Ooh yay!

My radiator on AT again (the black one of course, here).

And ooh yay as well for productive evenings. I put two posts on the blog in one evening, added a whole bunch of new links AND mopped the floor! That's a lot for me. Somehow I just get more done when my husband's not home. He's in the studio playing rock'n roller for the night, I'm being a total homebud...

That time of year

I decided to sell my car in the summer and was lucky enough to buy a used Kronan bicycle from a collegue's wife, including the baby seat. I've enjoyed my short ride to work via George's nursery in the summer, but now it's getting cold, slippery and my baby bump is growing every day it seems (it's getting more and more difficult to get up that hill with a 13 kilo baby in back and a 7 kilo bump in front). So it's that time of year, it's time to park my lovely bike for the winter, I'll miss the wind in my hair and George loving the ride, laughing behind me. As "luck" would have it, or rather this recession we're going through, no one has bought my lovely car. So I picked it up at the dealership and am back on four wheels! Well, I'm in Iceland, I'm sure I'll be very happy not to have to plough through knee deep snow with a huge bump and a pushchair!!!

Bedroom before

Ok so my next post was going to be about the great storage space I want to create in my bedroom. Well I haven't quite got round to it yet, but I thought I'd show you the corner of my bedroom that I'm actually pleased with. Trust me when I say that the rest of the room is a mess!

I´ve gone for a different colour scheme in the bedroom, with slightly cooler colours than in the rest of the flat. White, dark brown and teal dominate in here. We chose a low bed (actually just two box mattresses from IKEA) as our son shares our bed. The lamp is a simple rice paper shade from IKEA, I use white bedsheets only, the throw is from a shop window in a shop where my husband used to work and we normally have a few books stacked next to the bed, either to read to our son or for ourselves. A bottle of water and a glass for those nights our son wakes up thirsty.

The list of things to do in the bedroom:
Hang a curtain to cover a nook, perfect for storage.
Move the bed to the wall to make space for a cot (crib)
Hang the light in a different corner
Finish doing up a little piece of furniture that is going to be a present for a friend of mine ;)
Hang a beautiful design object that was a present from a friend of mine ;)

I'll post better (worse) before pictures soon, I haven't taken them yet and my son is sleeping in there right now.

Another post coming up soon, a little landing strip, or rather a request for ideas for my landing strip.

Thank you for the mentions!

I was very excited to see my living room in the Roomarks: inspirational interiors on Apartment Therapy.

Even more so when Beth of Apartment Therapy LA contacted me about doing a before and after post on my black entryway.

Thank you for the mentions!

Entrance Hall - part II

I finally did it! Well actually, I finished it a few days ago but didn't get round to blogging it until now. Like I said, it's pretty simple. A section of the wall painted black, a couple of FRÄN hat racks from IKEA and some baskets on top for hats, scarves and such.

And what a wonderful opportunity to show off my vintage 60's cape that I absolutely adore. Too bad it's getting to cold to wear it now.

A few well chosen pairs of shoes on display (they make my eyes so happy!).

And for our son's coats we got these fantastic BÄSTIS hooks from the pet section in IKEA!

That's it, my entrance hall sorted. Next will be creating a better storage space in the bedroom.

My plastic bag drawer

As you may have gathered, I am not the most organized person. There is one thing, however, that I do organize OCD style: my plastic bag drawer! Maybe not the drawer itself as such, but no plastic bag goes in there without having been folded and tucked neatly into a very manageable triangle. Let me show you how it's done:

Lay your plastic bag flat on the table, fold it over lengthwise twice, so you end up with a long strip.

From the bottom up, start folding the strip into triangles, until you get an end that you can tuck into one of the triangle's sides.



What you get is a nice, tucked up triangle. No bags overflowing your drawer, very convenient in a small kitchen because you can make do with a very small space for your bags.



P.S. I know that kitchen worktop is absolutely hideous, it's on the top of my wishlist to replace it. In fact I want to replace the whole kitchen, but with our current budget, that's not an option.

Home office

One of the things I really want to set up in my home is a little workstation. Besides being a desk, it has to include a storage space for a laptop and some minor paperwork, but it also has to accommodate my monstrously big printer/copier/scanner/fax machine. Right now I think I'll go for some minimalist shelf/drawer type thing as a desk, and then wrap the monstrosity printer into some sort of container on it's own. I was looking for inspiration on flickr and I came across this incredible desk by commonhumans made from an old x-ray display, found in a university surplus store. What can I say, my jaw just dropped (as I'm sure yours did when you first saw this picture)!

Entrance Hall - part I

Those two images above show what our entrance hall looked like up until a week ago. We've now been living in our flat for 8 months and we still don't have a place to hang our coats and jackets when we come in from the cold. The only reason for this is that I haven't been able to make up my mind about how I wanted to set this up. I seem to have an aversion to ready made solutions and I have to cook things in my mind, sometimes for months, before I come up with an idea I can be happy with. Often the simplest solution is the best, so all I've decided to do is paint a section of the wall black, and put up two FRÄN hat racks from Ikea, side by side. Our coats can go there on hangers, and hats, scarves, gloves and such will go in boxes on top. I haven't found the boxes I'm going to use yet, I'm sure it will take me a few more months.

What I've done so far is paint the wall. I've learnt from previous experience that when painting in dark colours it isn't enough to mask off the area with masking tape (or painters' tape), the paint will bleed underneath and create an uneven line. So this time I masked off the area and painted over the inner boundaries with white paint. Some people use transparent paint for this but I had leftovers from when we painted the whole flat, so I just used that. I let it dry and then painted with black. Removed the masking tape while the paint was still wet and voila!

Another "trick" I want to share with you is covering the inside of the paint tub you're using with aluminium foil. I hate cleaning the brushes and rolls after painting, and anything to reduce the work makes me happy. After I finished painting I simply removed the foil carefully and disposed of it. Not very environmentally friendly I know, but probably not worse than using lots of soap to clean it.

All that remains is putting up the shelves, but we've lost all our drills (somewhere in the mess in our storage room) so my dad is going to come down and help us with this. This is typical of us, we always loose little bits, the drills for the drill, the memory card from the camera, the screws from the piece of IKEA furniture (ok, this hasn't happened to us yet, but if it does in the future I won't be surprised). This is partly why I started this blog, I'm on a mission to become more organised and spend less time looking for missing bits.

This is what the entrance hall looks like now.

Entrance Hall - part II will be coming up soon... I hope.

On Flickr

I've just started a Flickr account and put a few pictures on there. I'll have some sets there, one with projects, where I post before and after (and sometimes intermediate) pictures of whatever projects I've got going on (so far only before and intermedate). Then I'll have sets for specific rooms in the house, as and when I finish the projects in there (and some where I just show you the part of the room that's looking OK). I might also make a set called "what should I do about this???", or something in that direction.
My first project is dealing with our entrance hall, on which I'll do a post or two, starting tomorrow.
Thanks for checking me out, and don't forget to flick through my photostream :)