Half Built House Perthshire – The treatment room & making a driftwood mirror

The front of this Perthshire home was divided by the front door / hallway into two rooms, one which the family used as their living room and one which was destined to become a treatment room where hypnotherapy work could be done with clients. When we arrived the room was filled with furniture and had become a general dumping ground, far from the calm space needed. The room had been re-skimmed but there were no skirting boards, no sockets, only one main light, a battered stripped pine floor, a half finished fireplace with mantelpiece hanging off the wall and a large window in pretty awful condition. A room in need of lots of HBH tlc!

The owners both said that they hated the orange hue of the existing stripped floor: “Although there are some stripped original wooden floors/doors and windows in the rest of the house I do not like the orangey  colour and I am planning to lime wax/whitewash or paint these to a paler more bleached look” …. (though their son quite liked it!) so I arranged for the floorboards to be sanded, then lightly white-washed & varnished them to pick up the pale-washed rear timber of the front door. The floor boards were already quite battered so a pristine finish was simply not possible without removing the boards and laying new ones, that was the best they were going to be! It was hard to get right into the corners with the time constraints that we had, but the family DIYer could easily manage that once we had left. It’s part of the premis of the show that we are there to get our contributors kick started again and set them back on the road to good DIY, not simply do it all for them.

I thoroughly cleaned the window down with Jif and a toothbrush – it took hours! Because the windows had been nailed sealed with plastic trim there was terrible condensation staining to all the paintwork and timber so all the edges were re-caulked and the timber sanded, then primed and repainted.

New skirtings were fitted, new sockets added and the fireplace tidied up with the mantel properly fixed.

I’d been given permission to ‘have a rummage’ and use what I could find as there were literally had two full sheds of timber! There was also a lovely garden studio filled with artwork, some of which had been marked as ‘family favourites’. Hanging in the studio were three complementary pieces of artwork which I felt would look stunning in the new treatment room. Not only that but hypnotherapy clients could then see the artwork side of the fledgling business whilst attending for treatment, hopefully generating sales and cash for the family. This art could be changed regularly dependent on the season or changes in the owner’s work focus.

I asked joiner Danny to make three equally spaced, vertical panels on which this artwork could hang, not only to create interest on the curved wall but also so that subtle LED strip light could be added to shine out from behind the panels whilst the hypnotherapy was taking place. This would hopefully be more relaxing than the one overhead pendant there previously.

Also in the studio was a part roll of artist’s linen…. they had said use anything! We covered the three panels with this linen, using a staple gun to the rear of the mdf panels, as it perfectly picked up the tones of the artwork, then painted the walls with Crown Earth Balance ‘Button Mushroom’.

Hidden away behind a load of timber in one of the sheds was a plastic bucket full of the most gorgeous driftwood and I thought it would be amazing to make something from this natural treasure. However that was on Day 5 and due to all the work needed at the house, I didn’t get around to starting to make it until 10pm the night before the reveal. Crackers! I’d bought a full sized timber framed mirror from TK Maxx and used an impact driver to screw through the back of the frame into the pieces of driftwood at the front. I filled little gaps with smaller driftwood pieces glued into place.

The room was finished off with a stunning cream leather recliner and a beautiful soft tartan pale blue and cream blanket from the Perfect Chair Company at the local  Scottish Antiques & Arts Centre…

and some flowers from the garden….

A bit of a transformation from a unloved, part finished room into a relaxed and calming therapy space.