Lilac and stairs

 In the attempt to make the garden better, we have covered a flowerbed towards our southern neighbours with some plastic and started to plant new things (maybe I will share how it looks another day). Anyway, I was checking how it was coming around, in an evening walk in the garden, while picking one apple or two, and I saw that one of our lilacs is not in great shape. 

The lilac with a glimps of the flowerbed

Detail of the leaves

After an inspection, it turns out that it is affected by armillaria, some sort of spore that has basically killed the plant.

At the same time, and after non few discussions around paint and where to paint, we are maybe hopefully finalizing the stairs to the basement.

This was after a first hand of paint, if I understood right, it doesn't look like painted at all to me. But I will take pictures when there is some relevant different. I believe it will take 2-3 hands of paint.

It will be nice to see this finished. Then, of course, I wish that the banister would be still shining green and not covered in a dark patina and that the leaves would not keep falling...

Wrong nuance

 When I manage to do the (what I called) "spring cleaning" of a room, I try to see if there are things to fix. It often happens that I need to also retouch the color on the walls, for a reason and another.

Few years back, I was trying to fix Oscar's wall and I noticed that we didn't have the right paint color. I went to the shop and based on the names that we had stored from when we painted the house (sadly with plastic based color - standard) in 2012, I bought the smallest available jar.

The jar

The documentation we kept - I am impressed with did

I did retouch the wall, but the result turned out to be awful. The patches just looked of a slightly different shade and even if the average visitor wouldn't see, I do.

This is not great...

It is super obvious when one look here, that they are two different colors

I did my "spring cleaning" last year again and decided to handle the problem. 

I had to take few rounds to the shop and, after managing to pull a little piece of the paint/wall and show it to the shop assistant, I got the right mix (almost). 

A bit of a pity, that the producer of this color has decided to change the nuance in the years, but good that one can fix the issue (although a bit time taking).

We have another room (the entrance) with the same issue, so that will be another round of attempts.

Same place, but right color

Now one can barely see that I had the patch the wall

An uplift for an armchair

Few years ago we bought at auction a jugend style armchair.  

The armchair

The armchair was originally put in the studio and there, it seems, some cat thought they need to leave a mark. It was a bit too clumsy for the desk so I thought of getting a different chair there and we moved the armchair to the guestroom, as more reading chair. 

I thought that it looked very nice in the room, but between the cat pee and the bleached textile, it looked a bit sad as well. 

Detail of the armchair, the wood lacked some glue here and there are visible stains

More of the stains

I decided it was time to fix it up, after so many years, and I tried to find someone that would not rob us for changing at least the textile. I probably ended up being robbed anyway, but I at least went to a real professional, whose basement was just full of textile bits. 

After showing me, I have no idea how many samples, we limited the search on three.

Fruity and flowery

A real William Morris

A bit more "woods" and animals

The original idea I had was to try to get the same kind of wool blue textile, but after talking to the upholsterer and after viewing all she had, I realized that I was limiting myself and probably choosing the wrong direction.

I went home with the pictures for discussing with Mattias, but I ended up discussing with AI. 

How can the chair look with the different textile?

This was a very good way to make the thoughts concrete. I also thought that how the room looks would matter, so I gave a picture of the bedroom and I got some idea of how it would look with the yellow of the walls and the dark furniture.

Option #1

Option #2

Option #3

This made things definitely easier and more concrete. So, it was not much doubt that option #2 would be the best one, even though we evaluated them all. It was quite clear to us that the first one, the more yellow textile, felt more like "too much kitchen", while the Willam Morris felt a bit too crowded.

We are very happy of the end result!

A detail of the armchair after the "treatment"

We lack just some curtains

Yes, something is missing still

Ok, now we have a curtains project to put in action.