Fixing "cremekoppar" in a Jugend cabinet

 As usual, lately, time is not enough for documenting everything that is happening in the house, even though the step forwards in our eternal project (fixing up this house) have been also limited. 

It feels as the last four years, time and energy have been even more scarce than before.

Several months back I bid on a fine Jugend cabinet, not too big, to have in the last free corner of the living room, where the piano is. I was more hoping to get a furniture for Mattias' vinyl collection, but I didn't find anything suitable while this cabinet seemed in my head perfect for the spot. 

The cabinet in the corner of the room, behind the couch

It is just today, many months later, that I finally cleaned it up at best as I could (the velvet has stains and dust that I didn't manage to get off). I probably need to give it a hand of "Fulgentin". It took me some time even to just remove the tag from the action house...

A cute detail from the cabinet

Mattias few months ago asked me what we should put in there. To be honest, I had no idea, except some very faint thought of placing a bit more visible some "cremekoppar" (creme cups?) that I had bought possibly few years back and that have been in their beautiful boxes since.

I love porcelain, especially the old Swedish one. I bought once a big set and since then I bought three more (not as big) and indulged in looking at many more on the internet, but restrained myself from buying anything more as space, even in a house like ours, is limited. 

But this. I saw them passing by on an auction and fell in love with the simple and elegant design. I had no idea what a cremekopp was and I still think that the usage of them will be very limited (some form of broth, some chocolate creme or what). They are more cute than useful. 

A good display of my 11 (+1) cups

This specific set should include (I think) about 13 unique cups as each of them has the king emblem on them. His motto and some historical detail about Rörstrande is written on the back of the little plate. 

One of the cremekopp, the "first" one. 

Eventually, today I moved them from their "hiding" place and managed to find a good way to display all of them (minus one, as it is a doublet). 

Even the toilet...

 ...deserves proper attention :-)

In reality I have even long term plans for this room, as it is almost intact from 1958 when the Edler had moved in in Villa Bellevue. The same tiles were found in the bigger bathroom and as far as I have understood, they were also in the kitchen, at the time. 

The toilet is breathing 60s with its style

I sadly haven't had the time to look behind the paperboard that is today on the walls. I have seen a picture from the previous owner where the walls had some yellow medallion wallpaper, but I do not know if that is from the 70s or earlier (I doubt it was the original one).

The roof is lowered - I guess for adding the ventilation, but who knows, maybe there are other interesting traces there if one would there to open up? - but my understanding is that this was a small wardrobe room from the start. 

Windows and doors were in dark brown with a slight tint of red. 

I am probably repeating myself from previous posts where I have described the toilet and what I have deducted/found around it, but I do not remember everything I wrote in these years :-)

Nevertheless, although I have the ambition to one day fix this room but simply patching where the column for the upstair bathroom has been placed, paint doors/windows with the right shade, have once again the 60s-70s bathrooms accessories (hangers, mirrors, etc.) and have the most appropriate wallpaper on the wall, right now we are happy to just add some minor decorations.

A perfect jugend newspaper holder

As the space in the room is quite limited, being it pretty small and narrow, I can't add much furniture in it. But the walls can be decorated. 

It is probably a bit suboptimal, in a toilet from the 60s, to have a jugend decor, but I think the mix and match works quite ok in this context.

The latest addition is then a jugend embroidered newspaper/magazine that matches the toilet rolls holder on the wall and can keep some of the "toilet cultural material" in place. 

It at least got some attention through this blog post! :-)

A turn of the century feeling

 We have ben very inspired when watching the old pictures from the Ingemansson. When looking at the dining room picture, I indulge in staring at the details and trying to understand how did the room look back then.

There are of course missing details, like the chest panel. But I see a drapery where there is the sliding door, there is some textile decoration over the left door and well, there is a nice wall pendulum.

A dinner at the Ingemanssons, 1909

Now, I have been looking for several year to find a wall pendulum that I would like. I think the one in the picture is slightly biger than the one I finally managed to purchase. 

View over the wall pendulum

It is not exactly in the same spot, but at least in the same room, and right now it is surrounded by a jungle of plants, since we want to save them from the kittens, which are still quite wild and interested in destroying my vases/plants!

The pendulum is from 1907

The watch maker was from Nyköping and was called Frans August Nilsson

Sadly, we haven't yet tested it. It would be nice if it would be working :-)

Something else that we bought, that is semi working (and ideally it should be connected with the few ringbells we have in the house) is an housekeeper bell display (in swedish betjäntklocka/pigklocka) which I think gives a very nice touch to the kitchen, the housekeeper's kingdom.

The housekeeper bell display

There, now we are ready for service ;)

It would be wonderful to find out how many bells we had, where was the display originally and so on. But I guess we will be content by having two of the bells still existing and working. Amusingly enough!

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

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?

Playing in the dark...

Has't been very funny.
Not that the lights really help very much when it is pitch black, but one has, with some fantasy, the possibility to guess what there is on the piano score.

The wall sconces are shining in the tower room 

As always, what we try to do should have some form of old style. Of course, I'd prefer to go around just with candles and kerosene lamps, but I would really need a maid then...(which I'd need anyway).

Anyway, electricity did come to Åkarp 1912, so we can assume at least a century of lamps being used.

In the specific, I have managed to find on the online flea markets two wall sconces old style. I don't know how old, but they looked nice enough (sometimes, it is just too time taking to find the right item and one has to get happy with a good mixture that compromises aesthetic, price and style.

One of wall sconce

The big effort we made was in finding relatively good looking lightbulbs, cord and switch. 

The bulb was not straightforward. But we decided to go for a LED lightbulb (dimmable!) with an old-ish look.

The switch

Cord and switch was bought at Byggfabriken. A nice bakelite switch with a black textile cable, which I chose to be in black. I thought it'd work beautifully with the colors of the room and especially, with the grand piano.
One should mention though that I managed to have to return twice to the shop (which is one of my favorite, of course!) since I had bought the set only for a sconce and not two!!
What a pity! I had to go back and fix the problem!

Curtains!

Anything we do just take some time. Putting up some curtains in our veranda has been a two years old project (and there is still one little detail that needs to be fixed).
I have realized that nothing standardized could be fixed, so we had to involve a blacksmith and a seamstress.

At the forge

Based on some picture I did find on the net, I went to the blacksmith (http://ferrumkonstsmide.se/) and asked to prepare some for me. The prototype he made was very beautiful, but slightly too long. So he cut it and that became the final design of the hook. This got fixed in March 2015.

Simple, but beautiful

I then got some idea of how the curtains should look like. Since we have a reproduction of 1700 century furniture there, it'd be nice to match it with similar curtains. It is hard to identify what kind of curtains were in the house from the old pictures we have...

Based on few models I saw on the internet, I discussed with the seamstress (http://www.cherubino.se/) some ideas and she proposed a first version, which then got transformed into something else..

The first curtain is up, but it looks too modern!

The final version then got decorated by a nice stripe of lace and went up about one year ago.

This fits much better! 

The curtains come up

While the curtains were being made, we (or better Mattias) had to adjust the rods that I bought as curtains rods. In our little world that required a lot of planning: where to put the hooks, how the curtains should look like, how to make the rods fit in the corner...

Eventually we managed to put all the pieces of the puzzle together and last year (March 2016) the curtains were all up and we were happy to not being roasted by the sun during spring time.

There was still a task left to accomplish: the rods were not painted and, although that wouldn't have been the worse thing ever, I thought that having them white would fit better.

This winter I therefore took everything down. The curtains got washed and got to work on the rods.

Preparation for painting

Base paint with linseed paint

I got some professional help for the painting

This is the end result after several weeks of painting/waiting/finding the time to finish up

Finally it is time to put them up

Details, the hook, the rod, the ceiling

Setting the curtains up

A room with a view

Now, the only thing is to adjust one of the rod because there is no space for one of the knobs.