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. 


 

When a night table drawer broke...

 It was way back in 2012 when we moved from our apartment to our house. Back then we did know little of the real world!

Anyway, in 2003 we did buy our bedroom's furniture at Mio and we still have it! We have of course then moved it through the three places where we have lived, but when we moved to the house we had some sort of company helping us out with the actual transportation and when we got our bedroom's furniture home, one of the drawers in one of the nighttable was just not opening/closing as it should anymore.

We asked whoever helped us moving to check it out and the result after he dismounted it/mounted it back was that he removed some of the small balls in the bearing in the drawer slide and that the drawer was somewhat closing and opening again.

The working slide

After 14 years I decided it was time to finally fix it properly. So I started to dismount it and try to squeeze back the small balls but it turned out that the slide was not really straight and even though I half succeeded in the putting things back in order it was not really great anyway.

The broken slide

It took so much time to fix mounting/dismounting

I then concluded the best was to buy a new slide and that turned out to not be an easy operation anyway as the measures can vary a lot. So, eventually, after going through few shops I concluded that I could pray that I would find the right one online and I sort of did.

New and old slide

Old and new

I mounted it then and sadly I could not secure the last screw as the premade holes were of course not in the right position. 

I could not fix the holes just right

The final step was therefore to drill a new hole. I am not super duper happy of that but I think that was maybe the best thing to do and now at least the drawer seems to be working better than before. Maybe this was just a lot of fuzz for such a small improvement, afterall the drawer have been working fine for twelves years...

There, now we have drilled enough holes and secured the slide.

Bookshelves

 It is true that we do not have the pace we had when we started the Villa Bellevue's adventure, but I think things are still moving. They move slow and even slower, or with less energy, I approach my way in front of the screen to say what is happening with the house. Both in terms of renovations but also improvements of other kind.

I have been a bit slow also in doing something that I call "Spring cleaning", which in reality is a deep cleaning in a room, including thinking of improvements and fixing stuff that is missing or broken.

Starting to preare the shift

During the spring, I did manage to clean out properly the guestroom and I thought of few things that would have been nice to upgrade. One of this was the bookshelf. 

The Billy is behind the new bookshelf

The existing bookshelf in the room (needed for all the kids books that we have kept and that they are reading during the years) was a simple white Billy bookshelf that we bought for our first apartment. It really fit the purpose, but not the style. 

The "new" old looking bookshelf (without shelves)

I thought then of getting something a bit bigger and old looking and I succeeded in getting something more old looking. I was then a bit disappointed and we tried to put the new bookshelf in Oscar's room. His room is not that huge (it was the old servan't sroom) and the bookshelf didn't really fit in size, sadly (just few centimeters). We then put it back but Oscar was then disappointed he didn't have a bookshelf anymore in his room.

Oscar his pulling down his posters

As turn of events, I realized we could put at least part of the Billy bookshelf in his room, and although he had to remove his football posters and the room is a bit crammed, Oscar is now very happy.

Oscar started to put things in order

It does look nice

Oscar is now happy of his bookshelf

At the end, the old looking bookshelf seems quite ok in the room and required that we didn't have to move the big cupboard (not really a bedroom piece, but...), even though it is now not centered and maybe it is not perfect fitting anyway. 

Voltron is happier

I hope it looks ok

I was not really happy at first of the purchase, but I think it turned out ok

The side shelf from the Billy bookshelf I managed to put it in the "tower room" as cleaning storage. I was doing the so-called "spring cleaning" of that room as well. It had been in chaos for at least few years and I had got also pretty lazy in how to store the cleaning products. Well, at least now they are not lying allover the floor...

The cleaning corner in the tower room

A day of spring

Both yesterday and today have been "warm" days. It is the end of march and we have been steady below 10 degrees except for these two days. Today for many in this country, it was possibly almost summer time.

I tried to enjoy the sun and the warmth by being outside a little. In this way I have helped Mattias moving a section of the pool roof that had been lying just in front of our secondary entrance forever and that, due to that, had created a good collection of weeds under it.

The first thing I did was enjoying removing them.

The weeds (dandelions) where the pool roof piece had been

Mattias is enjoying trying to renovate the pool roof after it flew last spring. The section that we moved today is under "polishing". He is cleaning it and I guess doing small adjustments.

Washing the pool roof section

He made a reparation "table" so he can try to fix the pieces that broke

The work with the pool roof has gone very slow. We were hoping the insurance company would pay for it, after talking with the people that sold and mounted the pool roof on the first place, but that was denied and we have been trying to seek also the possibility to get spare parts. I don't know how that operation is going. 

Nevertheless, the pool looks like *h*t right now, as during winter time there was no cover at all. 

Isn't it inviting? 

While Mattias was being the usual pool boy, I did some more clean up on a flower bed, removing leaves, moss and trying to make it look cleaner. It is not easy as there are a lot of small flowers coming up and I don't want to step on them or pulling them up when I rake it gently.

Among the flowers I saw today it is worth mentioning is a blue anemone.

Blue anemone

When it got a bit chilly, I went indoor. As always, it is not like there is a shortage of things to do and I took the occasion to look at my samsas where the two small cats have decided to have a party since they came and live with us.

I will have to glue a band that they manage to tore apart, but I had some serious issue with a button, that has always been not perfectly in place.

The button is in a quite bad state and it is not fixed properly to the back of the couch 

I have asked some suggestions on how to fix this, but I would have to dismount the couch and I guess it will stay like this. I would just hope I could find a nicer looking button, because despite my attempt, this looks crappy still.

 

What has happened lately

December is always a quite intense month. Christmas is what is dictating the rhythm and, despite corona and the cut of most of events, maybe due to the darkness, things have been moving with a heavy step focusing on the advent and Christmas preparations.

Chloe has discovered immediately the tree

We started to decorate Villa Bellevue directly from the 1st of Advent. We have a plastic Christmas tree (second hand one!) and, knowing that the kittens would have had great fun with it, we decided to limit the decorations on it and exclude the balls. That was a wise choice. 

After few weeks the lights were broken, branches kept falling and the few decorations were thrown allover the house. 

Just before Christmas Eve Mattias started a big restoration and since then it has at least looked decently.

The restored Christmas during Christmas Eve

Eventually, despite the days running too fast, I pushed Mattias to put up yet another shelf that I bought at an auction, to end up in Isabella's room. I am not very convinced of the position, but I guess we will have to live with this until some more drastic change occurs. 

Her previous shelf got crowded quite soon and we knew that she would get a new load of books to devour.

Her room with the new shelf just hanged

The new shelf

After we had got the walls in the entrance restored, we have had the thought of try to protect them.

In september I managed to get in contact with a company that could prepare plexiglass sheet shaped as we wanted. 

We took the measures. And we took them again. And then again. Bah, the walls never seemed straight, so we decided to make a template. But we didn't have the right material for it, so we had to order it and then to find the time to fix the template.

Eventually, again under coercion, we spent an evening trying to sort this out. It had just pasted three months since I was in contact with the company... 

Mimmi is helping

Or maybe she isn't

Ok, I am not sure of the result

Once again, this project had to be put on hold, because even though we had the template and new measures, the company wanted to wait few months as they are understaffed right now.

So, let's wait few months more for this.

Finally, Christmas came. The Eve was spent mostly preparing the last things and for me it meant finally having the time to bake. 

I can imagine that Bellevue has been seeing a lot of Christmas baking during all its years...

One tray of gingerbread cookies

Lucia cats (Lussekatter) 

Two types of fudge

An orange sallad to refresh the heavy Christmas food

The buns are ready and it is time to go to bed and wait for Christmas

The good thing with Christmas is the extra little free time to be able to do some project. 

One of the things that I have been doing has been starting to clean up the boiler room. It was a mess last year. We got some minor order and clean up some stuff, but we never finished, with the result that it got very messy very quickly.

On top of that, the ceiling has fallen down on one side of the room and I am thinking of tearing down the rest of it to fix it up properly.

The hole in the ceiling

I think the higher planks are the original roof. I believe that when the toilet was made, they probably reinforced it with iron beams and lowered part of it

Also this part is soon falling down

While cleaning up I have also noticed how great they have been patching the window, in this room.

Some foam, a big cut, some random pieces of wood, part of the window has never been painted in green. I wonder what did they do to it from the start. I suspect that there might have been a shortcut for filling oil in the oil based heater but that was patched brutally? 

It is weird that in such fancy house nobody did take care of the details of the less noble parts of the house...

How the window is looking from the inside

Wooden bits and pieces are placed on one side of the window

The window has been chopped off in some weird way. That part has never been painted in green - so
not touch from the 70s at least?

In the room I am trying to squeeze in a lot of things to have tools and spare parts and whatever in order. 

Right now though it is a bit complicated if I have to be fixing the roof. So, I have placed some stuff just temporarily in the middle of the room.

There will be a drawer, a carpentry table and a quite generous shelf

Mimmi is approving the temporary placement