Where It All Started, Part II

Tags

Aslan's Tent, Dawn Treader, Grandkids, Narnia, Wardrobe

This is the second half of my previous post, a tour through Narnia, now that we’ve been living with it for a couple years.  Picking up where we left off, let’s head through the Wardrobe into Narnia proper.

Because we were working with a floor plan as opposed to having an entire world, certain elements of Narnia were treated with some artistic license.  Our Wardrobe is in Cair Paravel instead of Spare Oom, and our Narnia is a combination of Lantern Waste and the “Dawn Treader.”  However, just like the original Narnia, we have our resident Aslan!

The window lets in light for playtime and has blackout curtains for nap time.

The boys’ side of the room gives a glimpse of the portholes in between the berths as well as the crown-embellished “sail” curtains made of drop cloths.

A large hunt cabinet with a dragon reminiscent of Eustace holds farm clothes for when the grandkids visit.

The quote over the door comes from “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” and perfectly summarizes my hopes in creating Narnia in our attic.

The grandkids love staying in Narnia.  Whether it’s a new book to read, a dark berth for a nap, dress-up clothes in the Wardrobe, or simply room to let their imaginations run free, there’s always something here for them.  If it’s been a while since they’ve visited, they’ve been known to ask their parents when they can go to Narnia again.  We just love the fact that we’re making so many memories together!

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Treasure Chests for a King and Queens

Tags

Colors & Paint, DIY, Grandkids

For our grandchildren’s birthdays this year, I made each of them a treasure chest that we could decorate together.

 I started with three plain wooden boxes from Hobby Lobby and these paints and stains, plus the Glitter Blast Sealer which you need to use on top of the Glitter Blast paints to keep the glitter from flaking.

 This is the box for our eldest granddaughter painted robin’s egg blue inside and out with some leftover spray paint.  After that I sprayed it inside and out with Sparkling Waters Glitter Blast.

 Here is our grandson’s chest stained with Minwax English Chestnut outside and sprayed with Sapphire Shimmer Glitter Blast inside.

 Our youngest granddaughter’s box was painted with leftover lavender spray paint, then coated inside and out with the Grape Glitz Glitter Blast.

 I had several bowls of treasures for the kids to choose from to decorate the tops of their boxes–polished agates from West Texas, seashells, and plastic jewels.  They each chose their favorites, and then directed me where they wanted them glued on their box.  I did the gluing with E6000 so they would not get glue on their skin.  Here the box is decorated . . .

 and finished, with three coats of clear glossy acrylic spray to protect the decorations.

 Decorated . . .

 and finished.

 Decorated . . .

 finished, and being enjoyed.  Besides serving as a place to store secret treasures, each box is a visual and tactile delight.

 The older kids enjoyed checking out their finished treasure boxes, too.

 Sorry you can’t peek inside, but the royal treasures must remain incognito!

A Promise and a Fairy Treehouse

Tags

DIY, Dollhouse, Grandkids, Inspiration, Mimi's Cave

My poor granddaughter has been so patient with the extremely slow progress on the dollhouse.  She recently asked me when she could play with it, and I told her I’d make her a dollhouse she can play with right now.  She thought a moment and asked, “Would it be as big as me?”  “Almost,” I told her.

I had already found this idea online for a treehouse dollhouse; I just needed to figure out an easier way to make the tree trunk.  And then I found this great tutorial for making tree bark out of tin foil, masking tape and paper towels.  The tutorial came from this website, which uses a slightly more traditional version of papier maché.  So Mimi’s Cave in Spare Oom once again became a construction zone, this time of the woodland sort.

 I started with papier maché boxes from Hobby Lobby which I spray painted a warm white inside.

 A string of tiny, battery-operated LED lights made a quick, easy way to light the treehouse.  I used an ice pick and then a letter opener to poke holes in the back of the treehouse to thread the light string through.  Then I cut out a round window for each room.

 Next I glued the rooms together using a tube of quick dry glue to avoid white glue which would have dampened the papier maché and to provide a stronger, more flexible bond than hot glue.  A plywood base provided a stable surface to glue the entire treehouse onto.  Once the rooms were glued together, I decorated them–although it would have been easier to reverse the steps.  The kitchen floor was made of scrapbooking paper sprayed with a satin acrylic spray, while the living room floor was made of thin craft sticks glued onto a scrapbook paper template and pressed under heavy books until dry.

 One 300 foot roll of cheap aluminum foil was more than sufficient for the entire project.  I crumpled bits to fill in all of the square crevices and to round off all the corners of the boxes to create a more rounded tree.  I tore off a sheet of aluminum foil longer than the treehouse was tall, then crumpled it into a long piece, which was then hot-glued to the boxes.

 Shorter lengths of foil were easy to glue around the windows and to fill in any gaps between vertical “runs” of bark.

 Once the foil bark was glued on, it was time to cover it with masking tape.  One large, cheap roll was more than enough.  The masking tape needed to cover the foil so that the papier maché would adhere to it.

 Next, a coat of brown acrylic paint went onto the tree and the base board.  One large bottle of paint was more than enough.  Bits of white peeked through the brown, but the next step would take care of that.

 I then brushed dark Minwax stain onto the entire tree.  It ran down into the crevices and helped fill in any tiny white gaps that the brown paint didn’t cover.  I used paper towels to soak up any excess that pooled at the bottom.  After each side was glazed, I gently dabbed over it with an absorbent rag to remove some of the glaze on the protruding areas, leaving more contrast with the crevices.

 When everything was dry, I sprayed two coats of matte acrylic sealer over the tree to tone down any shininess left from the Minwax glaze.  I used Aleene’s extra tacky glue to apply sheet moss around the base of the tree to serve as grass, adding small flat stepping stones.  Then I cut apart a grapevine wreath and hot-glued pieces of it to the tree to serve as vines.  I cut apart a bouquet of small pink silk roses and wove them into the grapevine.

 The final touches were bouquets made of small blue silk flowers and tiny mushroom birds glued here and there.  A tiny wooden mouse nestled in a hole at the base of the tree.

 The treehouse was finished and ready for its fairy occupants and their furniture.  The house was almost completely furnished with extra dollhouse things I’ve collected over the years.

 A dainty fairy stands outside the kitchen and living room.  You can see the mini grapevine wreaths that serve as interior window frames.

 Two bedrooms grace the second level, one for the grown-up fairy and one for the little one and her fuzzy bear friend who is taking a nap.

 On the top level is a bathroom, which has a rooftop garden on top of it, and an open air laundry room, complete with tiny clothespins to hold the lace curtain the smallest fairy is hanging up to dry.

 The fairies seemed very happy, but my creation still had to pass the acid test.  What would the grandkids think?  They were here this weekend, and I can safely say that the treehouse passed with flying colors!  I was thrilled that the promise I made to my granddaughter was fulfilled with such success in her eyes.

For Narnia . . . and the South?

Tags

DIY, Grandkids, HO train, Love, Narnia

At the beginning of the book “Prince Caspian,” the Pevensie children were waiting for a train to return them to boarding school.  Instead, the train whisked them back into Narnia.  Since our grandson loves trains, a train seemed the perfect Narnia-themed Christmas present for our grandkids.  Last fall when I was stymied by an electrical problem on the dollhouse, setting up a train provided a welcome break.  And that is how Narnia went South, into our basement.

After lots of research online, I found the Bachman Overland Limited HO train set on Amazon.  It has one of the few suitably old-time steam engines of all the trains I looked at, as well as plenty of cars and track.

We considered building a train table, but in the end Didi drove out to the mall and brought home a ping pong table.  It was a major job to put it together, but he got it done!

Meanwhile, I prepared the train board.  When I was little, we used a heavy gray paper board into which we “nailed” tiny railroad spikes to hold the track in place.  Our train came with E-Z Track, a raised plastic roadbed with the track mounted to it.  A 4′ x 8′ sheet of plywood provided the most stable surface for the train.  I spray painted it brown, then sprayed patches of green over the brown to give a realistic earthy appearance.  Misty served as Quality Control.

Every train needs a tunnel through a mountain.  First I formed a tunnel out of chicken wire and curved it to fit the track, making sure the train could go under it.

I used craft store plaster strips (similar to old-fashioned cast material) soaked in water to cover the sharp chicken wire.

Using cardboard box cut-outs for a base–not under the tunnel, of course–I added lots of brown wrapping paper, held in place with masking tape, to build the mountain around the tunnel.  I made sure to keep everything uneven and mountainous-looking and poked in a few holes for caves.  Once the structure was formed, I began covering it with strips of the plaster fabric soaked in warm water.

A rubber kitchen glove on the hand doing the smoothing prevented me tearing up my fingers.  I had to work fairly quickly, but I was able to shape the mountain as I worked.  You can see one of the “caves” at the bottom.

This process took several days because the plaster had to dry after the tunnel was formed and after the mountain was finished.  I took advantage of a dry warmish day outside to spray paint the mountain with the same brown and green paints I had used on the base.  After giving the mountain an all-over coat of brown paint, I used short, light bursts of green to “dab” the paint on here and there, avoiding making the mountain too green.

The beautiful Davis Mountains in Far West Texas, our beloved family vacation spot for many years, were the inspiration for my mountain’s terrain and color.

Sparkly rocks brought back from West Texas added texture, interest and a nostalgic element to the mountain.

On Christmas morning we gave the children the empty train box and sent them on a treasure hunt to find out what had happened to the rest of the train.  After some excited exploration of the house, we “helped” them find the basement door, and they hurried excitedly downstairs.

It didn’t take long before the train was chugging through the tunnel, to their delight.

Even the youngest got to play “Engineer.”

A new LED-lighted barn ornament provides shelter for the very old painted lead livestock from my childhood train set.  A few cows suffered broken legs through the years, so I made a pasture with hobby store grass on a cardboard form, added a lichen hedge, and glued the animals permanently out to pasture.  Sticks, lichen and hot glue made a grove of trees to shade the farm, and a new toy tractor stands in for Didi’s Kubota.

The old paper houses of childhood memory were grouped into a village at the foot of the mountain with the well-worn train station a short drive away.  This layout was not a labor of model train artistry, but rather a labor of love to give joy to our young grandchildren.  Hopefully, as they grow we can add together to our tabletop Narnia of the South.

The Lion’s Pride

Tags

Aslan, DIY, Grandkids

The grandkids were here this morning, and it was a beautiful Narnian kind of day.

It was also brisk and breezy, so when they came with us to fetch the milk cow into the barnyard, they needed something to keep them warm.

This called for their special Narnian jackets.  I found the sweatshirts on clearance at WalMart for $5 apiece.  I added adorable (clearance) iron-on lion patches from Hobby Lobby.  The final touch is a charm dangling from the zipper of each jacket–a nice manly-looking crown for Kol and a rhinestone-studded one for Charis.  The kids love their jackets, and I love how special they feel as members of the Lion’s Pride.  The perfect jackets for the kiddos that are Mimi’s pride and joy!

Construction in Narnia–Again!

Tags

Design, DIY, Dollhouse, Grandkids, Inspiration, Spare Oom

Back in April when this view of tender foliage was outside the window of Spare Oom, I started on a new construction project in Narnia.  Then life got in the way, and construction ground to a halt.  Now that working inside to avoid the suffocating heat of summer seems like a brilliant idea, I thought it was time to take my construction project public.  Maybe that will keep me at it!

“WHAAAAT?” you might well ask.  “Didn’t you just finish creating Narnia in your attic?  What could you possibly be building now?”  Well, here’s the answer to that very good question . . .

I’m building a house!  A dollhouse, yes, but a house!  This time I’m the general contractor, builder and decorator!

I bought this house before we moved to France in 1990, and it sat in storage with our furniture until we came back to the States in 2001.  At the time I thought I would decorate it in French style.  But it sat . . . and sat . . . and sat . . . in a closet.  Then in 2008, two things happened.

1)  We left my beloved Victorian house in Tennessee and moved out here to the country.  It was my idea to move, but oh, was it hard to leave my dream house!

2)  Our first grandchild, a girl, was born.  Now at last I had a really good reason to pull out the dollhouse and get to work.

But of course the work of turning this place into a farm took precedence, and somehow the dollhouse languished again.  Then earlier this year during the process of furnishing Narnia, Charis (now 4 1/2) saw the dollhouse and was enchanted.

That was all it took!  I realized that the idea of making a French house no longer seemed so appealing.  Instead, I would rather recreate my beloved old Victorian.  So I ordered lap siding and set everything up to begin construction–again!

So this is an invitation to join me up in Narnia while I build a house-within-a-fantasy-land-within-a-house.  And when I’m done with this, there’s an old Lionel train waiting for its own world to come to life in the basement.  So there’s plenty of magic still left in Narnia, just waiting to be breathed into life!

Goodbye, Dear Zephyr

Tags

Family Stories, Grandkids, Love, Narnia

This post is copied from my other blog, “Adventures on Zephyr Hill Farm.”  I got Zephyr just before we found this place we would soon call home.  Incredibly, the previous owners called it Zephyr Hill Ranch.  Being from Texas, we couldn’t call 29 acres a ranch, so we called it Zephyr Hill Farm.  Zephyr was the first animal to come to Zephyr Hill Farm, and it seems impossible to think of it without her.

Zephyr has been the only dog allowed upstairs in Narnia, and she has been the dog our grandchildren loved to play with because she was so small and gentle that no child could be afraid of her.  If any dog would have deserved to be a talking dog in Narnia, it would have been Zephyr.

In Memory of Zephyr,

“Zephyr Hill Windsong”

June 12, 2008 – June 17, 2013

It is with an aching heart and burning tears that I write this post.  It will be long and full of photos because it is a tribute to my wonderful, amazing Sheltie who was such a central part of our lives on Zephyr Hill Farm that we still can’t believe she is gone.

Herb and I were gone on a five-day trip and came home to be greeted by Hero and Misty, but no Zephyr.  We called and called and searched everywhere, sure she had just gotten left behind in a pasture or the barnyard, but there was no sign of her.  After 45 minutes of searching for her, a thunderstorm finally sent us inside when it became clear that she wasn’t anywhere we could find her.  A short while later Kara started over to her house and found Zephyr laying in the driveway, almost to the house.  Kara picked her up and raced to the house, and we rushed her to RIVER, the emergency clinic in Chattanooga.  We now know that Zephyr had gone away to die, as dogs often do, but when she heard us calling, she tried to drag herself to the house despite having one hind leg so stiffened out that it must have been sheer love and willpower that enabled her to walk or crawl.

I handed Zephyr over to the waiting team, and they went right to work.  Her heart stopped and she wasn’t breathing.  While they did CPR, the doctor let me go in to her.  All I could do was pet her head and beg her to come back to me.  Her heart began beating and she breathed on her own, and the wonderful team continued to work on her.  She was suffering from heat stroke and diarrhea, although we will never know what caused the diarrhea in the first place.  Kara joined me, and we stayed with Zephyr for the next three hours until she was stabilized.  Before we left for home, the doctor told me she gave Zephyr only a 50% chance of recovery.  She also said that she felt sure that it was because I was there talking to her that Zephyr was still here.

The staff at RIVER welcomed me to visit Zephyr as much as I wanted, so I joined her the next morning.  Before long, she began to have seizures, a bad sign.  When even a constant drip of Valium could not hold off the seizures, I buried my head on Zephyr’s side between the IV’s, oxygen cannula stitched in one nostril, nasogastric tube stitched in the other nostril, blood pressure cuff on one leg, and EKG leads on the other three legs.  I hugged her and begged her to stay with me, and after a few seconds, the seizures stopped.  When I raised my head and released her, they started again.  This scenario was repeated several times, and I knew that Zephyr was aware that I was with her and that somehow I was helping her in a tiny way.  Herb was there at the time, and he was as amazed as I was at her response to my hugs.

Eventually even love couldn’t hold off the seizures, and the doctor started a drip of propofol, the anesthetic notoriously used by Michael Jackson.  The seizures stopped, and we continued to monitor Zephyr’s breathing to be sure that her respirations stayed adequate.  By this time the doctor only gave her a 10% chance of recovering, but we all hoped that the seizures could be held off and her brain might begin to recover from all the damage that had happened to her little body.

During the afternoon, I received the bad news that Zephyr’s carbon dioxide level was rising, meaning she wasn’t breathing it off, and yet her brain was not responding by telling her to breathe more deeply.  The doctor said we had to diminish and stop the propofol and that the seizures were likely to return.  Zephyr would need to breathe better on her own or she would have to be intubated.  I had to decide whether or not to do that if the need arose, but he wanted me to be aware of the complications associated with her being on a respirator.

At that point I knew that the fight for Zephyr’s life was over.  We had done everything humanly possible to help her, and many, many people had been praying for God to intervene on her behalf.  He chose to answer differently than we hoped and prayed.  I continued to stroke Zephyr and talk to her, telling her that when she got over the bridge she should look for Alizée and Cider and Ditey, and especially Precious and Peekaboo and Tiger.  I told her to have a good reunion with Precious and Peekaboo and to tell them I love them.  I told her over and over what a wonderful dog she is and how much I love her . . . and then she didn’t take the next breath.

Herb and Kara were on their way and just missed telling Zephyr goodbye.  We brought her home, and Herb dug a grave near the top of the hill looking out over the farm, the spot where Zephyr has so often sat beside me while I took pictures of beautiful sunsets, the spot where I took a whole series of photos of her romping with Misty.  I can see her grave from the kitchen window and from my desk.  I still can’t believe she’s there and not sleeping on the rug behind me, snorting her funny little snore.  I keep looking up at the front door expecting to see her waiting there politely to be noticed and let in.

Zephyr leaped into our lives with the special joy that was always hers.  She loved to play with water.  She was Hero and Misty’s chew toy, wrestling happily with them even though she could never win.   She loved to play with Charis and Kol and could always be found under their seats at the table.   When Eden visited here for the first time, Zephyr stayed as close to her as she could get.  She loved chasing her ball or bone or a stick–anything that anyone would throw for her as long as they would keep doing it.  She was the only one of our dogs who never chased the cats, even in fun, and they rewarded her by hanging out with her.

Zephyr didn’t like to ride in the car, but she did love to go to Leahaven.  There, as here, she was the Queen of her domain.

Our son Jim (who is not a fan of dogs) said that Zephyr was the perfect dog for kids.  She was!  She was always gentle, with newly-hatched chicks and with the grandkids.  I never had to worry whether she might nip or growl.  Once before I could get there, one of the kids accidentally yanked out a clump of her hair –and Zephyr laid there without even moving away, without even a wince.  She adored the children!

I told Jim in response to his comment that Zephyr was the perfect dog for children:  “Yes, she was!  She was the perfect dog!”  Of course, she had her little quirks–like hating the vacuum so much she had to be put outside when I vacuumed.  We called the list of noisy things Zephyr barked at “Zephyr’s Rules,”and we laughed about them (most of the time).  We marveled when she learned the word “chill,” which could even make her stop barking at the vacuum!  I used to tell people that Zephyr “walked on water.”  It was a joke based on one cold winter when she walked on the frozen pond, but it was really quite apt.  Zephyr was a dog in a million.

I’m very grateful to all those who prayed for Zephyr during her brief illness, and for the many who have written and called to offer their sympathy.  Please don’t be shocked if I break down in tears; it’s going to take a long time before I’m all cried out, but your love and hugs really do help.  I know that dogs don’t live near long enough, but I thought I’d have many more years with my Zephie.  I don’t know why, but in God’s plan she raced into my life and out again too soon, and she’s taken a huge chunk of my heart with her.

We talk about the Rainbow Bridge.  I don’t really know where our beloved pets go when they die, but I  do know that God is good and that heaven, as Herb puts it, will not be the absence of everything good on earth. And so I hope that some day I’ll see Zephie come running to meet me and that I can hug her again and stroke her silky fur and smooth my hand over her face and eyes the way she loved.  And then I’ll throw her favorite ball for her for about a thousand years.  Until then, I told her before she left, you find Precious and Peekaboo and Tiger, and look up Alizée and Cider and Ditey, even though you didn’t know them, and they will all keep you company until I come.

Goodbye, my darling Zephyr.  I love you.

The Newest Queen of Narnia

Tags

Dawn Treader, Grandkids, Love, Narnia

She arrived April 10 and is perfect in every way!  She weighed 7 lbs. 14 oz. and was 20.5″ long.  She doesn’t have a name quite yet . . .

. . . but we love her to pieces just as she is!

As soon as I put her into Didi’s arms, she grabbed hold of his finger.

What she was really doing was wrapping HIM around HER little finger!

“Hi, Didi!”  She knows just how to melt our hearts!

Such a precious gift:  another grandchild for us, a little sister for Charis and Kol, a second daughter for Jim and Monique, another niece for her doting aunts and uncles, and a royal occupant for the third berth in the “Dawn Treader”!

So much joy from one tiny baby!

Branching Out: From Fantasy to History

Tags

Family Stories, Grandkids, Love, writing

This post is a bit different in that it is completely unrelated to Narnia.  However, it is related to my children and grandchildren . . .

My future father-in-law and me in 1977. I already loved him dearly!

I loved my father-in-law dearly, and it was a terrible loss when he died at age 63 in 1979, just three years after he came into my life.  When my husband, Herb, and his older half-brother Mike went through Dad’s stuff, they found an Army trunk containing everything that belonged to Dad’s first wife, and Mike’s mother, Barbara.  In this trunk were ALL of the letters Dad and Barbara wrote to each other throughout the years of World War II when Dad was an officer in the U.S. Cavalry.  Sadly, the decision of what to do with Barbara’s letters was out of our hands, and they were all burned.  However, I won custody of a small stack of Dad’s letters to Barbara–and laid them in a box where they languished for over 30 years.

At the same time, we found files full of legal pads covered in Dad’s atrocious handwriting, and these were given to my husband and me.  One folder was entitled “My Army Story.”  Having heard a few stories from Dad, I was curious about his Army story, but I was busy raising our four children at the time.  Like the letters, that story languished in the back of a file drawer for the next 30 years.

Capt. Ross Lea in uniform

Finally, two years ago I began the Herculean task of transcribing Dad’s handwritten Army story.  Certain parts of it remained stubbornly indecipherable, and I put it away again.  But toward the end of last year, looking ahead to Herb’s 60th birthday this March, I felt an urgency to finish “translating” Dad’s story.  I turned to Google and spent hours figuring out some of Dad’s mystery phrases.  Finally, after hundreds of hours of work, I signed in to Shutterfly and created Dad’s book.

Here is the book, as I gave it to Herb on his 60th birthday.

A V-Mail from Dad to Barbara

Once that book was done, I remembered the 33 letters that Dad had written to Barbara.  By this time I was so “into Dad’s head” and so familiarized with the inscrutable ways of his handwriting that I was able to transcribe those letters.  Along with a few letters from other friends and relatives, they helped me discover the story of Dad and Barbara’s love, their sacrifice, and their loss.  Only one last piece was missing . . .

Barbara Hughes Lea’s wedding photo, 1942

Barbara was killed in a car accident when Mike was 18 months old–and that was all any living person knew.  I couldn’t find the date of her death, although I knew the year based on Mike’s age.  This time my genealogy subscription on Ancestry.com found me a date and a place.  The place was Leesville, Louisiana, near Fort Polk where Dad’s III Corps had come back to be decommissioned.  Was Barbara going to meet him?  What was she doing there?

Google led me to the local paper, The Leesville Leader, and they sent me to their microfilm archives in the Vernon Parish Library.  I emailed the library Director a request for someone to check the archives around the date of Barbara’s death on Sept. 11, 1945 to see if there might have been an article in the local paper.

A copy of the article on Barbara Lea’s death, Sept. 11, 1945 from the Leesville Leader

And thus began my correspondance with Mr. Howard L. Coy, Jr. and his kind staff at the Vernon Parish Library.  In no time at all they had found an article, copied it and mailed it to me.  It was the last piece of the puzzle!  Unlike Dad’s Army Story, which he stopped writing before the end, Dad and Barbara’s story had an end.  It was not a Hollywood ending by any means.  I don’t think any living author would have chosen to end their story that way!  And yet, 68 years later, we can read this heartbreaking story and see the goodness of God shining down through the years into the present.

Capt. Ross Lea in an undated photo, somewhere in Europe

With the last piece of the puzzle in place, I went to Blurb this time and created the second book about Dad’s life.  Mr. Coy expressed a desire to purchase the book for his library if it was for sale.  So I made the book public on Blurb and sent him a link.

Today I received a heart-warming email from Mr. Coy who said he could hardly put the book down and was reading it through his tears.  I won’t call myself an author because all I did was compile the story that was there in a stack of letters.  But what “compiler” could resist a letter like that?  I certainly couldn’t!  And what it made me realize was that “There’s Always Tomorrow to Hope For . . .” Letters to Barbara tells a timeless tale that tugs at the heartstrings of every reader who has ever known love or loss or sacrifice.  It tells a story that belongs to the American people, because the sacrifice that Dad and Barbara made during the War was made to keep America free and to keep her good and honorable and true, like Dad and Barbara and their love.

So here, with love for Dad and Barbara, is their story.

Ross Lea’s law school graduation photo, 1938

Barbara Hughes’ law school graduation photo, 1938

Finishing the Dawn Treader Berths, Part II

Tags

Colors & Paint, Dawn Treader, Decor, Design, DIY, Grandkids, Narnia

The carpet remnants from Cair Paravel took care of protecting the bottoms of the bed rockers, but the beds themselves were still ugly bare plywood.  But I had a plan for that!

We had four boards cut to length at Lowe’s which I stained and poly’d the same as the berths.  Herb (by the way, the last picture of him ever at age 59!) is my go-to man when there’s drilling to be done.  First he drilled two holes in each board so we could screw the pulls in.  This had to be done first since the screws would be caught between the board and the bed once the board was screwed in.

Here’s one of the trim boards with the lion pulls screwed in and five more (silver-colored) 2″ wood screws attaching the board to the side of the bed.  We’ll take a closer look in the following photos.

A close-up of one of the lion head pulls from Van Dyke’s Restorers (see the Purveyors page).

A close-up of the lion pull in the finished trim board.

Herb counter-sank all the screw holes, a time-consuming operation, but one that enabled all exterior decoration to easily cover the screws since they were level with the board’s surface.

In the middle of each board I applied a wood decoration from Hobby Lobby.  I used Aleene’s Quick Dry Tacky Glue which dries quickly.

The weight of a full can of polyurethane was sufficient to press the wood decoration down while it dried.

Here’s a close-up of the finished decoration.  These cost about $3 each, much cheaper than anywhere else I had seen ones like them.  I stained them, then gilded them with Rub ‘n Buff, then poly’d them.  I was really pleased with how they turned out.

The final step for each trim board was to cover up the silver wood screws.  I bought Antique Daisy upholstery tacks at Ace Hardware for this purpose.  I gently hammered one tack directly above the screw with the nail part almost touching the edge of the screw.

I hammered another tack in below the screw.  Still a bit of screw showing, so . . .

on each side of the screw I hammered in another tack.  This time I moved them a smidgen further away from the edge of the screw.  I could have moved them further away so they wouldn’t have been on top of the first tacks, but I liked the bas relief effect of layering them on top.

Here’s a look at one end of the trim board with the screws hidden by upholstery tacks.

Here’s a full-length view of the finished trim board on Kol’s bed.  My fancy upholstery tacks are actually hidden by the curtains, but at least I’m not bothered by the thought of ugly silver screws under there!

This photo of Charis’ bed is a bit dark, but it shows how well the trim board ended up matching the paneling of the berth, making the bed look built-in.

I had forgotten to include photos of the ends of the berths earlier, so here’s a shot with the little lanterns I got at World Market hanging on the crown hooks.  I will NEVER put candles upstairs, but little battery-operated tea lights make perfect night lights for the kids–lots more fun in a lantern than something you plug into the wall.

The kids arrive tonight for a weekend of festivities celebrating Didi’s 60th birthday, and thanks to some work from Didi, their beds are FINALLY, completely done!

Aslan is ready and waiting for the kids.  Naughty lion, he nearly gave Herb a heart attack when he went upstairs and saw him laying there so lifelike!  It’s a good thing he’s a pretty healthy 60 year old!