Our home is not quite right. While we love the Modern Rustic style and produce furniture and items that have the look, our home hasn’t changed much since we moved in a few years ago.
We have decided to re-arrange things and transform what is an untidy guest and sleep-over room into a beautiful and stylish Modern Rustic bedroom. Why not keep track of the steps we take and the changes we make by signing up for our monthly newsletter.
If you too love Modern Rustic and like what we have done, then hopefully this blog will act as a handy guide with all the links to Estuary Home products in once place.
We have completed sanding the floor and woodwork in the room, but if we thought that was the end of it, Nic has had a bright idea and the original banister rails are being replaced by scaffold board bookcases. Inspired by Elephant Buffet's blog post 'How to keep from falling down a staircase', we're starting off in a similar manner but with some differences in the construction to keep it simple, rustic and thoroughly modern with straight lines and clean corners.
[caption id="attachment_1342" align="aligncenter" width="630"] The staircase opening to our modern rustic (to be) bedroom with the original banister rails[/caption]
Our starting
Unlike President Nixon's first speech to the nation on April 30th 1973 during the Watergate scandal when he proclaimed "there can be no Whitewash at the White House" there is definitely whitewash at our house.
Having looked up the recipe for making whitewash with hydrated lime (thanks YouTube) and fortunately having a huge sack of it for making cement ring cones and other such concrete niceties (available through our Esty shop once we have the finish we're after) we've slapped on the first coat. As we have blogged before, it would have been great to have kept the bare brick and
With all the sanding that we've been doing, I'm amazed we haven't produced our very own dunes. Enough-was-enough and we gave-up on our own elbow-grease and hired in 'The Machine'. This was just a standard floor sander, but the 24 grade paper attached, it tore through the varnish and stained floorboards in no time.
Needless to say, the bulk of the floor sanding is now done. Maybe we should have hired an edging sander too but even using the 24 grade sandpaper and working by hand, it is very effective so we've pushing round the edge with this. The drop in
Marathon runners describe the feeling that comes, usually after 20-or-so miles of running, when they feel beaten, spent and unable to take another step as 'The Wall'. In some ways, our attempts so far to prepare the wall in our Modern Rustic room have felt much the same, with progress grinding to a halt having completed most of the work.
However, the summer holidays and we've found some time to get back and face another round of scaping, hammering and generally clawing at the paint and discoloured coverings. Initially, we did think that if we could get back to clean brick,
This is paint, but not as we know it.
There is nothing like a bare brick wall to make for getting a rustic/industrial look. We think our room needs this and so Nic has been scraping the plastic-based sealant paint from the brickwork, painted on by the previous home-owners. It looks like white emulsion but is waterproof and where we've removed it, the wall is starting to drying out.
Keeping an old house warm and dry does take some thought, but having lived in a few Victorian/Edwardian houses it seems that any attempt to seal the property from damp and draughts results
We finally managed to find some time to tackle our soon-to-be bedroom. We have plenty of paper shredding to do!
A manageable amount of clearing still remains but now we can realistically start to get excited about taking a wire brush to the wall. We're pretty sure the sappy discolouration is due to the wood burning stove in the living room below. I'm not sure yet what the outcome will be but we're not looking for a perfect plastered look!
The heater is going to need moving and replacing before we start on the wall. So there are some decisions to made
We're getting started on the room and the first task is to make some space. The idea was to have a good tidy before we last moved but many of the magazines, books and knick-knacks came with us and have sat patiently on shelves and bookcases ever since.
So nothing intricate, involved or complicated at this stage. Just bagging, recycling, selling and giving away. The plan is to keep as much we can out of the waste-stream and re-use it in Estuary Home products. We've sorted some paper and card to be used for packing our online orders but the old
