Happy Christmas 2025

The "family update" Chistmas letter is, according to reknown and soi-disant etiquette expert William Hanson, not read and by inference, not to be sent.

So how can I persuade you to continue reading this Christmas blog entry? Well, I can promise no reference to family members whatsoever, whether over-achieving or not. Instead, I can promise you egriegous and engaging tales, exposing a villainy that would not be out of place in a seasonal pantomime. Such is the drama, that I am now determined to write the book version. Pre-order for Christmas 2026! :-)

And yes, I do make a point of reading family update letters, and not just out of considerations of etiquette. :-)

2025 has been the year of the most contrasting highs and lows for the restoration.

Early in the year, I reached out to Historic Environment Scotland (HES) for assistance in dealing with Angus Coucil, who were behaving really badly and had stopped all restoration works. The Council had not answered any of the complaints I had sent them - which they are obliged to do.

Anyhow, the reply came back from HES that there was nothing they could do, saying that people assume that as a national body they can trump a regional body, but in fact they are both "public service organisations" at the "same" level. HES said the best way forward was to create some positive publicity for the restoration project, so dutifully this is what I set out to do. We discussed an "open day" for the opening of the Great Hall, which was nearing completion.

Five weeks before the date of the planned event, I invited the CEO of Angus Council along as part of a bridge-building exercise and to verify that the event was acceptible. I also went for broke and invited all 29 of the councillors. I was emailed by one of the councillors to say that an IT system administrator for the Council, had contacted her to say that she had an email from me held in their quarantine system, so she got in touch to find out what was happening. So whether Angus Council regard me as "mad" or "bad" is uncertain, but they have definitely classified me as "dangerous to know". I have still to find out whether my emails to all the concillors were quarantined, but the evidence does suggest blanket censoring.

Lovely articles appeared in the Glasgow Herald and in the Dundee Courier, about the restoration and the open day event. A journalist friend said I could not have got any better publicity.

A week before the event, and notably a day after the Courier article, a certain Council officer banned the open day, and then banned the evening banquet to which I has invited 40 guests. The guests were lovely friends and neighbours who had supported the restoration over the years. I was devastated.

I had dreamed about a celebration event on opening up the Great Hall for decades, though as a realist, I realised it might not happen in my lifetime. You can imagine how I felt dismissing all the volunteers, sending out cancellations of the 550 free tickets, and sending out cancellations of the banquet invites. Architectural experts from all round the country has taken time off work, to speak at the opening event.

On the day of the cancelled event, the Council sent in a police raid to ensure that nothing was taking place. The police entered the building without my permission, and I collapsed with the shock. Sometime afterwards, I got a letter from Angus Council's legal department saying the open day event had taken place with members of the public attending, despite the fact I had promised that it would be cancelled. You're damned if you do; you're damned if you don't. I don't know how you are meant to respond to this madness?

A few days after the date of the open day, the Council imposed a ban on anyone entering the building, not even my friends are allowed to come in. So at present, I am the only person rattling about in this huge building, and I am missing my friends like crazy. It is a veritable travesty of how the castle is intended to function. Now the Great Hall is restored I woud have organised some festive seasonal events. Angus Council really is the Council than cancelled Christmas.

Some lovely friends in Norfolk have invited me for Christmas so I won't be spending it on my own at the castle, but I did initially have to turn them down as the Council shenanigans would not allow me to get away in time. In the end, I cut the Norfolk trip right down to a few days, to make it possible.

Christmas cards at the castle

It was lovely in any case to put up my Christmas cards in the Great Hall: the first time I've really had a place at the castle to put up my cards. I notice that some of my friends, with their own restoration projects, have produced their own cards. I am missing a trick. I have pictured Reveseby Abbey (the Hollis family) and Brough House (friend of Balintore, Mark!).

Revesby Abbey Christmas card

Brough House Christmas card

Given the massive onslaught of Angus Council at the moment, we have largely just been doing finishing-off stuff. I have been particularly pleased with the recent work on the linen cupboard in the basement. This has been restored for a long time, but we just chucked things on the floor as a storage space - hardly satisfactory. Gregor and Gavin have now waxed the floor with a tinted wax-oil and built bespoke items of furniture to fit the space - critical for small rooms. The plan is to use these units to store bulk quantities of vintage and antique crockery and cutlery etc. that I have obtained second-hand in order to feed the multitude on high days and holy days. I hope that one day the Council will see sense, and that these can be used.

the linen cupboard with bespoke furniture

The unit on the left is made from the pulpit of Lochee Parish Church in Dundee (eBay £100) and a antique bookcase (£10). I have installed an initial 80 or so plates just for the sake of morale. I have not checked the exact numbers yet, but I suspect I have a matching service for 200+. That would be some banquet!

plates in the left hand unit in the linen cupboard

The unit on the right is made from the same pulpit, a pew from the same church and the worktop of a school science bench. You can see the filled bunsen burner holes. The worktop was the last remaining one of a set of Iroko ones I purchased. We didn't want to cut it up, and when I measured the wall-space in the linen cupboard, I realised the worktop could be installed whole so it was time to use up that asset! Believe it or not, the doors are 4 inches thick!

Anyhow, I hope you all have a great Christmas and I wish you all best wishes for 2026!

Tiling on up!

Gavin has done an amazing job tiling a mini kitchen in a servants' room in the basement of the castle. He finished today, using a remaindered job lot of terracotta tiles that I located on eBay.

tiling completed

Hopefully the brick-like quality of the tiles engenders a period servant-vibe. Historic interiors can be decimated, in my opinion, by inserting modernist kitchen units. What is certain is that in 15 years time the modernist kitchen units will no longer look modernist, and will need ripping out. The ethos at Balintore is "restore once, restore properly".

I had a hard job persuading Gavin that the tiles should go above the bottom of the kitchen units, then above the top of the kitchen units, then to the top of the window frame. :-) I reckoned that taking the tiles to the ceiling would be too over-powering and interfere with any coving, but framing a cuboidal volume in which the kitchen sits, acts to zone and then characterise the space. Fortunately, when Gavin called me in at each decision point, it was pretty clear which way to go.

Gavin initially wanted to stop here

before the tiling began

Gaving suggested using some teracotta tiles when tiling a shower in the adjacent room to tie together the look, and I very much agreed with this. However, the bone-coloued crackle-glaze tiles which are also going to be used are a completely different size, and we worried about the clash. Gavin left a trial layout sitting on the worktop this afternoon, with teracotta bands dividing areas of bone tiles. What do you reckon? 

potential mixed-tile layout for shower

Surprisingly enough, because the zones are very different colours, I don't think the different tile sizes matter!

Preaching from the Converted

Is hard to believe that this classy item of furniture below is a composite of a £10 bookcase (top-half) from Curr and Dewer auction rooms in Dundee and a converted pulpit (bottom-half) from Lochee Parish Church in Dundee. Even my builder Gregor was pretty chuffed today at how his little carpentry project has worked out.

In antique circles, such an item is known as a "composite" and is generally frowned upon as being an inauthentic mongrel or indeed a Frankenstein's Monster of the furniture world. :-) Prices are correspondingly low.

However, in my view, you cannot put a value on re-using the beautiful work of ages past and building something unique that is a perfect fit for a rather low-ceilinged room in the basement of the castle. If you want to see the unit being assembled from its parts, see my previous blog entry here.

Make It Until You Fake It

While Angus Council has banned banquets of any form at Balintore Castle, one must I feel, be ready for the call when neither budgetary contraints nor bureacracy inhibit lavish largesse at scale.

To that end, over the years, I have amassed a few hundred place settings from auctions up and down the land. I look for large matching sets at bargain prices. What prompted the hunt was an emergency need for place settings, so reluctantly I popped into Birmingham IKEA en route to the castle and bought 100 plates, 100 bowls and 100 side-plates. So while the shopping trip was successful, I felt that I had failed in not biding my time and neither buying antique nor vintage, and ever since then, I have kept my eyes peeled. 

I now need somewhere to store this tableware. Large kitchen cupboards tend to go for a fortune at auction, whereas bookcases go for a pittance. The solution therefore is to buy a bookcase to use as a kitchen cupboard. A couple of weeks ago, this deceptively large bookcase came up for auction at Curr & Dewer in Dundee.

bookcase in auction catalogue

The catalogue picture was too fuzzy to know if it was genuinely Victorian or reproduction, but I could always just put a low bid on, and indeed I was delighted to bag it for just a tenner.

bookcase in Balintore drawing room

Back at the castle, a brief examination showed it is 19th Century and solid oak - hurrah!

The unit is 4'6" height and I wanted it raised off the ground so one is not scrabbling about at floor level to access the bottom shelf. The problem is that the basement room where the unit is being put is only 6'6" high so it could only be raised by 2'. Normal kitchen base units are 3' high, so something bespoke would have to be built underneath.

I suggested some beautiful Victorian billiard table legs on eBay which could be cut-down. Gregor suggested cupboards underneath instead which made more sense. We then went on the hunt for reclaimed cupboard doors in the castle. I have quite a collection. Sadly, the doors all are around 3' high.

Then it hit me. In 2020, I had bought the old pulpit from Lochee Parish Church in Dundee along with other bits-and-bobs. We had used a lot of the bits-and-bobs, but nothing from the pulpit. Perhaps some of the wonderful carved panels from the pulput could be used as doors?

carved panels from Lochee Parish Church pulpit

Sadly the panels in the photo above are too large being 3' x 3'. However, rummaging around we found two matching panels 2' (W) x 3' (H). If we turned these sideways and used some other carved details we could make the front of a base unit for the bookcase.

pulpit panels reformed into new cabinet

Above is the result at the end of day 1 (i.e. today) of building this base unit. To my eye the pulpit makes an incredibly convincing cabinet, almost like it never had a past as anything else. Gregor used cock-beaded tongue-and-groove panelling from the pulpit to make the sides of the cabinet.

rear of Gregor-faked antique cabinet

You can see from the rear of the cabinet that the framework is entirely modern, but Gregor is making it until he fakes it as an antique piece.

I now reckon the 3'x3' carved panels could make excellent (kitchen) cupboard doors on the same theme. However, Gregor loves the antique carvings so much he wants them on the wall as pictures! :-)

The moral of the story is that sometimes you have to wait a long time before using reclaimed materials. However, when that rare and right opportunity arises, the joy of recycling quality workmanship and creating something of beauty that will serve a useful purpose into the future, is deeply rewarding.

Coving Schmoving

As my eyes run over the interiors of the newly restored rooms in the basement of the castle, I am most discomforted by the lack of coving. To my eyes, a sharp 90 degree angle between the wall and the ceiling is the biggest "tell" that this is a modern interior rather than an antique one. 

The basement suffered the most water damage, so many of the rooms were back to bare stone walls and bare earth floors, so there was no coving to preserve or copy, and we have restored so far without coving. However, coving on each floor of the castle is generally the same, and there were some surviving sections in the basement, particularly in the butler's pantry, so there is little issue as to the style of what we should be puting back.

We are moving towards completion with the female servant's sitting room and as there is zero surviving coving in here, I realised that what we put back didn't have to be a exact match for anything, but just had to capture the right feel.

There is a little coving in the adjointing circular turret room so this was a good start. I do not know if there is any systematic way of descriping coving, but I would describe this as "cut, in, cut, out, in, cut". So going from the bottom to the top, you say if there is a sharp edge ("cut"), a curve that goes in ("in") or a curve that goes out ("out").

surviving coving in basement turret room - "cut, in, cut, out, in, cut"

Gregor alerted me to the fact that Screwfix does coving. I was somewhat surprised, but perhaps sourcing coving was going to be easier than I expected? It turns out Toolstation and B&Q do coving as well. Doing some internet research revealed most of this coving is manufactured in Slovakia by a Belgian company called Orac, and that this coving is actually plastic. Plastic is not an issue for me, geting close to the original coving shape is.

In the whole Orac range, only two covings were "cut, in, cut, out, in, cut" : C325 Manoir (£25.42/m)  and CB503N (£7.42/m) . Gregor reckoned the female sevants' sitting room would need a staggering 40m of coving. Identifying these 2 products took a whole evening of looking at literally hundreds of different coving shapes. It was a whole new world. It seemed like either would do, so the one that was under a third of the price of the other was the obvious candidate. However, Gregor advised getting samples before going ahead. I am so pleased I did!

C325 | Manoir

CB503N

The cheaper coving was made from something just a little better than polystyrene - I could make a mark with my thumbnail and the mouldings looked weak and did not have the same light and shade effect as the more expensive moulding where the "cut" in the centre was quite distinct. It would appear the term for this is "fragmented" coving.

Oh noes, the more expensive coving was the only one I was happy with, not only was the cut correctly in the centre but the cut showed up clearly and also I could not stick my thumbnail into this coving. I had to re-evaulate the situation.

It is the cut that makes coving look classy, and the more expensive coving showed clearer light and dark areas, and at the end of the day, that is what coving is i.e. it is to create classy patterns of light and shade. Perhaps, I should look for a plaster product and even though fewer patterns would be available off the shelf, I could locate a mould that maybe was not exact but had all the key elements of a quality Balintore cornice.

I located a plaster coving company online called The Plasterware Store, and indentified two products of theirs that channeled Balintore:  c32 | Hampshire and c15 | Gothic . The first is an almost literal channel but with a reversed ogee curve (i.e. in and out swapped in one location) ie, "cut, in, cut, in, out, cut".  The second channels the gothic quality of Balintore but is not an original design in any way. The samples that arrived through he post were a totally different animal to plastic coving. While they are a little too large, I would be happy to install either, but will go with Hampshire in the female servants sitting room.

top-to-bottom, left-to-right: Gothic, Hampshire, Manoir, CB503N

left-to-right: Gothic, Hampshire, CB503N, Manoir

So, the lesson here is to go for plaster coving not plastic. It appears to be superior on all fronts and not as expensive as the rigid plastic mouldings. It also supports the local plasterworks throughout the UK. Going for polystyrene mouldings is the cheapest option of course, but the appearance is poor in my opinion.

3⁄4" Cuban Mahogany II

Well Gregor sanded the slab of reclaimed wood that I bought recently at Steptoe's Yard in Montrose. What we both thought was weathered Cuban Mahogany turned out to be Teak. Well done to Gregor for his professional identification. Teak is even harder than Mahogany. There are Janka Hardness charts for various species of wood on the Internet.

Gregor cut this up to construct two new "meal shelves" which were once a feature of the bedroom corridors at Balintore Castle for the servants to use for holding trays.

As the reclaimed material is not the same wood type as the original mahogany, we thought it best to recreate a pair of missing shelves from scratch rather than repair existing shelves.

sanded and cut-up teak

And in fact, to get a pair of shelves out of the one slab, we had to make them 18" wide instead of the original 20". I don't think anyone is going to notice.  :-)  I sumggested cutting the shelves out across the grain instead of with the grain to get the the right size, but Gregor said they could split and we should honour the grain orientation of the original shelves.

Gregor could not locate a router bit in his case to match the original moulding of the shelve edges, and was starting to fret a little. However, he had one bit that was the right shape but just a tadge smaller in scale. I convinced him this was good enough - it certainly was to my eye. Sometimes when perfection is not achieveable, it just needs someone with a more objective outlook to say "good enough" to the person trying to solve the problem.

Gregor's router bits

The routered shelving looks great. :-) Aside from the shelf proper, there is also a section of wood that is attached to the wall, and a small section of shelf 2" deep to which the large main shelf is hinged. The depth of the main shelf was unknown as there are none left, but I remarked to Gregor that my eye and sense of proportion said they should be 12". Gregor was hovering at 10", and I suggested we could try looking at the original plans.

routered teak

Anyhow, I looked at the original plans this evening, and found this.

meal shelves described in the original plans

By a miracle, my guess at the shelf depth was spot on: 2" on one side of the hinge and 12" deep on the other making the 14" mentioned in the plans. Channel that building hurrahs! :-)

In my researches on hardwood, I learned a new word chatoyance. This is the way hardwoods change in colour with the incident angle of light, so you get a ripple effect that moves on the surface as you move your relative position. This gives a 3D effect with two vantage points i.e. one from each eye. Need I mention that chatoyance is desirable? The derivation makes one feel dumb for not spotting it. Chatoyance = chat + oeil + ance = cat + eye + ance as in the mineral cat's eye which exhibits the same phenomenon from the world of physics.  :-)

3⁄4" Cuban Mahogany

Having friends banned from visiting me at the castle, has made me realise that I need to take little trips into the world for mental health.

So on Friday, I went on a few errands. Whilst in Montrose, I made a short detour to Steptoe's Yard, which is less a reclaim yard, than a descent into Dante's Inferno. :-)

Much of the stock is unsellable or broken or decomposed, but then there is a curious masochistic pleasure and sense of adventure in trying to find something one could use - saving the planet and perhaps saving some pennies in the process.

It is an object lesson in really looking. After 30 minutes, I was in despair: the stock had aged; there had been little replenishent; and obviously the best stuff had been cherry-picked some time ago. 

Suddenly, bingo - I spotted a large cardboard box full of vintage gentlemen's hairbrushes. I had misplaced my existing vintage ones and my hair was in consequence badly in need of taming. A little rummage, and I found a pair, and indeed a pair almost identical in design to the misplaced ones. :-)

I was walking outside, in the rain, and saw an old silvered bit of wood. Much of the wood left outside at Taylors is clearly the worse for the exposure to the weather, but this looked remarkably untarnished and instinctively I tapped it. What came back was the sharp echo of hardwood! Could this possibly be Cuban Mahogany?

slab of wood from Steptoe's

I was looking for Cuban mahogany to repair the "meal shelves" at the castle i.e. flaps of wood on hinges on corridor walls outside bedrooms. You could raise these flaps to the horizonal, support them with a built-in bracket, and then use them for breakfast plates etc. The meal shelves are still largely intact at the castle, except that the flaps themselves have been taken as souvenirs. The original 1858 plans show that these were manufactured from 3/4" Cuban Mahogany.

meal shelf at castle

I had bought two small antique Cuban Mahogany tables for a tenner. However, I hadn't yet brought myself to cut these up, and was hoping against hope to find a slab of Cuban Mahogany.

Anyhow, the assistant at Steptoe's let me have the brushes and the wood for a tenner. She had been expecting me to haggle her down but I knew I had a tenner in my wallet (they only take cash) and it wasn't worth aguing the toss. She said she would give me a discount on the next visit. 

She revealed that Mr. Steptoe had had a brain stem stoke but was recovering well, apparently such a stoke is only 15% survivable. I was unaware that he was unwell and it would explain the lack of new stock.

Anyhow, before I left the yard I was delighted to see Mr. Steptoe bustling about,  perhaps not quite as busy as usual, and we exchanged a few words. I thanked him for the wood saying that it was the answer to my prayers, and he replied "That's why we do it.". :-)

The slab of wood was probably the top of a chest of drawers. Normally, these are mahogany veneer only, so this would have been a top-end piece. I measured the slab and it was 3⁄4" + 2/32" thick.

I measured the wood at the back of the meal shelves and it is 3⁄4" + 1/32" thick. The match in thickness is almost perfect. I suspect they are both nominally 3⁄4" but would have been over-spec-ed for quality and sanding purposes.

In fact, the moulding on the edges is almost identical too.

I cleaned up the back of the meal-shelf and the top half of the reclaimed slab. It's perhaps wishful thinking, but I think I can see the sample purple cast of mahogany on both. I will ask my carpenter Gregor when he comes in on Monday.

Amazingly, it looks like the back of the shelf will clean up perfectly - the grey areas are splattered plastering primer that will just need elbow grease to remove. The slab, however, will need a little re-polish with a fine grit as it feels slightly rough.

half cleaned slab of wood from Steptoe's

cleaned meal-shelf at castle

Anyhow, there is a moral buried deep in this story. You may despair with what is in front of you but look again and look more carefully and you may find the exact solutions to the problems you have.