Those of you who read this blog know that Eddi has a house out in the countryside; at their family farm he and his brother run besides their normal jobs now that their father has retired.
At only fifitly minutes from the Helsinki city centre (and forty from where we live) it is still way out in the country side, where the snow stays white in winter, the roads are dark whitout any street lighting and people leave their doors unlocked at night (crazy people! Haven't they ever seen any horror movies?).
The wooden house is big, built in the late twenties and will be great once it is renovated - right now it has nice features but contains the worst of the seventies, eighties and nineties. It seems most of his relatives have been living there at some point, the interior isn't really in any style, but items have been bought and left there sporadically over the years.
The plan is to at some point bring out the old ceilings and dig up the old wooden floors and fix each room, but as we just fixed our flat here in the city there is nor the time, money or spirit for it for a few years to come. Or, shouldn't be. But the itch is there -so, we decided to do a little quick freshing up in the room one spends the most time in; the kitchen. A small make over, some light pimping so to say; but you can do magic with some paint and new details during one weekend.
The kitchen before:
The walls were in what I called
baby poop brown, the cupboards old and worn from the eighties.
The room was full of extra stuff that had no practical or aesthetically purpose whatsoever, like an extra sink out of use. Eddi had removed most of it though, including the fugly curtains that were hanging there before I managed to get pictures...
We removed some of the cupboards on the wall to lighten the room up, reveiling a mint green colour that had been on there earlier. Not that far from the colour we had in the cans, waiting to get up on the walls!
Afterwards! A huge change.
We re-painted the ceiling white, painted all the walls robin's egg blue and changed the door knobs and handels.
And put up some shelves instead of the old cupboard.
I made us some new curtains.
At some point I intend to find us a big nice old cabinet for the china, but for now a trip to IKEA was enough. The cabinet can be used for other purposes once the perfect vintage piece comes along; I am not one of those to keep the plates and cups in a plastic bag to wait for that perfect piece to show up, I go for compromises until that.
We still intend to paint the door- and window frames, as the tree colour does not really match the pale blue walls - I am tempted to paint them in a dark red shiny colour but we will most likely go for white though. We also intend to paint the table and the chairs and get ourselves a new lamp. And a new fridge also. Perhaps another Smeg, but in another colour. Cream, or red.
(Please ignore the microwave there on the table waiting to be hidden). It feels a lot more nice to spend time in the kitchen now. This little project took us one weekend.
The knitted sweater is my grandmother's from the fifties, the rest is old, new stuff. Or how would one put it; new-old, old-new. Hmm. Later in the Easter weekend it got so warm one could stay out with short sleeves on. Finally!
