Pit checks & mining display

This weekend, yet again has been a really lovely one - I seem to be doing well at getting really good weekends at three minute, it's fab! My mum and dad have been over to stay and do some work on our kitchen for us this weekend. It's almost finished now so there will be a big reveal in a couple of weeks to see the whole thing done. The only thing let to do is to get door handles put on the door and to get the glossing done. We have had some wood paneling put around the bottom of the walls in our dining room part so this has all been primed and made to look white but ha not yet been glossed. Like I say, only a couple of weeks and this will all be done.

We have however been working on something else. Where we live is an old mining village. The pit closed in 1993 however there is still a big mining community left in the village- almost everyone seems to have a connection to the pit in one way or another. I am fairly sure that we are in the minority as we don't really have any direct connection to the mine ourselves. My husband has always had a keen interest in history as have I so long as it's some sort of history that I can relate to. I like to hear stories from people and see real things from the time that I am looking at in order to really be able to take any of it in.

My husband has been collecting a small amount of memorabilia for a while now. This started mostly from finding a couple of things when we moved into the house. We found some old tools marked up with national coal board or the name of the local colliery. We also found a couple of "coal not dole" badges in various places around he house as we have been decorating. The thing that I really like and am pleased that Adam found and has started to collect are pit checks. Theses are small metal disks that the miners would take as they entered the pit so that above the ground there would be a record of who was down there should there be any kind of accident in the mine.

We have started to find some of these on the Internet - you can get all sorts of different shaped and sized checks and, the part that I really love is that each one tells a story. They all have the name of the colliery that they are from engraved in them and they would then be stamped with a number as well for each pitworker who would have his own number.

These checks and the few other bits that we had, have just been sat upstairs on a shelf gathering dust for a while as we didn't really know what else to do with them. However, inspired by the kitchen being nearly finished, we decided that now was the time to think of something to do with them (& clear a shelf upstairs!)

We went through all kinds of options for how to display the checks. In a frame was our first thought, a bit like I did for Emma and Ross' wedding however the one thing that we have both noticed when we came to show anyone the checks was that they would all want to pick them up, feel the weight and texture of them and just have that real hands on history thing going on with them. I really love this and so I didn't really like the ides of having them hidden behind glass.

My only other thought after this was that we should mount them on some kind of a board. We spent a full morning online the other week looking for how we could get any kind of plank of wood or board of some description to be able to put them up on. With a lot of the kitchen being a white as well and thinking that these might be able to go up around our dining table I didn't really want these to be plain wood - just to make the job of finding something suitable that bit more difficult! Equally, a plain white board could also be just a little bit too plain and perfect for displaying this kind of thing.

Hmmm...tricky!

I really liked the idea of getting a wooden board, painting it white but then sanding it back down slightly to reveal the wood grain through the paint again. Now we just had the problem of where to get a couple of planks of wood from that would be nice enough for us to have up on the wall but not finished or anything as we wanted to paint and then sand them.

Another couple of hours of searching the Internet later and we were still no nearer so I got far too frustrated with the idea and decided to forget it for a few minutes and just go for a wander about the house to take a break from it all for a few minutes. This was when we came across a set of shelves that we have up in our spare room (& used to have a set of down in our kitchen until we started decorating). This meant that we now have some spare shelves that we might be able to butcher for this very purpose.

We knocked the ends off the shelves first, we wouldn't need the brackets.

And then we could start with the fun bit - painting them!

Just one coat should do it I think as we want to sand them down anyway to reveal the wood grain back through now that they are painted

One done each and both sanded back down to reveal the wood grain throguh the white and voila. Two boards all ready.

Well almost! Now for the bit that I seemed to somehow get landed with...measuring them out and planning the spacing for the pins to get hammered into them. We worked out how big the largest of the checks is and made a plan around this. They ended up being 5cm squares with the marks for where the pins would go being 1cm from the top of each square & in the centre of the sideways measurement.

By placing this template and another identical one over the two boards that we had painted we then knew where each of the pins would need to go that the checks will hang on. And the fun can begin - the hammers are out!

My hammering skills weren't perfect but we both managed ok with knocking all of the pins in. There were a few slip ups with the hammers but this all adds to the character of the boards. That's what we're saying anyway! After a little bit of straightening of the pins we have two boards ready to go.

While my Dad was here with his drill at the weekend we asked him to put these up for us. They were originally going to go up in the kitchen but it was my Dads idea to have these up in the hall instead. They are there and ready to go now when you go in/out of the house as they would have been at the entrance to the pit. We have a nice little shelf out there where the other little mining bits that we have acquired can also go.

We have an old miners helmet that we have had for a while. We have recently added the lamp to this which we got with the white helmet on the right of this picture. The white helmet is a medics helmet hence why it has a Red Cross pained on the side of this one, we also have two lamps - one that would have been used (& is really battered!) and the other that is a miniature presentation lamp. We have a rebreather that would have been used in case of any emergencies down the mine and some union badges as well.