Chez Larsson

Organizing photos

I love taking photos and with that comes the question what to do with them all.

I've always enjoyed organizing my best ones in traditional photo albums with photo corners. I've done that for many years. The albums and the rest of my photo paraphenalia is stored in two small cabinets in the dining area.

Photos of Wille are now in eight albums and there are also some albums from trips and travels and micellaneous photos from before Wille was born.

The pre digital leftovers that didn't make it into the albums but are still good shots worth hanging on to are stored in these two vintage card boxes my parents once used for their business cards in the 70's. The old frames were broken so I switched them to new leftover ones from some IKEA boxes instead.

The one marked "Wille" is divided by age. The other micellaneous one is divided by year.

Some photos are more difficult to sort. At least I think so. They are the ones that are so random so they don't fit in everywhere elso. I keep two boxes, one for Martin's random photos and one for mine. The boxes contain vintage snapshots and portraits which for some reason didn't make it in to albums of that time, random photos received from friends and relatives and sizes that don't fit into my blue boxes above. It's kind of fun to flick through them once in a while and I don't really mind that they are all mixed up. I guess the key is not to fill the boxes with the photos that can go in the more organized spots so these won't fill up completely.

About a year ago I decided I needed to sort the digital photos too instead of just leaving them on the computer. Both because I was afraid I'd loose them if my computer would crash (which it did six months later!) but also because I wanted to keep them together with the albums where I could touch them. Sound weird? I'm the same with magazines. I prefer the printed version the the web one because I can hold it and look at it. It somehow feels more substantial.

I do print quite a few of the digitally shot ones and put them in the albums but with digital photography one tends to shoot more frames, at least I do. So before I decided how to save my digitals I ruthlessly deleted about 80% of all the shots. There is simply no point in having  seven very similar ones, I kept the best one or a couple of the best ones and deleted the rest. This left me with a managable quantity to burn to DVD discs.

I decided to have one disc per year and for some occasions separate ones. Martin's sailing photos are on separate discs and so are some of the ones with photos of Wille too.

You can get discs which are printable directly on to a white surface but I opted for printable stickers simply because it's easier to reprint a sticker than the whole disc if there's a mistake. I made a template with a software I normally use but with most CD/DVD stickers the software is included or the template can be downloaded.

For the year discs I just chose a font I like and wrote the year and what is included on the disc. For the other discs I chose one of the photos from the disc and used that as the background for writing the contents. I love how they turned out in their plastic holders.

I've since heard that the disc format may become obsolete in the not so far away future so now I'm tryng to think of other ways to store the photos too. I think I will probably print more to put into the albums and maybe also have some of those Blurb photobooks printed. Have you had any photobooks printed by them? Were you pleased with the results?

Swedish country style

As promised I'll show you some photos of the house we stayed in on our little vacation. It's a typical house for the area, Småland, and it was built around 1925 with some of its features recycled from a 17th century local mill.

There is still no running water indoors, only a tap in the back yard and a privvy further back.

 

Most of the rooms have their original decor in terms of wall paper and there are little wood burning stoves in every room.

Our friend's whose summer house this is are avid collectors and their auction and flea market finds are displayed around the house. Above is the little through room off the kitchen.

 

We did some work in the kitchen during our stay. The cushions were one of last summer's projects though. I may have some before and after's for you later on after my friend Sanna and I coordinate our photos. I took some with my camera and she some with her.

The kitchen needs repainting but I love the color it's in so I'm hoping it will be repainted in the same or a similar color. Maybe I can even help out painting next year?

This is the upstairs hallway which is in the process of being turned into a 50's music/reading nook.

The original dark wall paper in one of the bedrooms has been brightened by Brigitte Bardot and more local models on the covers of Swedish vintage magazines.

Dinner in at the tiny kitchen table. Seven of us squishing down for a barbecue feast, excellent wine and great company. Thank you WMG family! Wille and I'd love to come back next year :) 

Yohoo! I'm back!!!

Wille and I are back from our little vacation in the southern parts of Sweden, Småland. We stayed with close friends near a town called Moheda. The weather wasn't great but the company was.

We've been there every summer the past four or five years or so and since it's Wille's best friend's family us adults needn't worry too much about the teenagers, they're happy as long as they're fed, treated to the odd afternoon snack, swim and trip to the game shop in the closest larger town.

Us adults are in turn treated to chauffeur driven tours (Thank you Thomas!!!) of the local flea markets and auctions. This year we missed the auction but instead visited several more flea markets. The photos show my loot which I just unpacked and will clean later tonight.

I had decided to try and get a vintage globe for Wille's room and I did. Judging from the countries it's late 40's early 50's.

I try to find fleas with a purpose so a lot of mine are jars and bowls to be used in the kitchen.

Fabrics are also favourite finds. I love the vintage prints and most will probably be turned into pillow covers.

I'm always on the look out for vintage books on style, manners and homemaking and did find a few of those too.

I'll show you some more photos of the house we stayed in tomorrow. Have a great evening!

~Benita

PS. Sorry about the weird post of yesterday. The photo credits came out strange and I'll try to fix it tonight or tomorrow.

Flickr Faves

Still away in Småland. Here's a peek into my current Flickr Faves. I'll be back "live" tomorrow!

1. overexposed, 2. my worlds, 3. plastic, 4. hubcaps, 5. little treasures, 6. My Bazzill tags, 7. DITL (3 of 1).jpg, 8. frogs in clogs - unbeatable, 9. the taste of summer, 10. Untitled, 11. Untitled, 12. Untitled, 13. white bedroom with vanity, 14. floating vanity, 15. new set, 16. E in the pool, 17. glacier, 18. vitreous, 19. Thanks G!, 20. love beneath the sheets, 21. Untitled, 22. top of my bookcase, 23. Du Pain, 24. ranunculus, 25. Ranunculus, 26. Semlor & Ikea, 27. Easter eggs, 28. In my garden, 29. Tulip from my garden, 30. Tulips from my garden, 31. New craft studio - WIP, 32. Untitled, 33. clawfoot tub, 34. IKEA Adel kitchen - mar08, 35. Joelle Hoverson - Purl, 36. cupcakes on vintage yellow tray

Guest blogger: Martin, the husband's story!

The photo is a bit blurred witch suits my face and figure perfectly...

I've been reading Benita's blog regularily and I'm very impressed with it, so when she asked me to write a post while she and Wille are away in Småland I felt honored and a bit scared! I hope you don't get to disappointed.

My wife is extraordinary, she is very able, clever (bad in maths but very skilled in languages), organized (no surprize there...) very dressed down (very pretty legs but never wears skirts), very headstrong (Finnish heritage) and very caring.

One of the nice things about Benita is even though she is very orginized and tidy, she is not a household Hitler! She is very pleasant to have as a wife, I made a good choice many years ago...

The downsides are:

She is also probably the worst cook in Sweden.... and she doesn't sail. The sailing thing is the only thing that really bothers me. Once I pursuaded them to came to a regatta in Finland and watch the races and all the beautyful yachts (I sail the classic 6mR class). It was very windy and hard conditions, one yacht even broke the mast! When we came in to port and I proudly talked about the race, her only comment was that we had an ugly hot pink spinnacker... It was my closest to file for divorce!

This photo was shot by one of my best friends and professional photografer Carl Henric Tillberg a few years ago (I don't wear glasses anymore thanks to lasic surgery). It's from a classic regatta in the very center of Stockholm and we came in second. Mostly due to that another of my very best friends was att the tiller.

6mR´s in close combat, I used to sail the one in the background (SWE 6). Photo credit: Carl Henric Tillberg 

The "cooking thing" is quite fun, Benita really has no clue! If she was in charge of the food I think Wille would suffer from severe malnutrition due to a menu of only readymade fish sticks or meatballs with macaroni.

What may surprize some of Benitas readers is that I'm also quite involved in the homemaking. Most of the carpentry in our house are joint efforts. But lately Benita has built some pieces on her own, she is too impatient to wait for me to get started because I want to make a proper drawing and figure out the right proportions before I start something. That's not the Benita way... She'd rather waste some wood than measure twice! She is fast though... 

An example; one evening we were chatting about our house and what was left to do, I thought we were quite finished but we might reflect on opening an opening in the wall between the livingroom and the hallway. Afterwards I understood that she had thought about it herself for a while because she didn't even answer. She just started too draw on the wall and a few minutes later went down in the basement to fetch the jigsaw. The next day the she was finished...

Those are some glipses into my life with my wife...

/Martin

Guest blogger: Wille. iPod + Phone = iPhone

Hi, Wille here!

I just got my iPhone a few days ago.. YES!!!

It's got the best features a cellphone can have.. TouchScreen (No buttons here!!), 3G Safari internet connection, iPod features, Gps maps and much much more :P

On the GPS feature you can see where we live!

I was in the foreign lands of Skåne while the iPhone got released.. so I made my mom stay up past midnight and buy it on the web.

While we are away mom and I can keep track of the blog!

I thought it would take months for it to be delivered because tens of thousands of people wanted it.. but it just took three days :DD

Blog faves

I'm off on a mini holiday in Småland together with Wille while you are reading this. We are staying in the little house in the photo above, a summer tradition. I've prepared a few posts and a couple of guest bloggers to keep you entertained while I'm away :)

I love blogs. Design blogs, craft blogs and other blogs. But most of all I love housey blogs. I loves being inspired by others renovating their houses and reading about their accomplishments and their lives. Some of my current favourites are:

Making it Lovely - Nicole is transforming her Oak Park, IL bungalow into a lovely home.

Door Sixteen- Anna renovates her cool Newburgh, NY home.

Fixing Adam's House- Anna from Door Sixteen and her friend Adam blog about Adam's fixer upper. Adam does the hands on work and Anna helps him out from 300 miles away.

Pencil Shavings- Rachel blogs about family life and their recent move.

If you're not already reading these, you have something to look forward to!

Enjoy!

We're on wheels

If it where up to Martin every bit of furniture in our house would be on wheels. He has a particular passion for the industrial type ones.

I like wheels too, both the look of them but also the function. Here they allow us to swivel the TV from sofa mode to dinner mode. I know, bad habit.

On Willes computer unit they enable us to get behind the unit to check cables. I also like the fact that they make it easy to clean, just wheeling the unit out of way.

This unit can be moved from it's normal docking space at the wall to a position which enables Wille to watch TV from bed.

The clear wheels are from IKEA.

In the basement, in the laundry room, I added wheels to a vintage laundry basket. We keep bags etc in it. The air really needs to circulate in that particular spot because there's a hole underneath in the floor with the pipes where our plumbing connects to the city's. The wheels give an extra couple of inches in height for better aircirculation and also good access to what's inside the basket.

These were store bought at a local department store, Åhléns, with wheels on them already. They slide easily from under the shelf where they're sitting, also in the basement, under the stairs.

Do you have wheels on any of your furniture?

Home office update

I recently bought a scanner/printer and as with every gadget and piece of equipment brought into the house there are changes to be made in order to fit the piece and for wires to be sorted. I hate visible cables and wires and make it a priority to hide as many as possible. For some inexplicable reason cables on a lot of white gadgets are black! Why is that? Only Apple seem to have realised that if somebody chooses white they will not be satisified with black cables. Duh!

My solution to the problem of the ugly cable was to drill a hole in the top of the desk of the home office and thread the cable through there and hiding the rest underneath.

Since I will now print from the home office and not from Wille's room any more I set up a little station for all the things needed. Plain paper, photo paper, and other printables like CD stickers and also various plastic sleeves are now sorted. I found the sorter in the metal recycling dumpster in the basement at work and had some milky white perspex "trays" made to measure by one of my suppliers at work.

As you've probably understood by now I have a problem with ugly packaging. I can stand the red photo paper packaging because I buy new frequently but the other printing sheets which are less frequently used I place in white cardboard backed envelopes instead. On the right hand front corner I've printed the contents using my Dymo Letratag.

I'm really excited by the scanner in particular, I've already used it for some of my posts, but I've  dug up some more "pre digital" photos of our previous homes which I'll show you at a later date. They will show you how our home decor has evolved over the years. I had actually forgotten some details myself...

I've got the time

You must think I'm crazy... I just realised all the clocks around our house.

To me keeping track of time is not something negative. I'm thinking some of you may think it's unsetteling knowing the time all the time but to me (and to Martin too) it's the opposite. Instead of wondering if there's enough time we know we can spend the extra few minutes in the bathroom should we want/need to or sometimes know when to rush in able to catch that particular bus.

I so need to get a prettier clock radio for the bedroom. This yellowed white one was passed on to me by my mom as she got a new better/prettier one. We've used it for years, but seeing it here in this photo makes me want to update. It still works though  and I'm used to waking up by it so I guess it stays. For now.

In the livingroom on the shelf behind my favourite armchair is this clock. Since there's something wrong with the clock on the DVD player we're used to looking at this one behind us instead.

 

On the little glass shelf in the tiny upstairs bathroom we keep this one.

An exactly the same one (I am a bulk shopper when I find something I like) is sitting on the glass shelf in the downstairs bathroom.

One more. It's in the laundry room on the tiled shelf next to the savon Marsellie.

Would you believe it? There's a clock in the garage/workshop too.

And of course an exactly the same one on the outside on the garage door.

Like I said, knowing what time it is makes us 1) More often on time 2) More relaxed 3) More aware of what's important, simply by realising all projects take a lot of time and at a certain point it's just time to stop. At our house, on weekends that usually means we stop at around 5 pm to shower, eat dinner and relax. At least in theory, I sometimes work way past that time and am too pooped afterwards to appreciate what I've accomplished. Less is sometimes more even in this respect.