embrace shibumi and wabi-sabi in my surroundings and life

is an aqua Raymond Loewy designed Frigidaire from 1953. It has a double oven and is massive. It is built like a vintage car – lots of chrome and detail.
It’s full of gingerbread pieces this evening, row upon row of walls and roofs and doors. There will be 144 pieces to assemble by the middle of the week. The smell is divine. I like to add a little too much ginger to the dough.
I have a template for the little house pieces and a steel ruler to cut good edges when they come out of the oven. I am feeling intellectually isolated – not clever – this weekend. The rote work is good for that. Roll. Cut and bake. Repeat.

The broken windows were finally replaced. There were four small panes needing attention, and one large one.
The large window was used to carve neatly into smaller panes to replace the others…it’s the good, brittle wavy glass that is so difficult to find. There is a comforting thing about looking through old wavy glass. Shibumi and wabi-sabi at their best.

..is to be in a perfect winter retreat. There are blue pigeon walls with trim the colour of vanilla ice-cream and dusky blue velvet curtains surrounding the windows and day-bed. The little quartersawn oak sewing and writing desk is also a century old. The whole thing looks out onto the frost of the winter garden.

The house is almost 100 years old, and casts looming shadows in the half-dusk that passes for afternoon at this time of year. There are towering chestnut trees out in front, each with a bristle of squirrel-nest.
The goal is to make all of this graceful.

It is like peeling an eight-foot high boiled egg. The fumed-oak doors and mouldings have been, over the century, coated in multi layers of alligatored paint. My plan is to strip off the old paint and gently restore the wood, leaving the gouges and scratches of history to emerge without apology.