One of the many delights of having relatives who live out in the deepest countryside is having a constant array of different walks literally on the door step. There is an inbuilt ability to enjoy the countryside and everything it has to show us – an inexhaustable supply of enthusiastic walkers to fulfill the dream too. One little village I am closely connected with has a self promoting country farm shop and it does absolutely everything you can imagine. Firstly of course it has a good range of vegetables and fruit for sale. There’s been a farm shop on site decades and over the years it’s expanded to now include cuntry living stylised crockery and kitchenalia as well as furniure, especially oak. here’s also a shabby chic and faux antique furniture outlet. The most recent addition to the group activities has been a fantastic food hall that was attached to the existing veg shop. This emporium is so popular with its own bread ovens, charcutier and an epicure that attracts folk from many miles circumfrence and the atmosphere on a hectic Sunday is wonderful!
Category: Oak Furniture
Smart Garden & Country Set In Unison
It’s a wonderful thing to be able to visit someone who lives in deep countryside. Views of rolling hills from every window, a few groups of trees over the horizon and maybe a lake or two in the immediate garden periphary. There’s one particular house that I have dealings with on a regular basis. It’s atually a Hall, so bigger than a mansion house but not a palace. Each window at the back overlooks the very fine landscaped grounds which are as wide and expansive. Through the coppice of trees to the right there are the tops of pavillions left from the days of tennis and croquet parties in the 1920s. In the actual garden itself, there are now tables and chairs for the tea room customers and aside these is the ‘bullring’. Not what it sounds. It’s in fact a very large circular lawn surrounded by an attractive pebble and gravel drive. Very impressive on Open Days when guests of note are allowed to park around the edge of the lawn – so long as everyone parks in the same direction and doesn’t have an old banger!
Car Booting Is Not How To Acquire Decent Antiques
I do have a joy these days of watching the tv programmes that feature auctions or at least valuations of furniture and effects that could be offered for sale at them. There’s something rather sad seeing a family taking their heirlooms to the expert – either we already like the party and have some empathy for them. . Or we’ve found them truly annoying and are quite pleased when the expert questions the provenance of the article, not rediculing it, but gently letting them down with a more likely scenario, whilst hacking several hundred off the anticipated value. If we want to buy antique furniture for ourselves, it is always advisable to do a great eal of research and to buy from reputable dealers and auction houses. The car boot sale and pop up ‘one day only’ sales are always going to be suspect. Stolen items can be disposed of this way – although many of the purloined beauties are stolen to order and shipped abroad immediately, there are outlets for other lucky acquisitions.
Mellow Months Ideal For Antique Shop Sortis
Ah the sheer joy of September, after the first full week, that is. The youngster have all started, or gone back to school an the university students are making their final preparations for the ‘off’. There is much more time and space everywhere. The old towns, particularly in the tourist spots, have seen their influx of visitors go back to whence they came; the chip papers and rubbish has been collected and dispersed to the dump. Now these little towns can sit back with a sigh and get on with every day living! I love the mellowness, when I can visit my favourite places – auction houses and genuine antique emporiums. always on the lookout for beautiful quality furniture, wooden accessories and anything with a bit of history to it. I love the smell, the feeling of old age in the second hand and antique shops. Nothing beats that old beeswax smell!
Summer Holidays Incorporate Historic House Rambles
At least in the summer months, July and August for example, the weather can usually be relied upon to keep us calm, keep us warm, and most of all, keep us from going batty with mud an wet weather gear keeping everything nicely damp! I love going off for a good poke around a country house – now that I have a little more time to myself, I have taken out membership of three of the major heritage charities and enjoy nothing better than planning a sorti to one or two properties wherever I happen to be in the country. The membership is useful also when I’m travelling around and want to stop off for a nice, relaxed, quality cuppa – the car parks are always free to members and the tea shops are absolutely top notch! This reflects the quality of the furniture inside most of them too – such history and feeling of belonging!
Oak Furniture – It’s Been There Forever
Oak furniture is one of those phrases that for some, will conjur up visions of grandmothers and their pristine ‘front parlour’, smelling of beeswax & lavender. For others it will mean wandering around tagging on to mum or dad’s hand whilst they go round stuffy historic houses. However for a very pleasing number of younger families, the phrase is again the by-word for excellent quality, beautiful finish, versatile uses and something worth paying for and cherishing for ever! As borne out by the previous examples, although we don’t recognise or appreciate the reasons why oak is revered amongst woods, when we look back to childhood and late teens, we do have many examples of how it has been the mainstay of country furniture over centuries. Trestle tables, high backed testers, church furnishings, baronial castles, modern town house dining suites, and everything else between. We will have used this amazing commodity in every stage of our lives and will always do so.
Appreciating The Craftsmanship Available Today
There’s a programme on tv that everybody seems to like – one where we see experts repairing much loved heirlooms and that aged relatives have been hanging on to for years. I particularly like the clock repairs – the chap is a real expert and expalins very clearly what he thinks is wrong with the thing at the start of the show. Obviously the researchers have gone through everything first with a fine tooth comb to ensure that each piece offers enough work to keep it viable for a third of a programme – the amount of film ending up on the cutting room floor must be heartbreaking! There’s also a really fantastic ceramics expert who seems able to put back together the most incredible mish mash of chipped and broken collectables. I remmeber also a fantastic job was carried out on a very old rocking horse – the leather expert really made an outstanding job of a seriously battered saddle – other colleagues were brought in to deal with the mane and tail. It’s heartening to know we have real expertise in this country – a real morale booster in these very challenging times.
Perfection – Country Living With Market Town Nearby
We are all used to living at an incredibly fast pace as a rule. When there are not lockdown restrictions in place to combat viruses and other pandemics of course. Most families still tend to follow the regular 5 day week with 2 family days off together and on those 2 special days there’s the shopping, cleaning and hobbies to fit in! One of the benefits of an almost country living is the chance to really take in the beauty of the local surroundings, be that farm land or hills and dales, whilst still having the avantage of a local market town for the supplies and social life. When we look at the hundreds of escaping to countryside programmes on the well known tv series, the majority of candidates are looking for a ‘country cottage with character’. They usually demand a fantastic sized kitchen – normally anything less than the footprint of a small bungalow will be considered far too small – the host of the show has to drag the expectations back down to reality – the secret being in the name – country cottage!
Knowing Your Antiques Before Feeding With Oil
For some reason my brain always associates country living with large farmhouse style homes filled with luscious old wood – furniture, panelling, trees in the garden . . . . . Having been brought up in a very english village, I used to walk past some fabulous houses and cottages just on the route out of our small modern development up to the main road. As a result, although I could never afford to live in a similar property, it gave me a love for visiting them by way of heritage houses that offer old furniture and furnishings. The smell of the wood and the knowledge that even if not originally bought or made for that property, they will be of a contemporary age and well worth admiring. Wooden furnirure needs special care to ensure its longevity. The commercially available oil is not always needed and can sometimes do more harm than good on a real antique. You need to know the original finish of the piece. Sometimes dust and dirt stock to oiled furniture and this causes more damage in a short time than centuries of careful neglect ever did.
Living In The StIcks Requires Resourceful Planning
We we live is alwas going to be dictated to a certain extent by our family needs rather than desires. It’s one thing to be able to find that absolutely perfect property out in the middle of nowhere. Maybe a stone pile surrounded by hills and trees and very little else. Apparently hat is the dream of thousands of people in this country. However, as I know very well, it’s a major undrtaking actually moving out to the sticks. You soon realise that when you first run out of milk or eggs. You also realise that not evey company is prepared to deliver out to the further reaches of your county. Also, there are the small matter of utility services too – I do know a couple of invested every penny they had to buy a stone conversion in a very secluded spot – only to realise the shortcomings when heating the place. They had no gas in the area so it was only electricity or oil. Fortunately, oil has been quite cheap lately and they have an early warning system to alert them to the need for more to be ordered. It runs the boiler very efficiently.