fighting with the bank, viewings in the rain, cleaning dirty toilets…. you get the picture. But of course, no-one ever feels sorry for landlords as we have single-handedly ruined the economy with buy-to-lets, terrorise people with our Rachman like methods and live lives of luxury driving round in huge 4x4s spending willy-nilly the cash rents we extort from our brutalised tenants in their squalid, cockroach infested tenements. Landlords eh. Bastards.

Only, it’s not always like that. As this lovely Lovely LOVELY thank you card I opened today proved. It warmed the cockles of my heart on this cold March afternoon and will make me smile all day. It made me proud of what we try to do and the homes we try to create for our tenants. It made it worth it

 

How to re-upholster an old Parker Knoll wingback chair

I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone claimed my newly upholstered Parker Knoll – now named Mr Portier – but I thought it’d be Mr M, not her nibs! That didn’t take long #fiveminutes

All finished now and I’m so happy with my first ever wingback chair, freshly painted, waxed and upholstered. It’s taken me about two months all in, but that’s only a couple of hours every Monday so not bad really. I LOVE IT!! Everything from the floral silk called Portier in Willow, to the deep charcoal Castellani fabric in Graphite, the lavender Emile over grey Graphite Chalk Paint to the antique gold upholstery tacks found on Ebay.

If you love the shape of a chair or piece of furniture, don’t be put off by the existing fabric or colour of timber – everything can be changed to suit your taste. Just look what Mr Portier looked like when I found it in a scruffy Lancashire second hand shop and believe me, it was very whiffy too!

This is a little visual taster of the steps and processes. First I took him apart, documenting with my phone the stages and how everything fitted together. This was a great tip from my tutor, because then, when you’re putting your chair back together, you don’t get the stages mixed up or in the wrong order whilst you’re still learning. It was fascinating peeling back the layers and seeing how the chair was originally made.

Then I put him back together again, with a LOT of help from Andrea at Plush Upholstery… what a patient lady she is. It’s a good job ’cause I’m so determined to do everything myself and such a perfectionist. ‘Sian,’ she’d say calmly, ‘you won’t see that bit’ as I fretted over a loose thread or wonky staple. Don’t even get me started on the air-powered staple gun – I WANT ONE!

I truly didn’t realise the hard work, time and effort which goes into upholstery or re-upholstery It’s such a skill and takes such time, I look at full time artisans from a completely different perspective now. The stages below were just a few of the ones Mr Portier and I went through, along with zillions of staples and much cursing. Let you into a secret though, I didn’t do the seat cushion, I am RUBBISH with a sewing machine. Know thy skillset people and stick to it What do you think, thumbs up or down?

Next project please!