The moving files: the work continues...

Hi!

As I am writing this, I am catching some rays of sun on my very own lawn. whooooh!
Looking to my left, the neighbour's chickens -who are not to be stopped by fences- are happily destroying my newly planted border, and looking to my left, 3 extremely grumpy cats are staring at me through the window, annoyed with the fact that those chickens are outside, whilst they are not. So far my attempt to make you jealous ( did I succeed? )

But back to business, because there is a lot of home improvement to be done!!

Last post I told you about painting the hall, and as you might have guessed; I wasn't entirely pleased with the result..  Wait; let me refreshen your mind: this is what it looked like...

it's okay, but not terribly exciting..

The problem was not that it looked bad, it was just a bit... boring. further, the paneled walls just felt a bit like a weird choice for such an old farmhouse. But then I thought of something: wainscoting.

While many of you may associate this with frumpiness, wainscoting ( or well, the Dutch type of it) was actually the regular type of cladding for farmhouses like ours. The main reason for it was practicality: if your 1900-husband would enter the house with his wooden shoes covered in mud, spraying lumps of it all though your hall,  it helps to have a wall you can easily clean; hence the wainscoting.

like this! ( this is a house we actually considered to buy)

I figured that transforming the panels into wainscoting shouldn't be too hard, so I called my dad and asked if he would lend me his circular saw ("please don't cut your own fingers of, girl"), cued the music and set to work!

The moving files: chaos, cats and crappy paint

before I go on with this post, I feel obliged to show you the dark side of our moving skills:

wowza!

well, one member of our household enjoyed the mess..

"Boxes!"

the moving files; things that can be done in a day

Break out your champagne, people, we are proud owners of our own house!



(in absence of champagne we made our own wine-labels for the occasion)

For those of you whom I haven't yet bothered with details of our house-huntinh, we bought this 100-year old farmhouse:

I still have no idea how we managed to buy something this cute.

easy like sunday morning, and an upcycled lampshade

Yesterday, as Joost and I were hurrying through the house and packing things, one member of our household that did not feel the stress at all:




Purrr....
Oh, sometimes I really wish I was like Broen... I'd even accept such hairy legs if that would be what it takes ;)

moving houses, moving schmouses.... and a refashioned dress!

Hi guys!

First of all, can I have permission to say 'UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRGGH'!
and then some more uuuuuuuuuuueeeeeeerrgggg... and well, more of that.

moving houses sucks so hard, that if I could put all that sucktitude into a machine, you would have the best vacuum cleaner in the world. I banged my toes against Every. single. moving box in the house. I have turned three boxes upside down looking for scissors, and now Joost is calling from the kitchen, asking if I know where I packed the nutmeg (!) which i know, because I packed it at the bottom of a box, but I have no idea which one. So, yeah I think I will start liking moving houses again as soon as we've got the keys to our new place, but so far, I am hating the guts out of it!

But to cheer myself up, yet another throwback-refashion! ( I will soon be making things again. promised!)

refashioning: Bow-time!

Bonjour!

As I am writing this, I'm wiggling my toes towards a lovely French sun, overlooking one of the most beautiful sceneries of in the Morvan. Yes, I'm spending my weekend abroad! (magnifique etc etc)

Well.... after I had written that sentence - indeed underneath a lovely French sun- I spend my weekend with other French activities, such as drinking wine, shouting at French drivers (but not at the same time) and eating cheese. So, woefully, I have to inform you that the rest of this blogpost is written in plain old Netherlands. But to make you slightly jealous, this was my view of the weekend:

a grassy hill and a cute niece!

interior hunting: thrifting for free

now that Joost and I are quite confident that we will actually move into our new house, my favorite part of moving has started: the hunt for goods to fill our new house with! And as you may have guessed, we're not doing that by spending all our money at some interior store, no: we hunt online and in thrift shops for second hand furniture.

We already bought some pretty nice things, such as an antique bathtub (with those adorable legs!) for 60 euros, a real wooden floor for 175,- and a second hand fridge and dishwasher for 150 euros. But what's even better is that we actually scored a few items completely for free! 

No kidding! If you look at online secondhand sites such as marktplaats.nl (it's my favorite site), there are A LOT of free items available. 

So, let's have a look at what we've scored so far, shall we? 

Starting with our dinner chairs. We got 4 of these chairs from a really nice lady who wanted to buy new ones, and wanted to get rid of the old ones as soon as possible, so she advertised them only for free. I didn't think they were very beautiful, but Joost convinced me to get them because they are really comfortable and practical.

When we got them, they were white. 

nice, but not yet perfect...

Since we didn't really like them as they were, we started removing the white paint, and look how they turned out:

That white/wooden look is so pretty!!!

a geeky rocking horse

Last Saturday, Joost and I looked at each other in slight panic: we had a birthday coming up for the son of one of Joost's friends, and we had completely forgotten to buy something for the child.

In my opinion, buying gifts for a one-year old is a headache anyway: they are too young for the really cool things, and too old for the baby-gifts. Fortunately, the father of this child has a not-so-subtle hobby: Star wars.

Well, yeah.. something like that!

So instead of doing the sensible thing and just buy a book or something alike, we decided to thrift something and turn it into something Star wars related.
So, ( with a trunk loaded with things to donate) we happily hopped off to the thrift shop!

And there we found this faded little friend:

a rocking horse! We thought it was perfect for a one-year old, but the paint was a little faded, and the wooden rockers were slightly spotted.
So, we cued the Star Wars music ( PAM PAM PAM PAMPAPAM PAMPAPAM....) and set to work!