So my Grandmother loved her flowers and had them all over the house. I took most of them out of the bar when I moved in since they were old and dirty but there are still some around the house. She even had a flower box built into the upstairs bar. This is a picture of it from when I moved in.
Now I had some construction done and all the flowers were covered with plaster dust as well as several years of regular dust. Today's project was cleaning that flower box. Something that shouldn't have been too hard of a project or so I though. Another counter in the bar has a similar box and it has a metal liner that just lifts out. This one didn't have that. Small pieces of styrofoam were just stuffed down it in and the flowers inserted however. So that quick job of taking the whole box outside became a big job. I has to take all the flowers out and all of the old styrofoam then clean all the dirt out of the non-lined wood box. I was left with an empty box sort of like this one:
That is the one from the counter in the bar. I've never put flowers back in it and don't plan to. Probably turn it into a light one of these days. That one has the liner like the upstairs one should have had.
So now to rebuild. You can get the florist green styrofoam made for these types of things but that stuff can be expensive and hard to find. So I cheat. I use regular white styrofoam packing. This is a piece of the material I snagged from my garage. I saved a bunch of it from stuff I've ordered over the years.
So I packed 4 layers in the bottom of the box. I would have done 5 layers of the white then just painted the top green but that's not a good idea for indoors. I did have 3 sheets of the green left so I used it for the top layer.
Then the next bit of fun began. I thought the flowers were silk and plastic. Turned out about half of them were made out of feathers. Actual feathers. Talk about dirty. Unlike plastic they also decay over time and well they were falling apart. Took over an hour of sorting and cleaning all the feathers off the plastic and silk ones.
Finally it was time to put what I had left back in. I started with the hanging ivy spacing it out evenly around the outside. Sorted the rest of the flowers out by type while I was putting the ivy in too.
Next up came the tall leaf pieces.
Now all the big flowers and couple of tall ferns. Tried to mirror everything so it would look symmetrical.
Next came all the slim tall weird leaf pieces and rest of the small miscellaneous pieces
Now to try to fill in some more since those feather ones were tossed. I had a vase on top of the fridge I have been tossing some flowers in from things I threw away. They were supposed to go outside when I redo the flower boxes out there but I decided they would look good in here so I put them in. 2 big yellow ones and some other small ones.
It still needed some more in the back and some height. Out to my stash of flowers in the garage. Found 2 nice tall ones about 6 small bright blue ones and one other. Added them for the current final layout.
I'll probably add another tall flower in the center but I will have to search the garage some more to see if I can find one or go out and buy one. Maybe add 2 more tall ones as well. Not important for now. The whole purpose of this was just to clean the thing. Now I have to clean the counter again and re-sweep the floor. So for now project complete.