Eek! Only 15 days till we open

It’s been a while since our latest post about what we’ve been up, but we promise we have definitely been busy.  The last few weeks of the winter clean is always fairly hectic.  This year however added to te usual mayhem has been the deinstallation of internal protection work from the first phase of building work, plus preparations for the next phase.  We have also had various contractors and conservators in and out of the house.

The dust protection tunnel and hoarding has now come down in the Leicester Gallery, Museum Room, Billiard Room, Spangled Dressing Room and Spangled Bedroom.  This meant we could finally deep clean the rooms, and it’s a good job we had the protection because it turns out there was a fair amount of dust!

Volunteer Zena, gives the bay window of the Museum Room a thorough clean after the tunnel was taken down.

Our contractors dismantling the tunnel section in the Billiard Room.

With the tunnel  removed from the Billiard Room, it was time to move the Billiard Table back in to its usual place in the room.

The team re-hang net curtains and blackout curtains in the Billiard Room.

This image demonstrates perfectly the need for internal dust protection during building work.

The tunnel coming down revealed that an area of plaster ceiling in the bay window of the Spangled Dressing Room had become unstable.  With our building surveyor Robin and our contractor we discussed what approach should be taken to make it safe.

Some small bits of plaster had broken off altogether.

After investigation and discussion it was decided to remove the unstable are of plaster. It turned out to be a modern plaster skim…

…and not as much of the plaster needed to be removed as we first thought.

Earlier in the month we took a delivery of some parts of the James II Bed, including the headboard and and some curtains.  They have returned after several years of conservation work.  As they are very carefull packed and in quite large boxes we took the decision to store them in the Venetian Ambassador’s Bedroom.  The Headboard will be no display to visitors during the 2013 season.

Conserved parts of the James II bed have returned from the National Trust textile studio in Norfolk.

It took a whole day for the conservation Team with  two of our volunteers to move all the boxes from the Great Hall to the Venetian Ambassadors Bedroom.  There has been lots of other lifting and moving around of various objects in recent weeks.  Including two tapestries on 4.5 metre long tubes.  They came from Lady Betty’s Bedroom which is now empty for the building work and were stored in the Billiard Room last year.  As the Billiard Room has been re-instated we needed to find another temporary home for them.  It turns out they both fitted rather nicely under the refectory table in the Great Hall.

So where do you store two tapestries on 4.5 metre long tubes…? Under a table of course!

Cliveden Conservation have been back carrying out more work to the Great Hall and Great Stairs floors.

Wet paper towels are left overnight on recently repaired areas of grouting to help it set properly.  If it dries out to quickly the new grouting can fail. 

Toning in the new grouting to match the colours of the stone. 

This week CSC Window Films have been in working int he first half of the house, where windows have been repaired.  They apply a film to the windows that absorbs ultraviolet light out of sunlight coming in the windows.  It is very important to minimise or stop completely any UV coming in to the show rooms as it is the most damaging part of the light spectrum and especially harmful to our textile collection.  Light damage is cumulative and completely irreversible.

Applying new UV film to the windows. The Museum Room window has never had film on before as it has been behind a display cabinets since the 1960s!

More shifting and lifting about!  This time four large portraits needed hanging at the north end of the Leicester Gallery.  They had been taken down while the dust protection was up in front of the window.

The deep clean of rooms has now been finished, leaving two of the long galleries, the Billiard Room, Great Stairs and Spangled Rooms floors to be waxed and polished.  We have already started uncovering some of the rooms and putting the furniture back in to place.  Two more weeks to go and we’ll be open again.  Where did winter go?

Sarah, Lucy, Melinda and Emily

p.s it’s snowing AGAIN!

The James II Bed

One of four beds at Knole, the James II Bed is probably one of the most important pieces of Stuart furniture in existence to have survived.  For many years the bed has been in an extremely fragile condition, a result of early conservation work carried out by the Rural Industries Bureau in the 1960s and exposure to the agents of deterioration (light, dust, high relative humidity).

James II Bed in the Venetian Ambassadors Bedroom at Knole

Since 2006 visitors have viewed the bed in a de-constructed state as most of its components were removed to the National Trust textile studio where the team have been thousands of painstaking hours cleaning the textiles and piecing back together tiny fragments.

Last month Ksynia (NT textile advisor) and Aimee from the textile studio and John from Tankerdale (NT furniture advisor) came to remove the last of the upper valances (the inner four).

Ksynia and John preparing one of the valances before removing it.

Aimee receives one of the valances ready for packing

Aimee prepares the valances to go in the travel box.

All packed and ready to go!

Once conservation has been finished on the valances the last big piece of the bed, the Tester will be next for treatment.

The National Trust Images website has lots of photographs of when most of the bed was dismantled in 2006.

Lucy, Melinda, Emily and Sarah

 

 

 

 

Happiness is a tidy store room!

Along with the many other things that keep us busy in the show rooms, changing light bulbs is another job.  Many of the light fittings are several decades old, combined with the very damp environment, they often fail.  We always hope that it’s just the light bulb that needs changing but more often or not it becomes a job for our electricians to come and repair the light fitting itself.  This week 2 lights in the Brown Gallery and 3 in the Kings Room needed some investigation.

Emily changing the sconce light bulb…only to find the light still wouldn’t work

Wall sconce in the Kings Room that had stopped working.  After trying a couple of new bulbs it still didn’t work, so it was another one added to the list for our electricians to look at.

By the end of Friday all the lights were in working order…we’ll see what Monday brings.  On Tuesday we finished the last bit of floor waxing for a while when the Cartoon Gallery was re-waxed.  We had got a bit behind our schedule but we’ve caught up with ourselves again.  Each show room floor will be waxed again after the Jubilee bank holidays and before the start of the summer holidays.

Little and large, our floor polishers.

In our last blog we documented our efforts of getting a new cover on the James II Bed mattress.  It was all ready to be moved back to the Venetian Ambassadors Bedroom (VAB), and this week we actually managed to get it there!  4 flights of stairs, 2 court yards and 2 long galleries later we got it to the VAB and back on the bed.

Taking the transport cover off the mattress

Lisa, Sarah and Melinda get the mattress in to place on the James II Bed

Back where it belongs!

With the mattress out of the store room we could finally begin to tidy and reorganise the room.  Something that has been on the ‘to do’ list for nearly two years.  With the help of our volunteer Tom we sorted through a lot of objects in the store that are awaiting to be accessionied to our inventory and moved tables around to create better work space.

Found objects in the collections store

Death-watch and Common Furniture Beetle damage to the backboard

Hello Mr Death-watch Beetle!

Unfortunately as we were working we found lots of dead and live pest insects, Varied Carpet Beetle and their larvae, and Death-Watch Beetle.  This is a concern as the store room is environmentally controlled.  The store rooms are always one of those things that slip down the priority list, and we don’t get to spend as much time cleaning the store and condition checking objects as we should.

The store is in need of a really thorough deep clean, which we’ll be doing next week.  We will treat what we can for pest insects, and keep up increased cleaning of the space to try and bring the pest insect infestation under control.  This will be easier to do now that the room has had a good tidy up.

Tidied and reorganised work space in the collections store.

Emily, Melinda, Lucy and Sarah.

How to put a cover on a 400 year old mattress, and other things!

As well as the usual visitor route clean, and some more floor waxing, this week we found some time to go up to the store-room.  There is a huge backlog of work to be done in the store, mostly condition checking objects and re-packaging them to make them more accessible.  This work is currently hindered by a lack of space in the store.  A large area is taken up by one of the mattresses belonging to the James II Bed (now partially dismantle and being conserved at NT textile studio).

James II Bed mattress. About the size of a modern large double, but twice the height…and full of feathers! The tear can just be seen in the middle along the top.

To create a suitable work space the mattress needs to go back to the Venetian Ambassadors Bedroom where the remainder of the bed is.  This you may assume would be an easy task.  Think again! The original mattress cover has deteriorated quite badly and there is a large tear in the middle, any movement of the mattress causes feathers to come flying out.  There was no way the mattress could be moved from the table, let alone down 3 flights of stairs, and across 2 courtyards, up the Great Stairs and through the 3 show rooms.

Entrance end of our store room in need of reorganisation to create a suitable work area.

Following the advise from our textile conservator it was decided that a new outer cover should be made for the mattress that would contain the feathers.  The original cover is too fragile around the tear to sew it up, so this was the next best option.  Our fabulous sewing volunteer Kristine made 2 covers for us.  One to be the new outer cover, and a second cover to transport the mattress.  This Wednesday we finally had enough time and people to get the new covers on.

Lucy, Sarah and our volunteer Tom nearly have the new outer cover on.

The mattress took a bit of persuasive handling and some brilliant team work but we succeeded!  Now we just need another free morning with enough people, (and no rain) to get it over to the show rooms.  Then we can reorganise the work tables in the store-room and get the object condition checking under way.

Its on! Tom Velcro’s up the seam.

Wednesday continued to be a busy day as Sarah and Tom went in to another store, our temporary store during the building work in the Spangled Dressing Room.  We are carrying out weekly inspections of the paintings and upholstered furniture to check for any pest insect activity or active mould growth.  So we have ongoing monitoring we are using pest insect traps and one of our temperature and relative humidity sensors too.

Tom, an MA student studying preventive conservation, inspecting the upholstery of a stool from the Spangled Bedroom.

Unfortunately we think that some of the mould on a couple of the paintings has got worse since the room has become a store.  Due to the dust protection that has been installed it has created a sealed room with much less air circulation.  Until the room was sealed and contents put in we were unsure exactly what the environmental conditions would become. The many weeks of wet weather have not helped as the relative humidity has been much higher for longer than usual at this time of year.

This painting already had quite an extensive covering of mould, but it has got worse since being in store.

Hopefully we’ll be installing a fan, and / or a dehumidifier in to the store-room to maintain the relative humidity below 65% to stop the mould developing.  This will depend on whether or not our electricians can get a power supply to the room.  One of our biggest problems in looking after the show rooms and collection is the lack of power sockets and power supply.  We use what seems like miles of extension leads just to vacuüm the visitor route every day.

During Friday’s ‘Meet the Conservation Team’ event we vacuüm cleaned the upholstery of two stools from the Ballroom.  They were last cleaned three years ago, and each stool took about half an hour each to clean.  We used our adjustable suction setting vacuums with soft brush nozzle ends.

Stool from the Ballroom, the upholstery was due to be vacuumed cleaned, having last been cleaned in 2009.

After each textile is cleaned we empty the contents of the vacuüm bag so we can analyse the contents, compare it to the last clean and see the difference in the amount of dust removed.  We also check for any fibres of the textile, this will tell us that either the suction of the vacuüm was set to high, or the textile is deteriorating.

Inside the vacuüm bag.

Emptying the contents to out in a clear plastic bag for analysis.

Job done for another three years! Just four more stools from the Ballroom to clean now.

Interpretation demonstrating the variable suction settings of our vacuums.

Lucy, Melinda, Emily and Sarah.