The first lunch outside

It has been snowing again today, but last weekend spring was here for a short visit. 

We celebrated by eating our lunch out in the sun room, and the cats joined us as well. I think I need to update my description so that it says that this is a blog about DIY and cats, because it seems to have turned into that.

 Even left overs taste good outside.

The sun room is not isolated, so it cant be used in the winter, but once it gets a bit warmer and the sun starts to shine it is just brilliant. Building/installing it is probably the best thing we have done to the house. This spot used to be very windy before, and even on warm summer nights it was chilly to sit there.

I will show the pictures from when we built it in a later post.

Small pretty things

I was in Copenhagen for a very short visit last Friday and I found these lovely candle sticks. At first I was about to buy two of them, the way I always do (and the reason to why I have tons of pairs at home), but as the price was really good I decided to go for three. I think they are nice, kind of cute and romantic

And as I am writing this I realize that I should have bought another pair and spray painted them in silver or some other color. Oh well... 

I haven't been blogging very well this week, but I hope to make a come back next week. I never thought it would take so much time, but it does. Also, when I look at many of my favorite blogs, they are written by women that stay at home and I guess that makes it a little bit easier to find the time. It is also very inspiring to see how many of these women have started their own business based on their blogs. 

 One can still see the snow through the window on this picture. How depressing isn't that?

Have a good day!

Cheap bubbles

I might as well start with an apology that these pictures surely aren't that inspiring. Photographing bubbles in a bad light turned out to be quite difficult, and definitely required more patience than I had at that moment (there was a hot bath waiting for me, so naturally my patience was even less than usual).

A while back we went to one of those smaller supermarkets, where they sell food and occasional "good deals". I am not sure what an international equivalent would be, but I am sure the same concept exists all over the world. There are all those usual groceries, and then there are an aisle or two filled with other things - usually tools, home decoration, socks or similar.

We found this little funny thing that is a mat that you place on the bottom of the tub, which will kind of turn the tub into a jacuzzi. Since it wasn't very expensive we decided to try it and it actually works really well, creating a lot of bubbles. One doesn't really feel the mat-thing in the bottom, and the only drawback (except that it isn't exactly beautiful) is that the water turns cold faster.

Here are my not-so-successful photos of the bubbles. We will, eventually, replace the tub with a real jacuzzi-bath, but it's a bit further down the list of everything we want to do. After all, the tub works fine and it was a real bargain because I got it on the equivalent of craigslist for just a box of chocolate. 

A visitor

I really need to get better at blogging during the weekends. I am usually travelling and the weekends are quality time with my family so I often do not even turn on the computer, but I still need to be better and not leave the blog for three days.

This weekend we had a visitor.

It is the first squirrel I see around our house. At my parents place about 20 km from us, there are plenty of them, but I have never seen one here. I made very sure that the cats could not get outside while he was there.

I have hard that squirrels are acctually quite mean, breaking into birds nest and eating the bird chicks and eggs, but it is so hard to believe when they are so cute. I guess it just shows that looks really can be deceiving. *smile*

Dried tulips

I always dry roses when they start to die, but I never knew it could be done with tulips.

I discovered it by chance some months ago when I tossed one of the bouquet that had already begun to dry up on the shelf and found on that it dried and looked quite nice and definitely added a vintage feel to the room.

So now I only wonder if I will be able to make it across the whole shelf before the tulip season is over? I already feel that I am a bit tired of them and I long for some new (cheap) flowers.

In preparation for summer

I love gardening. I never really thought I would, but since we bought the house my interest has became bigger and bigger. My dream would be to have a house with an old garden where I could discover plants from previous owners, but sadly enough our garden is nothing of the kind. As our house is barely ten years old, the garden is very new and the previous owners probably didnt have the time for gardening (and who could blame them with a house to build and kids to take care of?)

The first year in the house we bought tons of seed to plant and we had plans to  grow so much. In the end we sowed way to many and it took a lot of effort when it was time to plant them. It was also a very rainy summer and most died before June was over.

Last year we only sowed a few things, but this year I am hoping to get it right. I know the critical thing is to give them fertilizers and also to make sure the plot is well prepared.

I opted for many flowers because of the wedding, but it seems quite complicated and I am not sure how many I should sow. I uess that if it fails I will just buy the plants instead.

The cute labels are made of some left over carton and I hope they will stand some moist.

I keep my fingers crossed that I will soon have a window full of green plants!

Spring on the table

I found this beautiful little jug in the thrift store and couldnt pass on it. I think it looks so nice with some tulips and it will be even nicer with some handpicked summer flowers. 

The table was originally dressed in a cloth that had more spring feeling, but as one of our cats always prefers the water in a vase or a jug before that in her bowl, she knocked it over and wet everything. It is not the first time it happens and I have to suit myself for not moving the tulips to the sink for the night.

The handle is really cute, isnt it?

(Linking to Good Life Wednesday at A beach cottage)

A pedestal

Seeing this post last week made me think of a similiar piedistal I refinished at about the same time as the below shelves.

I do not find any before-pictures, but it was a plain wooden piedistal with some water stains on it.

I wanted to experiment a bit with colors and so I painted it in a blue-green shade, almost like old copper. It was quite a nice color, but it was to hard to match with anything, because it was neither bold enough to stand on its own or subtle enough to blend in.

So I gave it a brushed on coat of white on top and got a distressed look that I like quite a lot. Naturally, it could have been better, but it was my first try with that technique, so don't judge to hard. 

A relaxing weekend for some

This weekend has gone by really fast. I made some nice finds in the thrift store on friday, and a small bench that I want to paint, but never found the time for.

My fiancee, who I usually refer to as Darling in this blog, played in the church this Saturday, and he spent most of the day rehearshing for this. Our female cat is quite fond of his music and she was on the table while he played. 

Yesterday we spent the whole day creating our wedding invitations. I guess they turned out alright in the end, but it has been kind of a nightmare. I always thought they would be the funniest part, but for some reason we never managed to settle on a design and kept postponing it, which gave us even less time to have something printed and the more we waited the higher expectations we got, thus requirering something even better all the time.

In the end we settled for home made ones, and I think they are fine enough. I accidentally forgot to upload the pictures, but I will do so tomorrow.

As you may see in the picture, the weather has been fantastic. In spite of the snow on friday, I think spring is finally coming this way!

Day off

Friday is kind of my day off. I usually work longer hours on Monday - Thursday and then enoy this day off. 

It felt good to start the day with a relaxed breakfast, but can you believe it is snowing again!? I thought spring would finally arrive, but I was wrong. Very wrong, even.

Todays pictures are some eucalyptus twigs that was part of a bouquet I got for my birthday. I dried them and I love the color of them. They recently found a new home that I will show you in a couple of days when I have managed to get new pictures, but I love these pics because the color is really right.

Today I am off thrift store hunting again. I am still collecting vintage cups and other things for our wedding, and I have a long list of other things that I also need to pick up (including grocery shopping, which really isnt my favorite).

Maybe I will even be able to find some nice piece of furniture to paint. It's been quite a while since I painted something, but I seem to have gotten a lot of inspiration lately.

The "after pictures" from the "church" will be up next week.

"The church" part one

This will be a long post so I have decided to break it into two, or possibly three different ones.

Our living room is kind of special. It has a very high ceiling, and an indoor balcony. This creates a very open and unusual room, but it is not very practical, because the balcony can not really be used for anything. My father baptised it "the church" because of the high ceiling and the balcony, and since then it has been our inofficiall name for the room. We just have to remember not telling people that we will be having dinner before the TV in the church. 

When we moved in it was mostly natural wood. This is what it looked like in the prospect.

Seeing the pictures makes me kind of nostalgic, but it is really not my style. The sofa looked so small in the corner and there was no balance to the room and it was all really dark (a lot darker than in the pictures).

Below is our sofa which is a bigger one. It looked better, but still not  good.

For a long time I pondered how to best make the ceiling white. It is so high that we could not reach it and painting seemed quite hard (especially considering all the branches in the wood - we were afraid that these would show through in a couple of years). We considered putting up one of those premade ceilings on top of the wood, but it seemed kind of sad to cover that nice ceiling.

In the end I convinced my father-in-law and a painter friend of his that it would look better in white and so we went at it. They brought a  big scaffold and began painting.

Here is Darling taking down the ceiling fixtures.

And this is my doing my part. I did paint quite a lot, but there was a major difference in tidiness between where I had been and where the professional painter had been. Oh well...

After one coat it looked like this. I love shabby chic, but not on a ceiling.

We also removed the rail, originally to make it easier to paint.

It was kind of scary being up there without that rail. Funny what a psycological difference it makes to know that it is or is not there.

I will show you the after pictures in a later post, but I am sure you can already guess what color we chosed.