Finishing and restarting

It is summer and, even though we are not travelling this year, it seems that the amount of tasks we are dealing with never decreases.
The days pass by too fast to have reached the feeling of completion when one of the eternal tasks we need to address are actually done, really done.
There are always a lot of leftovers and even if it is summer and we are here, things accumulated from last year are still waiting for us.

The escutcheon is back

With a certain satisfaction I can state that our garage doors are soon completed. We finally managed to put up the last escutcheon, after losing the screws in the grass just outside the garage. A memorable story that one, which should be spared from this site.

Anyway, still some minor steps missing from the door per se', but we are getting closer. 

I am though desperate between the rain and the amount of things just piling up and I don't manage to get really a momentum with things that should have been done few years ago.

Hence, I really pushed myself to go out with the brush and color and start to pain the roof in the poolhouse as we have some decoration ideas that should be implemented as well (luckily, those not by us, since probably they would happne in 30 years).

There, now I have started painting

I never understand why my base color is very thin in pigment although I mix it properly. Maybe for that reason I always end up with three layers of color...

View from the ladder. I have got quite some nice bushes there

 Now, it is "just" to wait to dry. Not a problem. There is plenty more to paint!

One of the two chambers 

They are back!

Once upon the time I feel in love with a furniture set. An IKEA (!) set "1700-talet", (hand)made in the 90s. After some digging I eventually managed to buy what I thought would fit in our veranda.

Unfortunately, though, it took few years and its age started to appear in terms of holes a bit everywhere and a bit too much.
So, I thought we would have to fix it up. Also this.

But now, they are finally back. It was a bit sad to see the "naked" couch and not be able to use it at all. Not that we sit there often anyway, but at least the look matters quite much ;)

The couch and the foot rest

Sadly, the exact same textile was not available. It had bigger squares. I don't know if by searching for more than the time I put into it, I would have actually succeeded in finding the right one. I do not like so much to compromise with how things were originally.

The armchair. The covers for the arm supports are still to be finished

We are almost nailing this. A small piece of textile needs to be ordered furthermore for the arm supports cover. They were simply too short and looked a bit weird (again... I have hard time with copromises...).
But, finally! We can sit there! I am sure the cats will be happy :) The foot rest was one of Pico's favorite places to sleep.

Shelves

Sometimes one has just to have patience.
Switching from "Billy" IKEA bookshelves (or similar) to better ones requires a bit of luck, especially when the kids' bedrooms are already crammed with furniture and toys and putting a classical big jugend bookshelf is utopia.

The idea has been then to try to find something that could be hanging on the walls, and as the time was passing I thought we would have ended up asking the carpenter to make one for us or similar.

But one day, in one of my daily checks for jugend items on Tradera (the local Ebay), I did find a very lovely piece that would have fit us very much (and it seems Isabella appreciated that too).

A beautiful flower decorated shelf

The small shelf is decorate with inlays of flowers, possibly Iris, which seems to be the recurrent flower in our home (both as windows, furniture and even flowers in the garden).

We are putting books on it

Details

The corner of Isabella's bedroom with the shelf

Certainly, the shelf beauty is a bit hidden by all the books, but that's just a detail.

Then, of course, also Oscar wanted to have something (well, he didn't really scream out loud on it or nagged about it) and on an auction online I saw a Jugend shelf that didn't get very popular.

I can guess why. When I went and pick it up, it was a massive piece and if the one of Isabella's seemed tinier than my imagination had thought, this one was definitely larger. 

My bad that I never check all the parameters of what I try to buy.

Oscar's shelf

Luckily, despite my clumsyness in not making sure the measurements would fit us, the piece fit the wall where it was supposed to be placed just perfectly fine.

Details

The good thing with the size is also that it can swallow a lot of books and items. 

Maybe I am on my way to get rid of a Billy bookshelf, finally?

Oscar's room with the shelf

Dangerous steps

Things naturally need maintenance.
But as we are busy with just normal cleaning, extraordinary cleaning, fixing flying pool roofs, trying to raise kids and indulge in sports and social life just to not become full time robots (while also squeezing other renovations, maintenance of all sort, etc.) we miss that some things of the house might need a more urgent intervention than we have forecast.

It is the case with our side entrance stairs.
I had noticed that they were getting some patina, but that they would start quickly to fall apart I didn't really expect.

The cats are waiting for us to let them in

I have no idea from which epoch these stairs are, but I can see that they have been cast on a different type (in terms of material) construction and hence I doubt they are from the jugend time. 

Though, I don't think they were redone by the last owner before us, so my suspect is that they are from when the Svensson sold the house (around 2000) or from when them or the Edler did the house renovations (1974 or 1958 in the latter case).

More and more pieces are simply falling off

Nevertheless. I do like the appearance as it looks a bit old fashioned, although this is concrete. The other stairs we have are made with some other material but I am unsure if that would be suitable here as we have the other part of the stairs as well.

How it looks underneath the stairs

Our plan is to just get some new concrete stairs that wouldn't look too modern. Like usual, getting some craftsman on board seems to be mission impossible. 

I have got one that should come and make some samples, but he was supposed to show that to us during this week and I haven't seen anything.

This is getting dangerous

I just hope that it survives till I manage to get at least this guy to fix something for us. Otherwise I guess we need to learn to fly.

Perfectioning the garage doors

The garage doors are one of those things that are never finished and deserve constant adjustments.
I suspect that also the pool house (and some of the windows I have renovated few years ago) will drag in time before we can consider it completed.

One of the things that we could not finish have been putting the key eschultcheon, since the hole was too big for it.

That's how it looked (well, this side still looks like this)

The eschulcheon is finally in place after few years

With some minor trick and carpenting, yesterday at least the front eschultcheon was screwed back in place. I suspect though that this is going to be a bit problematic as it hasn't even been oiled and could absorbed a lot of humidity for the rest of the door.

Next to do, to fix also the one on the inside of the door!

Tool Shed Doors

This was probably not the most critical project we had right now, but the first part went fast and smooth, so why complaining?

Our toolshed, which probably has been replacing some nice old building, is starting to accuse the age factor and especially doors have started to be disfunctional, especially because they are rottening on the lower part.

Our toolshed in the morning light

We have now a couple of brand new doors that should work out there. 

I "just" need to paint them and they will hopefully fit and work just fine.

The new doors

So, I have another task in the queue....

Wall paintings restoration

Since the previous owner, one of the walls in the entrance has revealed a mystical painting. He also had kindly shared some pictures of the house works he had conducted in the few years he had lived in Bellevue, and few pictures were focusing on those paintings and showing that one of the walls, now covered by the turqoise structured wallpaper had some underneath.

We had started to remove some of the wallpaper to see how it was going here.

The room ready for being treated for restoration.

Sadly, when removing all the wallpaper some parts of the painting were gone under some concrete layer. Some were clearly made when electricity was installed, but a big patch role is still unclear.

Part of the wall with the patches for the electrity and for something we still don't know

Cristiana, the restorer, is working on one of the walls

Also, the wallpaper glue has minor damaged the surface. The structured wallpaper is not the only wallpaper that was there. We have found traces of a wallpaper in grey tones, probably from the 60s and a darker green one, that should have been used after the Svenssons moved in 1974. 

Trying to reconstruct the paintings 

The pattern is quite "free handed" so it was very nice to observe the new creation take place. 

Details over the painting

Of course, the bigger work was to handle the big surface where there was no trace left of any painting, also because the basis was different, material wise, than the original one.

Started to create a background for the new paintings

One can see clearly how the original painting is ruined. The yellow color was the background color of it.

As the wall turned out

Details over the wall. It is almost impossible to see that this is new.

The pictures speak out by themselves, I think. We haven't aimed at having a perfect surface, but rather recreating the paintings and try to melt them in, to make them look a bit torn as well. 

Details of the wall

It is nice to see that what has changed is not only that now we have a more genuine and colorful room (well, not that the turquoise was white, but it was a very "suffocating" color there) but the light is reflecting in a very different way. I often think that someone has left the light on, but it is just how the surface is reflecting the sunlight from the window.

The room is done!

There are few things still to do here. 

One is that the surface is quite brittle, especially where there is glue from the wallpaper and the top color layer is very fragmented. 

We have evaluated using some protective layer or even a wax, but the first would not let the wall breath and with a water leakage (we have above one of the bathrooms) it would be a disaster to fix it up; the second instead would make the color quite dark and would have the same risk in case of leakage.

We will therefore try to find some plexiglass sheet to have at neck height for avoiding that people would be careless with it and hopefully keep it to deteriorate at a slower pace.

The furniture is moving back 

The room looks completely different!

The second is that there are minor details that need to be retouched. Just my usual pedantry, except for one of the electrical cable that is quite visible under the wall. As Cristiana said, one gets a bit blind when working with something like this and needs to take a pause before the final touch.

I believe I was a bit blinded too when overviewing the work!

A before-after serie of pics

This work has brought up some question marks on the details of the room. From the big patch (when was it done? Why? ) to the ceiling, as it looks lowered and the paint on that and the cornice has not many layers. White there would have not worked fine with that wall, as the rest of the wooden parts were dark red (and yes, that needs to be fixed, of course). Possibly there is some original ceiling behind that? 

I wonder if we will find out during our lifetime...!