March and spring

March can be potentially an interesting month. The garden is awakening at the first sun light, the days gets longer and the amount of things to do just explode as the garden kicks in.

Romeo is guarding the entrance during a sunny day

During this period I try to squeeze in even more.
1) I repot most of the plants. I don't know if also other human beings do this, but Feb-Mar (and often even April, as this year) I focus on the indoor plants.

Blurred example of the lucky bamboo after repotting

In the years I got some kalanchoe and I have managed to make the family expand. This year I am trying to make small plants from the ones I have, but they are not very popular anyway...

Baby Kalanchoe

2) The garden is getting alive. I start to cut when I can some bushes, like spirea or hortensia, before they start to grow too much. I also try to remove the carpet of leaves that are especially around the red beech. Spring flowers are popping up quite quickly.

Strong grape hyacinth are blooming

Daffodils (narcissus) taking space from the leaves

3) Seasonal change of clothes. Sometimes one can start already in March, not this year. Still pure set of winter clothes. In this case the improvement is that I got two clothes racks that I have put in the tower room, where once upon the time we had some huge and space taking wardrobes.
Now that they were gone, clothes have been hanged a bit inappropriately, so I am happy to have thought of this solution.
When it will get warmer I will switch the clothes...

Racks at the tower room

4) Easter. This is lent time and I decorate as always the house. I enjoy it a lot doing it with the kids.

This year påskris 

Not always fancy, not always jugend

Sometimes we need to look also for things that are not really matching the house style, but they are "needed" and practical.

One of the latest upgrades is a minor item that though makes a lot of quality difference in our lives. We have of course a ringbell at our main door, but if the gates are closed, noone will ever manage to catch our attention.
The previous owner had mounted a wireless ringbell, but the ringbell per se' has been standing under the rain a little too match and with humidity, the batteries have given up very easily.
We basically have never had it working in 7 years that we have lived here. Maybe a glimpse of life for the few seconds I have tried a pair of new batteries. But that's it.
I then saw a "beautiful" ringbell that use kinetic energy and hence, it works without battery. IP44 certified (water resistant, basically!).
Yes, it is a gadget. Modern. Nothing jugend. Nothing from the ancient time. But very very practical, I'd say.

Outside the gate. Yes, the weather is amazing here....

On the left lower part of the picture, the receiving part is plugged (in the kitchen) - note the fantastic woven wallpaper...

We have otherwise, always things ongoing. Mostly, cleaning, fixing, windows...
One of the things we have prioritized has been the basement. Not that we are "fixing" it properly, but we are at least ordering it a bit.

An unsorted part of the basement

Our basement is quite spacious and has several rooms. The laundry has in a semi ok status, then there is a small corridor that I use for planting when the weather outside is still very Swedish.

A big room where we have the ping pong table and the fuzzball table, with thousands of boxes I save (!).

A food cellar, that is now a storage of things to sell, some food, a lot of apple juice, some plants. It is dark and as most of the places in the basement, the cats have not had mercy and left a lot of trails that makes everything unfresh and smelly.

Finally, we have a small room with the heat pump and a small workshop. Though the ceiling has fallen and we really don't use the room.

The big room one reach when coming down has been used as a wooden workshop and repairing workshop. 

So, it has been messy also because when sawing there has been the highest particles generation that has spread generously everywhere.

Making it impossible to paint... (so we have entered in a evil loop where I have been blocked in the windows renovation, while Mattias was working on the wooden outdoor dryer).

Still a lot to do, but a bit more order

So, we have started to move things around, to make more space and to avoid this stall situation. The sawing equipment will be moved in the heat pump room and I just need to sort out all the mess I have in the painting area. And actually paint...

The repairing station

We have though successfully found a better position for the repairing corner. We have a tendency to seldom throw items, even if they are in a quite broken status. We do our best to fix them... sometimes we give up. More often we can use them a big more.

Our basement is not exactly "cosy" or hyper fresh. We would need to fix it. But for the moment at least we need to clean it and make it functional.

Let's see now when we can continue with this operation....

So be light

Having the right amount of lights and the right type of lights is of course a science on its own, also for us.
I think we have made good progresses in the light sector, but of course there are still needed improvements (some depends also on rooms that still after 7 years are waiting for a restoration).

One of the critical spots have been the "reading" light in the guestroom. We have had a relatively big lamp (belonging to Mattias' family), in a late jugend style. In search of some form of more practical light, I have put a Jugend table lamp, with a beautiful big orange shade, that can still be too far off to reach when in bed.
(And by the way, the shade is actually not secured whatsoever, so when I clean the room I am just worried that I will hit that nighttable a inch too much and I will have opal orange glass shattered everywhere - I bet I jinxed it now!)

The orange Strindberg lamp 

I have been having in the mindset for a long time to have some wall mounted lamps as reading lamps.
And then I stumbled over an online auction which sold the perfect ones (except the electrical cord being horribly brown and 70ish). I succeeded in winning the auction and after "just" three months we actually got the lamps on the wall!

The newly mounted reading lamps

The beauty of them is that of course they are jugend as they should, but they even match the big lamp that has always been in this room. Not a super perfect match (these ones are in copper style, while the lamp is in brass), but I think the differences are making a good combination anyway.

I think we can improve the cord and maybe put the lightbulbs in :)

Time to go to bed...

Another piece of Allan's furniture

Mattias took advantage of a day of vabbing (taking care of Oscar being home sick) for continuining his task of reviving the furniture he saved from Allan's house.
This time it is a different kind of cupboard, which in swedish is called linneskåp. I guess it was mostly used for storing sheets or kitchen related textiles.

As always my pictures are not as pretty as the ones from other blogs, also because I took them at night and sadly, in the room where the piece is placed there is barely light. The flash of the phone camera did quite a bad job...

The linneskåp

As most of Allan's furniture there is a strong jugend footprint in it, with the typical apple motif on it (which we have in few sideboards, chairs, etc.)

Mattias did clean up the whole cupboard and repair the ironwork

Now, the cupboard has been in the "black room" for several months. We really don't have a place for it but I thought it could be placed in the tower room, which one day will become a playroom for the kids. Problem is we have to carry it up. We are searching for volunteers :D

In Jugend style

There has been some progress done with Allan's furniture (what we have saved here), but it is now few months that things have put on ice.
We have still few pieces that are in need of help and some of them are a bit on the way.
Nevertheless, what Mattias have managed to take of so far has certainly a patina, but also quite some charm.
In these months I have indulged myself in online auctions and Tradera (the local ebay) auctions as well, always with the mindset to enrich our home with Jugend details. This is going to be a very long operation but I hope that at least that everything is getting better without ending in an unpleasant excess of useless things.
Now, this is some of the new pieces (or Allan's pieces)

1) A big drawer. Probably ideal to have in a bedroom, but as our bedrooms are crammed with furniture already, this one ended up in the entrance to store hats and gloves (I guess it will be rather empty during summer time).

Few new things in the entrance. A drawer, a stool, the radio and a candlestick

2) An old radio. We have no idea if it works or not, but it is just very beatiful. A bit more art deco than jugend, but still nice. Right now it is over the drawer, but I think a more suitable place needs to be found

All available radio stations

3) A stool and a candlestick. Those are things that I have bought through auctions.

The candlestick. A a drawing of Stortorget in Malmö with the pharmacy "Flakta Örn"

 The stool is in reality a piano stool, but I thought it worked great here as it is the place where we and our guests take off jackets and shoes. The candlestick was just plain beautiful.

The stool, it has the same "decor" as the built-in couch that we have under the stairs

4) At Erikshjälpen here in Åkarp I bought instead the Malmö drawing. I decided to buy it because there was the pharmacy "Flakta Örn" in a corner. The pharmacy was the working place for the pharmacist Anders Nilsson who lived in Bellevue 1914-1919.

All together.

5) The big glass cabinet. This turned out to be an incredible piece of furniture. I haven't yet filled it in with books and other things, but I am getting there. It maybe is a bit suffocated behind the Samsas, but I really can't figure out a better placement.

The glass cabinet

The painting need to be lifted up and centered again. And surely we need to find a better placement for the things on top. Note Pico sleeping on the IKEA couch on the right

6) A nice little local detail in term of a small soap plate (I guess) from "Svenska kalkförsäljnings" in Malmö. There were two on sale on Tradera and I managed to get the one that unfortunately had some minor defects. Still, I love the super perfect jugend line

Jugend in a nutshell in this small plate

7) Finally, Oscar has been longing to have a desk in his room since this summer. Isabella has one, so why not him as well? Luckily, among the furniture from Allan there was a desk which has also the same style as Isabella's. 

He was then super happy to get it in his room, which is slowly getting to something more "harmonic" and a bit less temporary. Still, there is space for improvement, but I think the bases are now defined.

The desk with the Jetson armchair where we sit when Oscar is falling asleep

It is a bit tiny space compared to other bedrooms, but this was the maid's room (we think) afterall

Some Byggfabriken shopping

One of my favourite shops is of course Byggfabriken. It has almost everything that a modern "byggnadsvårdare" needs, plus the atmosphere of a bit old style shop. Anyway, every now and then we need (casually?) to go and buy some small things for the house. From paint, to other accessories.
Last time it was Mattias' turn to indulge himself into spoiling the house with nice stuff...
This is what he came back with:
1) A porcelain insulator: to have in the cords of the wall lamps that are placed around the piano. They don't really have a *real* function as the cord is already perfetly insulated, but let's say for the sake of how things were done in the past....

The porcelain insulator

How it should be placed, more and less....

2) Some flax insulation (linisolering) to put in the gaps between the floor planks in the "Red room" (the piano and tv room). This room doesn't have a warm basement room under it, so there is a icey draft coming up if you try to feel closely.

The isolation keeps coming up

As we are not expert in this, we are probably doing something wrong, as even though we are squeezing the flax down, it just doesn't want to stick too much.
Maybe this was not exactly the right product for the purpose?

The flax insulation

3) Finally, a chain for a ventilation shaft in the guestroom (now, Mattias' room). In reality we had decided to not get one because it didn't look possible to fix one chain on the ventilation shaft without asking our blacksmith for support. 

But Mattias forgot all about this and bought it anyway and... surprise surprise, he even put it up without any problem!

It is a detail, but it is nice to have a decent chain to open the shaft

Detail of the ventilation shaft. It says "Patent Örnen"

Wooden creativity

Sometimes things happen at the most unplanned time.
We came back from our Italian Christmas holidays, ready to go to Kalmar and in the short break home, Mattias, with the help of Oscar and a minor assistance of Isabella, put together a structure for letting firewood dry in the basement.

This was very much needed, as in our six years in Bellevue, we have accumulated plenty of firewood (and still, there is plenty to come) and just storing wet logs on the floor is not the best idea ever.

The good with Mattias' invention is that he used some apple storage boxes/frames which we never managed to use to store apples. 

Well done, I'd say!