THE IDEA & THE PLANNING
The story began some time around late summer in the Year of Our Lord 2000.
One evening (I should think) and when deep in our cups (I can guarantee) my wife suggested that we should turn the garage into a medieval banqueting hall.
Our garage was, as you may judge from the picture above, too small to fit any decent sized car in comfortably and was in any case full of the usual junk you find in such places so she had begun to think of alternative uses. Being heavily into historical re-enactment, socialising, cooking, eating and drinking, a medieval theme seemed an obvious choice. Hence the suggestion.
A suggestion to which, being a caring, considerate and supportive kind of chap, I responded with . . . ."F**k off".
"No no" she said, "I'm serious!"
"So am I", I said with vigour and a certain amount of fear . . . . . . . . . "F**k off!"
That would have been that had I not begun to indulge in what I knew was a dangerous practice and what I should have known would rebound on me - I began to think about it; and as I thought about it more, I liked the idea more - and more - and more. So a few days later I threw caution to the wind and uttered the immortal words
"Ok, let's do it!"
Fine. Great. Whoopee. Where to start, that was the problem. I decided to chop the project up into the following manageable lumps:
FINANCE
WHERE TO PUT THE JUNK FROM THE GARAGE
BASIC BUILDING WORK
WINDOW
DECOR
FURNITURE
TABLE SETTINGS
ACCESSORIES
FINANCE
This was fairly straightforward to deal with as we costed up the various parts of the project, went to the building society and asked! We were losing a garge but gaining an extra dining room and as we had enough equity they were happy to lend. However, the silence on the other end of the telephone when I initially contacted them to explain what I wanted to borrow the money for was a bit worrying...
WHERE TO PUT THE JUNK FROM THE GARAGE
Easy - get another shed! This would also have the advantage of cutting down considerably on the area of grass which would need cutting, a fact not lost on me.
Bish bash bosh, shed arrived.
BASIC BUILDING WORK
The garage needed to be lined and insulated, an entry had to be cut through giving internal access to the house itself and the up and over garage door had to be replaced with a window. Yellow Pages were no help on garage conversions but before I began to contact local builders I telephoned Yeoman Windows themselves and they were happy to do the lot.
Which meant I was happy too.
Yeoman had built the rear conservatory on the house and also replaced windows and doors in the rest of the house and as I was extremely pleased with their work I was even more pleased they could do this too. Basic stuff in theory - batten and panel the walls, cut arch from hall into garage and fit the window.
Bish bash bosh again.
WINDOW
Fitted by the same company that fitted the others, same design so nothing looked different from the outside, so at the risk of becoming repetitive - bish bash bosh.
DECOR
Here, bish bash bosh fizzled out and disappeared without trace for about six months. In the autumn of 2000 there was shown on the telly an episode of Fantasy Rooms in which Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen used some 4ft tall MDF arches as part of a Gothic makeover given to a living room in Tooting. I saw the programme, thought the arches were the absolute bees knees and simply had to get some. Enquiries with the BBC were fruitless as were emails to all the UK manufacturers of MDF that I could find on the net. Nobody appeared to have heard of these items which were unfortunately not stock, and the BBC's production team for the series had long since disbanded and there were no records or points of contact in existence ref suppliers etc.
Failure however was not an option!
In February 2001 I again wrote to the Beeb and this time they replied by giving me the postal address of the BBC Artistes Mail Answering Service in Belfast, but with no guarantee that anybody would actually answer. Well somebody did answer, Jackie L-B, wife of Laurence. She was very helpful and somewhat surprised as the Beeb could have given me the same information when I originally contacted them. Anyway, laurence's website contained all the details I needed, including the firm who supplied the arches, which was one of the first I had contacted months previously and who had claimed to know nothing about them.
Anyway they were thereafter extremely helpful and so I (eventually) got my arches. Perseverance paid off.
The dragon gargoyles and arched candleholders I obtained from a chap I first met in May 2000 at the Cressing Temple Traders' Fair in Essex. I bought one of each 'cos I liked them and they used to hang in the living room but then I thought they would look very atmospheric - and practical as candleholders - so I ordered a few more and picked them up at the May 2001 Cressing Temple Traders' Fair !
The phrase "picked them up" makes me smile - reinforced plaster and heavy!
The dragon stencil was made for me by an internet firm (Stencil Kingdom) from a drawing I sent them, itself originating as a 1" long decorative detail I found in a medieval French manuscript.
All the other stencils (pictures will be added to this blog in due course) were stock items from the same company.
FURNITURE
Plain oak benches would have been accurate but would also have been uncomfortable, difficult to rise from and manoeuvre around, and have provided no storage facilities. The pine "monks' bench" single seats which I eventually decided upon were the opposite in every respect - although with priming, undercoating and topcoat painting ten of these plus the two 6ft long tables from the same supplier was a pain in the proverbial especially as there was little room in the garden shed to start with! However, we survived.
TABLE SETTINGS
Enter stage left . . . . John Coles, work colleague, fellow re-enactor and a whiz with a lathe. Twelve sets of elm eating bowls, drinking bowls and trenchers as well as eating knives were ordered whilst candlesticks, salts etc we either already had or obtained easily enough from locl junk shops.
ACCESSORIES
The floor may be thought of a a starnge thing to refer to as an accessory but as we had to buy it separately, here it is in this section. After having circled our local plumbing shop three times (yes I know I said "plumbing" but stick with it) without finding a parking space I lost me temper - almost - and drove off to sainsbury's Homebase as I needed some salt for the water softening system at home. Muttering, moaning and whingeing because I knew a bag thereof would cost a few pennies more at Sainsbury, I found myself stomping past a pile of dark red floor tiles which were being sold off at a very good price. For "very good price" read "cheap". So I bought 'em! Easier to maintain than carpet, cleaner than strewn rushes and so I was rather pleased with myself.
Something additional for the walls was needed so I also bought from another colleague who was a huntin' shootin' fishin' type a stuufed jay and magpie plus a couple of shield mounted fox skulls.
The next bit was pure unjustified, unadulterated extravagance -what the hell.
A Google search revealed contact details for a chap who made memorial brasses of the type which were set into horizontal grave slabs and from which later generations now take brass rubbings. I took the details and contacted him. I asked him to make something which would fit into a 13" X 26" space on the floor left by two tiles. He was up for a challenge because he normally made them about 4" square to hang your keys off on a wall. I thought a representation of a tomb brass set into the floor would add a certain something to the atmosphere so he was commissioned to get on with it.
At £400 he was very happy to.
Like I said, pure extravagance, but as I would do this only once - what the hell.
THE BUILDING
First, a short maths lesson.
"Garage clearance = new garden shed + less grass to cut".
It is therefore a good thing. However a new garden shed needs electricity which in turn requires a cable which in turn requires a trench which itself needs to be dug. So beware!
Eventually, on Sunday 22nd April 2001, the garage was finally cleared out. All was silent, empty and still.........
...........until the next day, which coincidentally was St George's Day. Because on that day the garage door was taken off the front of the garage and planted in the back garden to await collection by the work colleague to whom I had sold it
and over the following couple of days the resulting gap was bricked up
and an internal entrance arch was cut in the hall
Once the window had been inserted where the garage door had been, the garage as such had all but disappeared. And just in case you're wondering - yes that IS a 6ft figure of a knight in full armour engraved on the front door glass.
A few days later I received an unexpected telephone call from my bank. "About your loan..." it began. "Hells bells what now?" I immediately thought....."Would you like to extend it a few months, reduce your monthly payments by ten quid and have an additional two thousand in your account on tuesday?"
Well that took some thinking about, didn't it?
Off to the DIY shop I went and bought paint. Quite a lot of paint. Thank you bank.
At this point I feel it only fair to introduce an element of caution. Yes, you may well be thinking silently to yourself...what a sad ol' bastard to be taking pictures of a bit of building work...and you may of course be right. I on the other hand may be thinking....what a sad ol' bastard you are to be looking at them...so be careful.
The weekend arrived, traditionally throughout Christendom a day of rest. But not in that house. Having rashly promised to clean out the downstairs toilet, I decided to put off the evil moment as long as possible by taking more pictures
The difference over a few days was amazing. The door from the garage to the outside world (on the right in the right hand piccy above) still had to be filled in but the internal wall boarding was virtually done. A real room was slowly appearing!
However, the evil moment referred to earlier had now arrived. It was a far far better place I went to then than I had ever been and it was a far far better thing I did than I had ever done. I went, brush and pine disinfectant in hand, exhorting those watching me at the time that if I did not return think only this of me.........that there would be some corner of our downstairs midden that would be forever England.
And I survived! Survived well enough indeed to spring clean the main bedroom too but that is another and far more boring story, so enough. While I was thus engaged, a chap came to fit the radiator, no picture, equally boring. Then in the early evening two men and a trailer turned up, handed me £65 and the garage door disappeared from the back garden, although it left its mark on the grass......ho hum.
A few days further on and Dave artexed the ceiling. Dave's identity need not concern us now, but let me repeat - Dave artexed the ceiling. Spot any link between fourteenth century design and artex? No. Quite right. There isn't any. He assumed the ceiling would need to be finished as in the rest of the house and I had neglected to tell him any different. I had intended a plain ceiling on which to paint stars but that would be impossible with artex and sanding it flat again was not an option so the artex stayed. As it turned out there was no problem and I painted my little gold stars on the ceiling without difficulty.
Once the artex was up, a blue plastic floor membrane was laid (that's a blue plastic membrane for the floor, rather than a membrane for the blue plastic floor, which would of course have been silly) in preparation for the concrete to be laid the following day. This was necessary to bring the garage floor up to the same level as the rest of the ground floor of the house.
Herewith, two piccies of the blue plastic membrane!
Two and a half tons of concrete went onto the floor and raised it by 6" and it was just after this that we discovered a revolutionary new concept in home security, which from the inside and the outside of the house looked like this . . .
I thought that a door with a solid wall behind it was quite a novel idea, almost as novel as having both a back and a front garden which looked like crosses between builders' yards and bomb sites.
I had taken pictures.........but they're just rubbish........
And then, a couple of weeks after the building work had begun, all was once again silent, empty and still, because the building work was complete and the really fun part could start
THE DECORATION
The building work had been completed on the friday before May bank holiday weekend so no prizes for guessing what I did for those three days! Saturday was priming the walls and undercoating the walls and Sunday was framing the arch and painting the ceiling - twice. It was however a change to see some colour in the room instead of white everywhere.
On the monday I was up early and the stars were up on the dark blue ceiling before 8am. The artex finish was not at all intrusive and as I have already said the stars were painted thereon without difficulty.
Two sandy topcoats went on the walls, light green on the boiler cupboard (couldnt move the boiler so built a cupboard round it to camouflage it a bit) and primer on the MDF arches - all fifteen of them. Worked non-stop until 7.30pm.
Gosh, what a hero.
Over the next two days the 15 MDF archs were primed and undercoated. the entrance arch glossed in green and the lower walls emulsioned in blue - twice. We're getting there!
I still had to keep a number of the monks' benches in the room itself as there was nowhere else to put them. You can see one in white primer creeping into the pics below
The MDF arches were then glossed in green - light for the inside edges and darker for the rest -then glued to the lower walls. This was the first time I had used "No More Nails" and it worked a treat. Gloss the boiler door frame, regloss the arch, stencil the blue areas and Bob's yer uncle........
Next on the to-do list was to paint red and stencil gold around the front window frame, thus
Having completed the front wall/window area, the room had by now really begun to look the part. Plaster gargoyles and candleholders went up next, as high as possible up the walls against the ceiling line, and apart from a bit of touch-up painting I was rapidly approaching "stencil time!"
A bit more art work around the entrance arch and some additional dragon stencils to go with the plaster dragons already flying about.
The dragon stencil, which I had first seen in a book on calligraphy I bought in 1994, began life as a decorative line filler in a medieval Gothic Blackletter manuscript. I contacted Stencil Kingdom and they turned it into the stencil. It is still part of their on-line stock too.
I spent a full eight hours completing the stencil shown below, which was on the back wall of the room. Painstaking , detailed, careful work but the result was far more impactive and decorative than the picture suggests
The day after that the long walls were stencilled too, with the same figures but this time in black, and also with a bonnacon on each side
Eh? What? A bonnacon? What's a bonnacon?
A bonnacon is a mythical medieval beast, listed in the appropriate bestiaries, which looks very much like a cow. It has backward pointing horns which are therefore no good whatsoever for fighting so to compensate it has developed a somewhat strange but nonetheless effective method of defence. It is able - and here I paraphrase said bestiaries - to fart poisonous excrement over an area of two acres in one blast !
Those of you who know my email address and the name of my Franciscan friar character will recognise, understand and appreciate the connection . . . . . . . .
In a little more detail, the bonnacon and black figures
Once this stage had been reached the major part of the painting had been done and it was then down to a combination of imagination and "what I'd seen in books" to come up with the small detail that would really lift the whole effect. One complete day was spent filling in the green arches and stencilling the blue ones, like so.....
....... and when the time came to stencil on the various mottoes and greenery, I knew that the end was at last in sight
The floor tiles (cheap, as stated earlier) were laid on top of the membrane (blue plastic as mentioned earlier) which itself was positioned upon concrete ( two and a half tons as also mentioned earlier) then grouted, sealed and cleaned and the result was
Two months and two days had passed since the garage stood cleared, empty and swept in preparation for the builders to move in and begin the transformation. The builders themselves took two working weeks and the rest of the time was me - priming, indercoating, glossing, glueing, emulsioning, stamping, stencilling, tiling, grouting, sealing and all with a bit of woodwork and MDF butchery thrown in for good measure.
At this point the floor brass had yet to be delivered and fixed, but with the exception of that one thing, the finished room, complete with curtains sewn and ironed by good ol' mum, was as shown in the next picture. It was once again silent, empty and still.
On the morrow I would begin to fill it with furniture..........
And on the morrow, I did indeed begin to fill it with furniture.
Monks' benches were brought up from the shed, from mum's house and from wherever else they had been stored (I've forgotten, but I managed to stow twelve of them SOMEWHERE!) two 6ft painted tales were recovered from the conservatory and then I decided to do some more stencillng. I now belive there is no known cure once it gets in your blood. Anyway, gold figures were stencilled on purple tabletops and gold shields on purple bench backs
The seated gargoyle on the left of the shelf was an impulse buy and was originally placed elsewhere in the house. He seemed to have found his way down to the banqueting hall (note the name change please - banqueting hall - HUZZAH!) by means unknown and had been quietly watching, some might even say guarding, the proceedings ever since. He stayed.
Tablecloth, beeswax candles, glassware
On Wednesday July 4th as the result of a snap decision we drove to the filed of Bosworth where on 22nd August 1485 King Richard lll lost to the future King Henry Vll and the Tudor dynasty began. This battle therefore signalled what many consider to have been the end of the Medieval period (indeed saw the last cavalry charge led by an English king and the last Plantagenet king to boot) and may therefore be considered a rather strange event for lovers of the medieval period to think about.
However, the visit was also to meet there one Gerald Thorpe, maker of decorative swords, film props, shields and heraldic banners, together with his wife Edna who live in Armthorpe. Gerry was making me two decorative swords to hang in the hall.
Yup, you guessed it - pictures to follow.
This was the first time we had met despite many telephone and email conversations; the weather was perfect, the site fascinating, the occasion memorable, and in order for it to remain so I mention it here!
Gerry and Edna
The swords in situ. The shield above them was a gift from Gerry and shows the arms of Richard lll. Thus were the swords handed over upon the field of Bosworth and the arms of King Richard, last Plantagenet monarch of England, now hang in Plantagenet House.
Poetic, innit.
At least it was. I have since moved from Plantagenet House and the Royal arms now hang from my garden shed!
The following week I received a telephone call from the maker of the floor brass, one Adam Murray, to say that it should be completed that weekend and delivered to me early the week after.
However, a subsequent call from Adam informed me that as he thought the finished brass was so good he was asking if he might display it at Tewkesbury the weekend after that.
Before we get too confused with which week is this and which is that and which the week after, the brass arrived on Thursday July 19th - and it was stunning. The following pic was taken once it had been laid in position and the flash has bounced around the highly polished surface!
But still it wasn't complete !!
Val Cartmell, woodcarver extraordinaire, had carved fourteen oak faces, flatbacked and about 3" square, which went up on a ceiling beam at the beginning of August. She is carving to this day and is absolutely first class. This is a sample
And on that same evening, Thursday 2nd August 2001, the final stamp of completion was given by the attendance of an Anglia TV film crew who did a piece on the conversion for the local news. They needed bums on seats to lend an air of . . . . of . . . . well, just an air, really . . . . and what a bunch of bums they got . . . . .
Thus, finally, was completed the conversion
and if you still have nowt better to do, you are hereby invited to http://www.garagetobanquetinghall2.blogspot.com
