laundry room crafting – part 2 (and LadyBug)

I got a bit distracted from the laundry room plans last week, but I managed to get something sorted that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time…spruce up my ironing board!

(I promise you that I don’t make Penny sit in my photos, she does it all by herself.)

I looked at a couple of tutorials online but it was pretty easy to make up as I went along.  Firstly, I used the old cover as a template on some nice cotton from Ikea -

I cut round with a good 2 inches extra, my old one sat pretty close to the edge of the board and I wanted it to tuck under properly.

I turned part of an old curtain into a very long 3 inch wide strip, folded it in half and then sewed right round the edge of the new cover with the right sides together.

(The white stitching you can see here was part of the bottom hem of the curtain.)  I then folded the binding in half again, and tucked some strong white cotton inside before sewing along the same line to enclose the cord.  I stitched this bit down with a pretty narrow seam allowance so that it sat above the first stitching line and would be invisible.

After that it was just a case of putting it on the board and pulling on the cord.  There was a slight accident where I yanked the cord a bit much and it snapped, I had to unpick some of the stitching to find the end again.  But overall, success!

While I was working on this I managed to get a photo of our other rescue dog, LadyBug.  She doesn’t appear in pictures much as she likes to shake about whenever a camera appears, so much so that it doesn’t even look like a dog in the resulting photos.  LadyBug is a very old lady, she just turned 17.  She’s deaf and almost completely blind now, but is very content pottering about the garden and snoozing with her tongue hanging out.  On walks Penny acts as her guide dog to show her where all the good smells are, and they like to cuddle up together in front of the fire and at bedtime.

Dr Walker’s house

Many years ago our house was the local doctor’s surgery for our town.  It was actually built specifically for him, mainly as his home with a surgery and waiting room to the side.  There are still bits of evidence…

(Please excuse the blurriness, and my reflection!)  This sits above the door in the kitchen and the bells are all still in the rooms though they don’t work, sadly.  Our house isn’t of an age where bells would normally be fitted, so this must have been something Dr Walker requested as it was built.

What used to be the surgery is now a utility room, and this is my next project.  It’s really horrible just now – paper peeling off the walls, stained lino, lots of weird fixtures.  I plan to transform this at the weekend by painting the presently hidden concrete floor a pale blue/grey, stripping the walls and painting some white and one some kind of colour, sprucing up and moving the shelving that I like and ditching the rest.  I will be delighted to get rid of the flooring.  While the pattern is almost acceptable in that it looks a bit like knitting close up, it’s really horrible.I seem to spend quite a bit of time in here, doing laundry, blocking things and feeding dogs.  I wonder about where the doctors desk was and what went on in here, and what kind of good and bad news was delivered to the people in our town.

To the right of the doorway is the old waiting room.  The wallpaper was recently stripped to uncover a concreted-up opening – this used to be the main door to the waiting room.  Patients would walk up the side of the house along a path which is still there, to wait in this room before being called through to the doctor.

This is currently being used for storage, obviously!  (Mr Saz will be horrified that I’ve put this photo on the internet.)

It’s nice living somewhere that holds a lot of memories for the town, I’ve spoken to people who remember coming to the doctor here, and a friend of my father-in-law remembers being chased off the roof as it was being built when him and his friend had snuck on the building site to play as boys.  Now back to the decorating…