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. 


 

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