THE BACK VERANDAH

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 April 1939, Page 10

THE BACK VERANDAH

MAKE IT A SUN ROOM. How often you see a back verandah with dark woodwork, battered furniture, and a general unattractive appearance! Yet the back verandah is just the place where you can have fun introducing bright colours and gay accessories, inexpensively. For instance, if your closed-in back verandah gets a good period of sun each day, there at once you have the beginning of a smart sun room. ( Now, in planning a new decorative scheme, first of all ensure privacy for your new “room.” If the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker must come up on to the verandah to reach the back door, have a light plywood or asbestos sheet partition put up to cut off the rest of the verandah from such intrusions. FURNITURE AND COLOURS. Then you will be ready to decide on furniture and colours. Inexpensive canvas and wood chairs, and built-in furniture are best for verandah rooms, with some handy tables. In addition to this, a day-bed or stretcher is a very pleasant possession, with a shaped cover reaching right to the floor to give a neat, “boxy” appearance,, and piled with half a dozen brilliant cushions. Very handy little stools can be made from old kerosene boxes with the sides knocked out. planed, and sandpapered, and given a gay coat of enamel ... and if you knock out all except three sides, these boxes make quite elegant modern-looking low tables. Or you can still make use of the old verandah furniture, only freshen it up with enamel to fit in with the new colour scheme. Here’s one attractive colour scheme for your new verandah room ... hydrangea blue walls and ceiling, with furniture in biscuit colour. Then cover your day-bed or stretcher and any upholstered chairs (or replace the Canvas of camp chairs) with natural hessian, and' have gay tartan curtains and cushions in sun-fast cotton fabric, combining tones of hydrangea blue, green, and apricot. FLOOR COVERINGS For your floot coverings, paint over your boards or lino, with silver-grey paving paint ... you’ll find this almost an exact match for the “natural” hessian ... and add a rug in a blue-green shade —between the blue of the walls and the green of the tartan curtains. Another interesting sun room colour scheme includes rust-red, dull blue, dull green, and cream. These tawny shades are lovely when the sun shines warmly on them, particularly when they have accents of rich cream. For the day-bed and the cushions (you must have lots of cushions for a really comfortable verandah) you can get inexpensive cottons in a rust, blue, and green design. If you have rather worn canvas chairs already, hessian, dyed rust-red, would make grand new covers at very little cost. As a background for these charming hues, the walls, woodwork, and wooden' furniture, would all be painted cream; and the floor lino blue paving paint.