One can be lucky

The retouching of the walls is almost completed. I am a bit dissatisfied that the new color has turned out to be a bit lighter than what there is on the wall and I have still some minor retouching to do.
I hope that lightness will disappear with time, but right now it is not very fancy.
Except for that and for the eternal house cleaning, I always keep the eyes open to try to improve the home feeling with items to complete the furniture.

As we have barely curtains and few carpets, the acoustic can be quite challenging, especially with a horde of small kids around.
I have always thought we should try to focus on buying carpets, but I have never come around to it, fully.
Though, the other day I did see an advertisement on some selling group on Facebook for a big carpet. I am not sure it is fully original or a copy or what, but it was big and beautiful and I thought it would have worked just fine in the dining room.

The carpet, while we are placing it

I think the result looks promising - we can surely adjust the positioning in the room, but size wise it works as a charm.
It feels very strange though to have a carpet there, where we have never had it. The best is that finally all the marks of Oscar's cars been thrown on the floor to play are hidden under it!

Carpet, point of view #1

Carpet, point of view #2

Carpet, point of view #3

Same day, although time was not on our side, trying to do too many things at the same time, as always, I did finally manage to get hands on a table to put the mangle. 

A mangle is something that Italians have no clue what it is. However, it seems a "must" in a Swedish home, especially with a touch of retro. 

I have started to use it, although I am not yet having a full proper technique with it, I am afraid, but I didn't even have space where to have it when I am ironing or folding the laundry. 

The pink painted desk

Not that our laundry room is fancy in any way, but having a good surface for the mangle and for handling laundry was needed, although it is a bit on the way for the drying rope right now.

The laundry room is getting crowded

Our unfancy laundry room

There is plenty to do here and probably I need to adjust these things several times before finding the optimal position. But a good start would be if I manage to sell/give away the wooden panels that were in the kitchen in the 90s. Should I keep one for "memory" of the house at least?

Everyday life

I will never stop repeating that living in our house means having constantly something to do house wise.
Even something so trivial as a "spring cleaning" is a major task that takes the whole year (as we don't have a maid differently from the first owners of the house, plus I am working full time). Sometimes some of the rooms just don't get cleaned properly that year and it is not a big drama.
I have now replanned the activity (of course, I like replanning...) so I am prioritizing the kitchen which I had half done more than a year ago.

The kitchen cabinet from 1906

The other day I was focusing on cleaning the inside of the lower part of the kitchen cabinet from 1906, which is located in what once upon the time was the serving "corridor". 

The cabinet is painted with many layers of white and it is possible to see some other fancier color underneath. The original seems a "forest green", which I wouldn't mind to have in my "new dream kitchen".

One can see the original paint of the kitchen

The lower part of the cabinet is constructed in a very interesting way. There is the list on the wall side and the bottom is constituted by floor planks. 

We finally also got the last isolators to have where we had installed some wall lamps some time ago. We had already placed two on a lamp and now we finally got the second.

Detail of the porcelain isolator and the twigged textile cord

Finally, I have kept going on retouching paint in the different rooms and realized I had to retouch some holes, which will mean additional work. But I guess it is about time as they have been around for few years, as most of our tasks.

There was an alarm sensor there

Some of this retouches can be a bit more complicated, as for example this one as the device was not moved when we painted/put mikrolit on the walls. So there will be more putty layers for smoothening up the paint layers

How it looks now after closing the holes at least

I have also finally sand the work done last summer to patch some digging done by the electrician on the wall for finding the ringbell cables. 

When doing that I noticed that my retouches of paint on the wall didn't really work good. The color seems lighter than what I have which is a new interesting problem to solve.

Creative electrical work and the wall patch that I sanded

Some retouch

At times there are ungrateful tasks that need to be handled also with some bitterness as it is far from optimal from the current perspective and compromises are needed.
 Now, we are also good at procrastinating so it has been for few years that i have had to paint the plastic lids that are put on the wall to hide electrical cables.
Just to make them melt on the wall and not be so obvious.
On top of that, last year, when we were painting the metal sheets on the roof, we had got a leakage in the tower room and the ceiling over the piano had clear stains.
Thing is that I have to have all sort of plastic paint available for doing this as the wall is originally painted with some of that paint and we have recently threw away some big jar since it had got bad. Today I would have not painted the walls with this kind of paint, so it irritates me to have to go and buy small jars of new one.

Starting to paint the lids in the living room

Anyway, I have finally started to work on this task and have completed four rooms of six. In few of them though I need to do more retouches as the wall has holes or got patched and I have to investigate how to fix it properly or at its best.
A small task, but still time taking in its simplicity...