Two hours later, Lulu had been to the Spar, stocked up on a few things to go with what Willow had already left her, had bumped straight into Daisy, someone she used to know from school, and had popped into Pretty Beach surgery to register with the doctor.
She pulled her Audi into the same spot on the road outside Seafolly House, took the shopping bags out of the boot, took it all in, and then went back in and loaded it all into the fridge in the garage.
After making some lunch, she’d walked around the house and decided that she would leave the setup in the study as it was and would start her tasks with the garden and the kitchen. Her thinking being that even trimming down the weeds out the front and mowing where she could the place would look much better. She applied the same logic to the kitchen. The old dressers, the handmade cupboards, and the two antique butler sinks would seem a lot better once they were clean and wearing a fresh coat of paint.
Lulu looked at her reflection in the mirror; the long journey and months of stress were catching up with her. She looked tired and drawn.
Thank goodness for BB cream. Always good not to scare the locals when you arrive in town, she thought to herself as she pulled her makeup case out of her bag and gently rubbed some in.
Five minutes later, after making sure that Mabel was sorted, she pulled on her jacket and went to leave the house to go to the DIY centre.
‘Rightio, Mabel. I won’t be long. I’m going to be back with more paint than you’ll probably ever see in your lifetime,’ Lulu said with a chuckle. Mabel barked in response and settled herself down in her bed for a snooze.
After driving through Mermaids, past the sand dunes, and out the other side of Pretty Beach, Lulu made her way to the retail park in Newport Reef and the huge DIY store. Finding a space in the car park, Lulu locked the car and strolled in the sunshine through the huge automatic doors of the building. Once inside she found a trolley and made her way to the paint aisle.
Back in her oh-so-nice leafy London suburb, DIY had been more her husband Fenton’s department. Not that he ever did the ‘yourself’ bit. Their house was normally painted by Fenton’s dad when they were on holiday on the French Riviera. Though Fenton would never let anyone know that his dad did their painting. Fenton pretended that he paid to have the house painted. Fenton pretended about many things, it had turned out.
As Lulu walked up and down the vast aisles of paint, memories of her first little flat in London came back to her. She’d saved up a deposit for her flat by working by day in the West End in a PR company, and by night in a pub a few doors along from her rented one-room studio flat. In those days, she would come in from the ride home on the tube, run the tiny shower in the corner as a trickle so the water and electricity bill wouldn’t be too much, duck under it as quick as a flash, then get dressed and run out the door to her shift in the pub.
Those were the days. The first few years after she had left Pretty Beach. The time before she’d met Fenton via one of her colleagues at work. Life had never been the same since.
Lulu turned around a tin of emulsion and read the back and thought about the tiny flat she’d bought all those years ago. The flat, next door to a pub with a weekend market taking over the road on Saturdays and Sundays, had been owned by a real old hippy from the sixties. It had been in a dreadful state with orange walls, rodents in the kitchen, and stories from the neighbours of wild parties and scents wafting from the place that were rather more potent than incense.
Little by little, she’d done the place up, ripping up the carpets, painting the melamine kitchen, scrubbing the bathroom, and making do.
Now here she was years later in precisely the same boat. Though it felt as if there was a lot less on offer now. Then she was young, naive, full of enthusiasm, brimming with potential, and gagging for opportunity. Now she was jaded by life, covered in its knocks and bumps and only concerned with one thing: keeping her head above water.
Lulu blinked repeatedly as she read the back of the can. That was right, emulsion was for walls, and she started to walk towards another aisle looking for woodwork paint when a man in a bright orange apron asked her if she needed some help.
‘No thanks,’ Lulu replied with a smile. ‘Errr, actually, yes please.’
‘What can I do for you, my lovely?’ the man whose name badge announced him as Paul asked.
‘I have a rather large house to paint, a limited budget, and not a whole lot of idea what I’m doing.’
‘Right. Well, you’ve found the right man to help you and you are certainly in the correct place. So, you need some help with paint colours?’
‘Ha! Actually, I need some help with the actual paint itself. I’m on my own and I’ll be doing it myself. It’s huge and in a bad way but I need to make it somewhere for me to live. I need to make it as comfortable as I can, as quickly as I can.’
Paul shook his head and scratched his chin. ‘Not a problem. That’s what I’m here for; paint and doing it yourself,’ he said chuckling. ‘You’ll be fine, duck.’
‘Ahh, really? Thank you so much. I was just on the verge of walking out and crying in the car. I just don’t know where to start.’
Paul put a small tin of primer he was carrying onto one of the shelves and indicated for Lulu to follow him.
‘All about breaking it down into manageable pieces, duck. Just like a puzzle. Start with the prep, get everything ready to go, scoot around the edges, and put it all together. Okay, now, so when you say big, how big are we talking?’
Lulu grimaced. ‘We’re talking detached six-bedroom, nearly-derelict, backing onto the sea in Pretty Beach.’
Paul sucked in through his teeth. ‘Hmm. Blimey! Six bedrooms over there. It might be near derelict, but you'll be sitting on a pretty penny. And you’re on a budget, you say?’
‘Paul, I am on the smallest budget of my life. My collection of shoes is worth more than what I have to spend on paint,’ Lulu joked, and proceeded to tell Paul about the size and more importantly the condition of Seafolly House, opened her phone, and showed him some photos.
‘Well, duck, if it was me I would be starting with that there kitchen. The kitchen being the heart of the home and all that. Once you’ve got that together, everything else can be done bit by bit. You say it’s the original? It looks like it to me.’
‘Most of it is from what I can see. Apart from a section of it that’s melamine, by the looks of it. It even has the original table in the middle,’ Lulu replied.
‘So, if it’s twenties, I’m guessing all it will need is some preparation, then just a good clean up, an industrial-strength primer, and then you’ll be able to paint that whatever colour you like. And let me tell you, there are people in this store who would give their right arm for an original butcher’s block worktop like that one. All you’ll need I would say is a lot of work, a sander, and some elbow grease.’
‘Sounds like I might be able to manage it, then. Thank you so much, Paul. You’ve been so encouraging and helpful.’
‘Follow me over here,’ Paul said, and as they walked to the primer aisle he continued, ‘The trend at the moment is soft greys or the other end of the scale, very dark navy-blue or green. If you want my opinion, though, I’d blast the whole thing in white. It’s a big job you’ve got there. A lot of woodwork - do everything in white eases the cutting in and all that. Sanitises it too in one fell swoop.’
Lulu looked down at the paint brochure at the gorgeous boutique kitchen with the units in an exquisite dark green and quickly closed it.
‘Plus, white is the cheapest,’ Paul said and lowered his voice. ‘Don’t even consider that fancy brand you see in all the magazines - it’s all a load of marketing codswallop. Trust me. I know. I worked in a paint factory ten years ago. One lot goes to the budget tins, the next lot goes in the fancy brand with a different label for double the price.’
Lulu smiled to herself. Paul was gold.
Half an hour later, Lulu loaded huge cans of white trade paint, a job lot of rollers, and man
y packets of budget paintbrushes into the boot of her car. Paul had scrolled through the pictures on her phone of the huge kitchen, given her loads of tips including how to go about sanding down the worktop before anything else and had told her that in bite-size chunks, she’d be surprised how quickly it would get done.
Lulu had loved Paul’s enthusiasm but couldn’t quite match him in conviction and wondered how long she would be surrounded by tins of white paint.
6
Lulu had been cleaning for days, and on top of feeling constantly as if she needed a shower because of all the cleaning and crawling around on old floorboards, she now had paint everywhere too. White paint was on her clothes, in her hair, and on her face. She did, however, have all the cupboards under the sink primed and painted, and the run of cupboards on the walls was not far behind.
Lulu stood back with her hands on her hips so that she could survey the whole kitchen. Paul from the DIY shop had been correct and she was so pleased that she had taken his advice; the white paint worked wonders. It transformed what she’d started with, from dingy dark old cupboards to clean sanitised storage she wouldn't mind storing in the dishes she had spent many years collecting.
As Lulu realised it had come up a lot better than she had anticipated she wondered how it would look with some of her nice Lovely Little Things bits and pieces on the shelves. A few of her gorgeous scented candles, a big pot of utensils, little baskets full of napkins on the dresser.
Thinking about it all, she thought about her little homewares business Lovely Little Things and how she missed it. Yet another thing that Fenton had nearly ruined in her life.
Her small but thriving business, Lovely Little Things, had very nearly been another calamity of the whole divorce and debt but luckily, Lulu had come out of it with her stock still intact and her website, though on hold at the moment, sitting there waiting to be switched back on.
Lulu’s life-long obsession with accessories, things for the home, and finishing touches which had morphed into a small business, had more or less begun on its own when friends and colleagues had continuously asked her where she got her things and how she put them together to make a lovely outfit. It had grown from those initial comments to a tiny boutique market stall, to a pop-up shop and then an online store that had slowly begun to grow.
It had all been on hold since Fenton had left her, she had been made redundant, the bailiffs had arrived, and the house had been sold. Now, looking around the kitchen and feeling the need to add her bits and pieces, Lulu realised it was time to start Lovely Little Things up again. Now she was sure that Fenton and his debts couldn’t get their hands on it, she was ready; it was time to bring Lovely Little Things back.
Lulu looked down at her paint-splattered jeans and ran her hand over the door of the now painted cupboard under the sink.
‘Not a bad job for a first go,’ she said to Mabel, as Mabel lay collapsed sideways on the kitchen floor. Mabel opened one eye, looked as if she wasn’t at all impressed, slowly closed it again, and let out a huge sigh.
Lulu had gone gangbusters on the house since she’d got home from the DIY store, working into the early hours every day. Most of the ground floor had now been vacuumed multiple times, peeling wallpaper and cracked plaster had been removed, and the boarded-up windows had been replaced in what felt like no time by a lovely young man from Pretty Beach Glass who had told her, in no uncertain terms, that they didn’t make windows like the ones in Seafolly House anymore.
Next on the list was a plumber, who was coming to hopefully get hot water to the copper bath on the first floor and replace the hot water tank with something that worked other than randomly.
Lulu had made lists of what was crucial to her successfully living in the house and what she was prepared to spend her dwindling money on. Plumbing, hot water, glass in the windows, and new locks on the doors had come in way over the garden and falling down fittings outside. Once Lulu had locks that actually turned and hot water to the bath, she began to feel better about everything in life.
As she came back from the loo, Lulu tucked her hair behind her ears and her phone went in her pocket with a text from Willow.
Got a bit of sunburn here so I’m staying under the shade for the day! How are you getting on there?
Good. I got a job lot of paint and I’ve really got stuck into it. Hang on I’ll show you some pics.
Lulu went around the kitchen taking pictures of the now white cabinets and under the sink cupboards and sent them to Willow.
OMG! Are you kidding me? It actually doesn’t look too bad!
I know. You don’t need to tell me the power of a base layer - that’s what I do with my accessories. Clearly, it works for old kitchens too.
It looks really good. Crikey. You must have gone some, though!
Lulu took a few pictures of the other side of the kitchen, which now although it was certainly clean, was still the dark mahogany timber and casting a dim light over the rest of the room.
Oh. Maybe not so much on that side. Eeek!
Nup. A bit depressing on this side and the work involved to get it looking good.
Yeah. Good motivation though, if you look at how the first lot turned out.
I know! The guy in the DIY store said to do it in chunks and it was the best advice.
So proud of you for doing this all on your own.
Thanks. OK. Gotta go, Wills.
Lulu put her phone back in her pocket and walked over to the line of French paned windows running all the way across the whole back wall of the kitchen and looked down towards the sea. The white cupboards had already changed how the light bounced around and Lulu felt hopeful that things in the house were on the up.
As she looked out at the weeds and brambles and an old birdhouse swinging precariously from a tree, she added clearing a patch of lawn in front of the kitchen window to her list so that she could at least have one clear area of the garden to look at while she was washing up.
Onwards and upwards and free.
7
Lulu Drinkwater had had enough. She’d been working until two in the morning on the house, having a shower, going to bed, getting up early, and starting the whole process again. It was like a monotonous merry-go-round that she couldn’t get off. Every day she would get up, have a cup of tea and a cinnamon bun down at the end of the garden overlooking the sea, walk back to the house, and start cleaning or painting or both. It was awfully slow and tedious work, and she seemed to be getting nowhere fast.
She looked out at the bay as the sun struggled to get through the clouds, and a sea mist settled on the top of the water and touched her face as she held it up to the sky. Glancing down past the jetty, Lulu could just make out a few cars starting to arrive for work and in the distance, an old fishing boat chugged out towards the coast.
Lulu took some deep breaths in, stroked Mabel who was sitting beside her with her nose in the air sniffing to her heart’s content, and started to plan her day. She’d been in the kitchen for the previous three days straight from dawn to dusk, and it was now mostly done with both its base primer and first coat of white eggshell.
It had been long, laborious work with her crawling into tiny spaces with a paintbrush and holding a roller overhead on a pole while balancing on a ladder but she had to admit it was looking unbelievably different. She hesitated to even think it but it was up there with the handmade shaker kitchens she’d seen in the brochure in the paint shop. She had nearly cried at how lovely they were compared to what she had started with. Now she had been up close and personal with the cabinetry, she appreciated what she hadn’t before; the outstanding carpentry and beautiful old woodwork.
Today she was having a breather from crawling around in dusty cupboards and the fumes of white paint, and as she picked her way carefully through the bramble and weed-covered path, she looked over at what she believed was once the lawn.
Stopping on the terrace outside the conservatory she looked over to the left side of the garden. She would st
art just as she had with the kitchen and work in small chunks until the lawn was clear. She had no idea when she would ever attempt the actual flower beds and trees but she decided that she would cross that bridge when she came to it.
An hour later, after a few choice swear words and a lot of struggling with the strimmer Willow had left for her in the garage, a one-metre deep section of the lawn closest to the terrace was stripped.
‘Hmm, Mabel. We can’t really call this a lawn, can we?’ Lulu said as she knelt down on the floor and looked at what was mostly weeds with the odd blade of grass in between. ‘But we can most definitely call this progress.’
Mabel was having a whale of a time sniffing everything and everywhere she could and had mud all over her nose to show for it.
As Lulu propped up the strimmer on the wall and sat on the terrace with a glass of cold water, she was wondering if she had the energy to continue with the strimming and pulling out weeds, when her phone started ringing. Looking at the unknown number, she had a horrible feeling it might be yet another thing about Fenton and his dealings.
‘Hello,’ Lulu said.
‘Hello. Is this Lulu Drinkwater?’ a friendly voice asked.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Oh hi, Lulu. This is Helen from Pretty Beach Sandy Hotel, personal assistant to Atlanta Cavendish.’
Great, what’s this going to be about? Don’t tell me the vacancy is no longer live and I haven’t even started yet.
‘Hello. What can I do for you?’
‘Actually, I’m calling about a job vacancy we have here at the hotel. I know your sister quite well, so I sort of know about you and I thought it might be a good fit.’
‘Oh right. Lovely. Okay. Thanks for getting in touch,’ Lulu replied trying to make her voice sound both happy, interested and enthusiastic at the same time.
Lovely Little Things in Pretty Beach : A magical feel-good romance book to escape with in summer 2021. Page 4
