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

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?

The rods are up

Summer is here and thanks to some weeks of holidays, there are some progresses in some of them many projects that we start (and barely finish).
Let's give an update about what's happening with the curtain rods in the "red room" (also known as piano or tv room).

We are at the point where the rods are up, I have oiled them and we need to:
1) choose the curtain textile
2) buy all the accessories (rings, tie-backs, ...)
3) have the blacksmith coming here and cut the curved rod, since it is too long
4) fix the wall, as it got scratched (typical...) when the rod was put up

Curved rod, left side

Curved rod, right side

Once all is done, we will also add the quite beautiful knobs.

The knobs at the forge

The wall fasteners became pretty good at the end, but there is a little long history behind them.
The idea was to have some "jugend" inspired design. Something was defined during last summer, but that got lost in time and space.
I spent a quite rushed hour with the blacksmith trying to find something feasible and trying to remember how it was supposed to look, but that didn't work out exactly smoothly.
We came up with an idea, but that was not approved as it was too messy to have done in such a small piece.

A first attempt for the wall fasteners

Considering the space limitations, our blacksmith had to use a bit of creativity and make more trials, before, after a ping pong of pictures on Whatsapp, we gave our approval.

How shall we do this??

There, this should work! And in fact, it did!

Modernities and antiquities

This summer has finally been a summer. Maybe a bit on the extreme side as for at least 3 months we haven't seen a drop of water and the grass of the neighbour ended up being more yellow than ours.
One of the advantages of our house, except that it keeps fresher than the average Swedish one, is that we have a pool. With roof and that is warmed up.
Yes, the warming up is crucial even if it is 4000 degrees outside.
The best is the evening bath.
Now. I had finally managed to squeeze in some time for doing that, between cutting some of the thousands of hedges we have, and as soon as I did dip my feet in the lukewarm water, the weather has of course changed with an inch of autumn in the air.

Last evening bath for the season?

It is the middle of August. The warmest month of the whole summer. And now it starts with this crappy weather? 

While we have enjoyed this, there have been many other things ongoing, like always.

Firstly, we have recently had a visit of a conservator because well, we have a painted wall. And we know from pictures from the previous owner (which I forgot to photograph) that behind that lovely structured wallpaper in aquamarine color there is more. The painted wall is in the "entrance". Just after stepping in the house and before reaching the big room with the staircase.

Sure, we need to win the lottery to probably reconstructing it all. It might be also overkill, but if it was there from the start, why no?

We can at least start to investigate how that thing is coming off from the wall. 

The painted wall and the wall covered by the ugly wallpaper

On the minor side, finally, after more than a year, I took an evening/night moment to finally paint the floor in that big room with the staircase. Not that I am very happy of it, but this is the best I can get right now.
First it is completely off to have the floor painted. Black, even.
Second, the color I am using is against any byggnadsvård principle. Some form of regular, water based, plastic rich, floor paint.
But right now it is what it is and I am just hoping to not find any more cat pee stains (it is daily now... so annoying) and scratches.

Looks shiny...

I have noticed that the first strokes of color didn't turn out fine, so I need to retouch that (every task generates an infinite amount of tasks like usual), otherwise, it turned out pretty ok.

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.

Spring cleaning

It is the first day of spring, but the weather doesn't look yet super promising, although it is getting better.

As every year though, I started my yearly spring cleaning which usually last until summer and never gets completed. Let's see how it will go this year...

Nevertheless, the only room that is *almost* completed is the TV room (almost because I'd like to paint the ceiling were we have some humidity stains and hope they won't appear again), which though went through a small make over.

Before

After

After (2)

Basically, the main concept is to be able to sit and "listen" to whoever is playing the piano at least looking at the piano. Seems a bit better than before...

Bathroom enhancements

Although we have completed the bathroom renovation few months ago, we have taken our time for finalizing some details.
Slowly, we have added accessories for making the environment more comfortable and practical.

Panorama of the bathroom, as it looks today

We have added a curtain for the shower (bought at Åhlens) and few items of need, like a soap dispenser, a toothbrush holder and a toilet brush. I have bought them through Butik Öland, an online shop that sells items from different brands, including Miljögården. Unfortunately, the toilet brush broke spontaneously after 8 months. Butik Öland was very professional in handling the errand, while I was very disappointed at Miljögården for the lack of interest in keeping customers. Since the product was not of high quality and considering their approach to my request, I will try to avoid them as much as I can in the future.

Soap dispenser

Toothbrush holder

Toiletbrush

Noticing annoying water stains on the floor every now and then, especially when giving Isabella a bath, we have then bought a couple of carpets (Hemtex).

Carpets

Finally, considering that with the light on, everything is perfectly visible, we needed to put a curtain. We thought that a so called cafègardin would have worked fine, but pity, such curtains are not the most popular currently.
Thanks to some expert hands (the ones of Mattias' mother), we managed to put together a nice curtain that matches the tiles color quite fine.

Cafègardin

Lace detail

The pictures are worse than usual since the natural light in this period is scarce and my bad skills can't compensate such environment!