THE LIVING ROOM

We finally have a living room!

Yes, there has always been a living room downstairs, but that room still has boxes and extra furniture from our former city flat everywhere, that have been waiting for the renovation to progress so they can be taken into use and the downstairs one glorious day be emptied up of extras. A day which is very much closer now than a few months ago. (Insert big choir underneath my window singing Hallelujah! the Bach way here.)  We had basically been hanging out in the kitchen for the past two years while first fixing up the boys' rooms, and this summer we finally got the upstairs hallways turned into a hang-out space. 

The hallways was always ugly, unpractical, and tended to collect junk. There are no proper before's of that exact reason. A long time ago when I first came here it made you feel like a tiny hotdog in a bun as one wall was ketchup red and the other mustard yellow. Eventually we coloured the walls white as a quick fix. The ceiling was this strange plastic-cardboard-probably-very-great-in-the-eighties-material. Here are some of last summer's progress:

New ceiling and new walls. I wanted an apricot-y shade on the walls; this is Riviera by Tikkurila. The hardwood floor was in good condition but not nice per se, so it stayed but changed it's looks with paint.

Eddi hand-painted the checks on the floors. The same as the downstairs hallway, from where the stairs lead right up to here.

A lot of things are from our old Tapiola-living room -

(The cats have totally destroyed those red chairs btw. Anyone know of a good upholsterer?)

But some found their way from other rooms, or are in one way or another new - my old movie theatre chairs that had been waiting on the front porch for, umm, five years or so finally made their way up to be put into use! Scraped a lot of old hard bubblegum off underneath those (yuck!)... We also have a tv for the first time in years

The lithography is from my late grandmother's home. She got it as a gift from a lady she had helped during ww2. I always liked the colours in it.

Haha these vases were waiting for the living room to happen, collecting dust in our bedroom forever. Eddi got me the blue-and-white one from a job trip to South Africa and I thought it was a bit ugly until I got the two small other mid-century vases from my grandmother's home when we had to empty it, and I thought of pairing them together.

The Helsinki-poster by my graphic design idol Eric Bruun hangs here now as a nod to what I still consider "my" town, next to a map-poster of where we now live (the village of Vassböle), that  my sister gave us some Christmases ago.

Nothing is ever really ready though. Doors are missing, books need to be taken out of boxes and arranged and the bedroom corridor still needs a new ceiling and walls and and and...

(And now we have no front door because the front porch is being renewed. But that is another story. Right now however I intend to hang out with Netflix on a bigger and comfier screen than the usual laptop-in-lap. Netflix, theatre chairs and red wine it is!)

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AND RIVIERA IT WAS

This is the best part of the renovation!

Choosing colours and getting to paint.
(or ok, second best, after actually being done. or maybe third, because getting to bring the stuff in and decorate is pretty close to being a winner as well...)

Also, note: nice floor. Handpainted by mister Eddi again, like he did downstairs.

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