The revamp queen (From The Northern Echo)

The revamp queen

10:49am Tuesday 15th December 2009 in

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Lucy Richardson meets a woman with a passion for taking broken down bits of furniture and giving them a new lease of life.

ACHILDHOOD desire to take in waifs and strays has never left Andrea McMahon. And now, her 20-year passion for renovating unwanted furniture has made her creations so popular she is now eager to set up her own business.

To some, a tatty chest of drawers tucked away at the back of a charity shop may look like a monstrosity that has had its day. But to Andrea it is a hidden gem ready to be given a new lease of life and loved once again.

The mother-of-four combines looking after her family and helping on her husband’s fruit and vegetable stall on Stockton market with working on her latest project.

She admits that her creative thirst “is a bit of an obsession” but there is no doubt that it makes her very happy. A recent triumph was an old pine wardrobe a friend asked if she could do anything with. Andrea sanded and painted it before removing the wooden panels which were replaced with chicken wire. The back was papered with decorated sheets intended for scrapbooking and the bespoke piece now sits proudly in her friend’s kitchen.

“It’s nice to have things in your home that no one else has,” she said.

“I have always liked to be different, I have never been one for fashion.

I do look at magazines and think ‘that looks lovely’, but I don’t copy.

They just give me ideas of how I could recreate something in a different way.”

Andrea’s love of decorating dates back to her childhood when her family travelled across Australia.

Her father, Don Crockett, was an entertainer and when work was hard he would paint hotel bedrooms to earn some extra money.

“From then on I have always been painting,” says Andrea. “I am obsessed with colours and putting them together. When I was younger I told my mum that I was going to live in a big house, have 12 children and adopt more and I would do the same with dogs and cats.

“I have always wanted to take in waifs and strays and look after things.

I look at the unwanted, unloved wardrobes, chairs and drawers in charity shops and think ‘you poor, sad things’ and I get attached to them.”

Sitting proudly in the front room of her home in Linthorpe, Middlesbrough, is her latest “baby”.

An unusual lady’s writing bureau with a glass cabinet on either side made her eyes light up when she spotted it in a charity shop on Stockton High Street. It has been sanded, painted cream and then stencilled before being sanded down once more to give it a “shabby chic” look. The inside doors have been painted a vibrant turquoise which complement the faded pink roses paper stuck to the back panels of each cabinet. New handles from Bombay Duck and a matching chair complete the transformation which has already had her friends clamouring over it.

“I am always scouting round second hand shops and looking at the classified adverts in newspapers,”

says Andrea. “I would love to get hold of some French furniture, including armoires, but they are scarce to find in the North-East.

“Some people do not like old things, and never will – which is fine.

But this is like my drug, my thrill, I love doing it. At the age of 42, I’ve finally found the job I want to do.”

■ For more information on Andrea call 01642-504811.

What are they talking about?

Teenagers have always had their own language. It’s time parents did some vocab homework.

A COUPLE of months ago, thousands of students headed off to start new lives at halls of residence across the country. Once these young minds found their new ‘hoods’ (neighbourhoods or universities to the rest of us) and were away from controlling parental influences, it was inevitable that they would adopt a new slang.

So when they return for the Christmas holidays will their parents (or ‘rents’) be able to understand the new student vernacular? A new dictionary, Pimp Your Vocab, by Oxford graduate Lucy Tobin aims to bridge the divide between the generations.

Published to help parents of students and teenagers get to grips with the baffling words used by their offspring, the decoded jargon includes words such as being “owned” (that’s embarrassed), “teek” (old – stemming from antique) and “neek”, a combination of nerd and geek.

The book was inspired by the 23-year-old author’s own experiences after she had to go through the difficult job of explaining ‘teenglish’ lingo to her parents and her teachers at university.

Tobin, who graduated in English from Oxford University last summer, said a misunderstanding during a tutorial led to the idea for the book.

“One of my tutors couldn’t understand what a student meant when she’d said she had been “IM-ing”, which means communicating online via instant messaging,” Tobin explains.

“Then when I arrived home in the holidays, after spending months surrounded by people my own age at uni, my friends and I realised our parents were stopping us all mid-conversation to ask what we were talking about.

Eventually, I decided to write a dictionary to decode the language kids use.”

Some exam markers and tutors have complained that teenglish terms and language from internet forums and text messages are creeping into their students’ formal work, and fear the book could accelerate this trend.

However, tutor Dr Helen Barr, of Oxford University, has praised the book, saying: “At last! A book that helps us understand the young.”

Tobin says she hopes the book will improve communication between the younger and older generations, but admits that she doesn’t necessarily expect to see it included in univeristy linguistics reading lists.

■ Pimp Your Vocab by Lucy Tobin (Portico, £7.99)

TEENGLISH EXPLAINED

Allow (that): This phrase confusingly means ‘absolutely no way’..

CBA: Translates as ‘Can’t Be Arsed’.

Frape: This is a mixture of Facebook and rape, describing someone’s social networking profile being hacked into and changed.

Neek: A combination of nerd and geek.

Obv: An abbreviation for obvious.

Owned: To be humiliated or embarrassed, usually after being shown up or exposed in some way.

Smacked it: To have done well at a particular activity.

Teek: An adjective for someone who is very old/older. Derives from antique.

Wagwan: A greeting, stemming from Jamaican patois. “What’s going on?”

Waste: Someone who acts in an idiosyncratic way.