Building A Nest In Goldfinch Barn

Perhaps my art professor was right a few years ago when he hinted that my work was too literal. Today I lusted after a cream mixing bowl in a department store, a bowl with little birds dancing around the rim. I promptly sent a text message to my sister expressing my alarm at this new heartache (at the same time emitting faint yet audible puppy dog whimpers). Five minutes before the bowl incident I was surreptitiously photographing a packet of notecards adorned with what? Birds again.

A little while later I was told I was nesting.

This is only a few days after my unbridled excitement following a forage on the internet for a new duvet cover. I found one, after many months of sporadic searching, one which totally fit my current temperament. It has a sky blue background, with blouzy pink and red roses, to follow many seasons of solids and stripes.

Perhaps it is all due to our entrance into a new era. Not pregnancy. A new era in our conversion of a stone barn into a comfortable place to dwell.

Four years ago we decided to move an hour inland and upland from the North Sea coast. We purchased a farm building attached to a cottage after recognizing the potential of the place. Our thoughts were - put some work in and give the structure a makeover. “Some work” became an understatement. Our barn, christened Goldfinch Barn, was a stone shell ready for a renaissance.

Presently we are able to see a little luminance at the end of one heck of a tunnel. Hence the time is ripe to laugh about some of the conditions we have lived through, by choice. There was a time when we had black walls, covered in a damp-proof membrane of sticky tar. This was not inviting and was definitely not a wipeable surface. Nonetheless it was great mechanism to trap free-flying cat fur and feeble insects.

For several years I lived without a sink in my kitchen and for even longer I have slept in a room with no natural light. I suppose it’s no surprise that friends/family staying over have said they’ve enjoyed the best night sleep in ages. (It is akin to sleeping in a cave). Now the windows are slowly opening and ushering in the beams of sunlight, some of the surfaces are easier to wipe and the rooms are beginning to ask for visitors.

So yes, it is a new era of floral prints, color charts and the delicate final touches, and I am the dancing bird.


Our kitchen, in the beginning, black walls and all, but hey, we still had a nice refrigerator! (And a vacuum cleaner!)

And now, black walls buried, protecting us from the ingress of horizontal rain.

xxx Laura