The Little Dog who Vomited all over Kirriemuir

Dolly AI-reimagined at Bonfest !

Meet Dolly the dog! Ryan the chef at Balintore Castle has been dog-sitting Dolly, while her owner is on an extended trip to Australia. On her first stay, Dolly was a ball of fur and badly needed a haircut. However, it emerged that she has a lovely placid personality, loves to be around humans and can be taken for a walk without requiring a lead. In short, an ideal pet who is no trouble at all to look after.

On her second recent stay at the castle, Dolly arrived with the much needed haircut and for the first time I twigged she was probably a Cairn Terrier. I have a soft spot for terriers and love their sparky independence. Ryan and myself bonded much more with Dolly during this stay: we both admitted to being immorally lookist and the haircut was the key. :-)  Ryan allowed Dolly much greater freedom this time round as she was a known quantity and allowed her to do her own thing inside and outside the castle, instead of being kept in a room or on a lead. Dolly did not betray this trust, except on one occasion when she decided to eat half a dead rabbit she had found and on another occasion which is the subject of this blog ...

I was sorting out guest rubbish for recycling, pulling out the cans and bottles etc. Occasionally, gems appear such as an unopened packet of crisps. On this occasion, there was a whole unopened pack of butter. When you are banned from driving for a year and in consequence cannot go shopping and live with a vegan chef, a pack of butter is a rarity to be celebrated. I put the butter to one side.

I then discovered a smashed up Victorian pink glass flambeau lampshade which must have been broken by the guests and put into the bin. I ran into the guest accommodation and the table lamp which had been fitted with this shade was missing. I checked the cupboards, and the lamp was nowhere to be found. It had been stolen, to try to hide the crime. I was heartbroken given the trouble I had taken to source this Victorian lamp and shade - both items were irreplaceable. Guest are told they must report and pay for broken items so I felt betrayed as well. I burst into tears and rushed to my neighbour's house to let it all out. After the recent significant and devastating burglary at the castle, any new incident can set me off.

I was too upset to continue sorting out the rubbish, and left it to the next day. The next day was Saturday the 2nd June, and BonFest in Kirriemuir - the annual rock festival celebrating the legacy of Bon Scott (1946-1980) the lead singer of AC/DC who was brought up in the town. Ryan attended the event with Dolly and a human friend. Normally you would expect humans at such festivals to overindulge, but no it was Dolly who was living the rock-and-roll lifestyle.

She vomited in Ryan's bedroom that morning. What emerged was so thick that it hung over the back of Ryan's chair and did not drip to the floor. Dolly vomited (amongst other locations) on the floor of the "The Star Rock Shop", the oldest sweet shop in Scotland let alone Kirriemuir. On coming back to the castle, Dolly vomited on the floor of Gregor's carpentry workshop. Ryan was so fed up with dealing with vomit that day, that he simple sprinkled sawdust over the two deposits. In a carpentry workshop, sawdust is not in short supply...

Later that day I resumed dealing with the waste. There on the ground was an empty pack of butter save a tiny quantity remaining in one corner with little teeth marks in it. I think we all know who the culprit was. :-) My builders mentioned they had seen Dolly in the area of the refuse bonfire pit.

So if the guest had reported their breakage, I would not have been so upset, the pack of butter would not have been left, and Dolly would not have eaten it and then vomited it out onto the mean streets of Kirriemuir. I have never watched the "A Series of Unfortunate Events" franchise, but suspect Dolly's misadventures of excess at a heavy metal festival are right up there. 

The good news is that the following day, I did a more careful hunt in the guest accommodation and found that the antique lamp had been stuffed at the very back of a cupboard.

When Dolly arrived at the castle for her latest stay, she did not have a day bed where she could be with Ryan and myself in the kitchen, so we put her on some wool wadding that was used as packaging material. Later on I fabricated a doggie day bed from an Amazon Prime cardboard box, and unholstered with the said wadding. 

Dolly in her Amazon Prime day bed

You can see from the photo above, that Dolly is not always a heavy metal hooligan or leporine desacrator, and usually serves little dog cuteness. :-)

Gavin's Dance Floor

In the previous episode of this blog, my builders' insistance that the floor of the Great Hall should be left the natural blond oak colour of the newly installed reclaimed wood was pretty apparent, and their arguments were, it has to be said, perfectly valid.

However, where there is a choice my natural instinct is to go with the historic reality of the building, and at Balintore the original Great Hall floor was painted a dark brown that matched the other woodwork in the room. In fact, without Gavin's and Gregor's intervention, I would not have considered a blond floor in the first place.

What a dilemma!

I am someone who naturally consults with others where there is debate. It's not that I am weak-willed or indecisive, but the more angles one views an issue from, the better informed and better the resulting outcome. I showed my guests the stained samples of wood, and the clear consensus was the stain named "smoked oak". This tint was what I myself had chosen and had found was the closest match to the historic colour. Obviously, I kept my own view hidden for the longest time. :-) An extremely talented artist I know, just clearly stated that it was obvious the floor had to go dark. That was one of the clinchers.

I am also someone who does not believe in "decisions". One tries something out to see if it works. In that way you never make a mistake. This is a common technique in software engineering: you may not know how to solve a problem but you give yourself a hour or so, to work on a reduced version of the problem with a particular solution technique. By the end of that hour, you will generally know whether the approach is promising or whether you should try something completely different instead.

The actual moment I had to tell Gavin and Gregor that I was going dark was rather intimidating. It was the end of the day. We needed to move on the floor, and G&G asked what I was doing.  I mentioned I was going dark, but that we needed a test area and that I would order a single tin of "smoked oak".

Gavin joined together some spare flooring to produce a 2 foot by 2 foot dance floor and he applied the stained wax oil.

Gavin's dance floor

I was super delighed at how it looked, and eventally Gavin with some reluctance said that it did look good but just for this limited area. Because the grain of the oak shows through one's initial thought is that this is just the natural rich wood colour.

I can remember that moment in childhood when one realises that most wood is actually "white" in colour, and the "brown" material one has seen up to that point is actually due to a stain.

I naturally wanted to record the floor in a blond state before it went brunette:

goodbye blond floor 1

goodbye blond floor 2

Today Gregor stained a section of the actual floor within a doorframe, and this was final confirmation that it was full steam ahead. All three of us liked the effect.

test patch on actual floor

Great Hall Wood Stains

I sent away for eight samples of a floor wax containing a stain, to see which colours might sit well in the Great Hall.

As ever with colours, it is always best to have a swatch in your hands. Relying on seeing a colour on a computer monitor has gone totally wrong in the past. The paint might have been a lovely toffee-colour on my screen, but what came out of the can that arrived through the post was definitely green. In the end, we just used the green paint (with a catastophically distant hint of toffee) in the originally intended room.

Gregor sanded 5 short offcuts of oak flooring for me to use. The test-staining results are below:

On the left of the photo is a section of pine I used to get all the colours in one place. My first observation is that the stain looks tacky on pine, but some of the colours do look good on oak.

You may wonder why there are only 7 test patches - well my sachet of dark oak stain arrived dried out. The company are sending a replacement.

The stains work best where you can clearly see the original wood grain (e.g. American, Antique and Smoked Oak). To my eye the original oak fitttings in the Great Hall lie somewhere between Antique and Smoked Oak, and on balance I would be happy to stain our new oak architraves and skirting boards Smoked Oak.

Obviously, I will be consulting on this one. When someone can hold the samples in place, I will take a picture.

The bigger debate is the floor. Gregor wants us to leave the oak unstained, and I have a great deal of sympathy with this, as the stain will not wear off and one is using the "natural" wood. However, the oak is very, very white - you can see the unstained oak on the left.

I cleaned the surface of a surviving section of Great Hall flooring earlier today, and it is a very dark brown.

So that is the debate: leave the new material "au naturel" or match the historic colour?

The sanding is well underway in the Great Hall. The photo below was taken during the 40 Grit pass. We have now done a 100 Grit pass, and we have 150 and 180 Grit passes still to go.

Gregor and Gavin were reluctant to have their pictures taken during the sanding, but I managed to catch a cameo when they were not looking. :-)