Chez Larsson

The Gaps

Here’s one of those posts that I’m mostly writing for my own sake as a record of what ‘s been done at the house. It’s probably not something that will going down as “most interesting” in the history of Chez Larsson but here it is never the less.

 

My house was built in 1954 which makes it 58 this year. Over the year the stairs to the basement at the back of the house have started shifting away from the house leaving wide gaps.

 

The previous owners were obviously aware of this and had taken some not very successful measures to close the gaps by filling them with junk. I have to say it didn’t do a whole lot for the look or the function of keeping soil from above trickling down when it rained hard.

 

So I did a bit of excavation. My finds; a plastic bag, a clothes peg, some rocks, some strips of wood and some creepy crawlies that weren’t happy that I was poking around in their home.

 

I had every intention to do this job myself but when my contractors came to do the other work they offered to do it for me and since my to-do list is still as long as my arm I took them up on the offer. 

 

They braced the opening shut with a tall board at the front and a small one at the back and used planks of wood to hold it together. Then they poured down concrete and let it cure for two days.

 

This is what it looked like after the brace came off.

 

It was a bit uneven in places but I used a wire brush and a scraper to remove the excess before the concrete had dried completely a not seen in this photo because it was after I took it.

Like I said, not the most interesting post but I’m happy that my gap’s now closed. As for the other gap along the stairs I’ll show you in the after shot when everything’s all nice and painted.

Birthday Bunting

For Wille’s Birthday I wanted some simple but effective decorations for the den because it's just off Wille’s room and he’d see it straight away when he got up. I didn’t have time to sew anything so I used regular printer paper and made bunting.

 

 

I printed WILLE 18 in Stencil font, one letter to each sheet, onto the paper and cut each sheet into bunting triangles.

 

Then I punched a hole at each side at the top…

 

… and thread twine though each one in the order I wanted. I had a blank one in between the Wille and the 18 and two blank ones at the ends.

 

Simple but festive!

Egg Craft Guest Post

Some of you noticed already but if you haven't I'm excited to let you know that I have a guest post up over at the Martha Stewart Crafts Dept. Blog. Find the ice-cream stand how-to over there!

Ps. Check out my earlier egg crafts here.

DIY Floating Shelves & the Homies

So yesterday was mainly about the wallpaper and today I thought I'd share the floating shelves. The shelves are actually a little DIY project. I needed storage in here and in my “new everything” plan there was some built in storage. But since I went down the “mini reno” route instead I had to come up with something.

 

Enter the old home office desktop that I switched out to a bigger one. As I was using it as a wallpapering work table I suddenly realized that it would make two perfect floating shelves.

 

Please excuse the following two ultra crappy photos. I lost my point and shoot camera last week and my DSLR battery died on me just as I was about to take some photos so these are iPhone ones AND the sun shone like crazy. Not perfect photo conditions…

Anyway, what I did was to cut the end off the table top. It’s a hollow core tabletop so I wanted to get rid of the wood(chip) at the ends.

 

Then I used the shelf that I had had up in there before as a template for the length of the shelves and cut accordingly and then down the middle so a 60 cm tabletop turned into two 30 cm deep shelves.

 

Then I used my thumb to press down the cardboard insides at the ends to make room for some pieces of wood for hanging.

 

To hang I simply drilled holes, added plugs and…

 

 

 

… attached some wood which happened to have almost the perfect dimensions to fit in between the Masonite top and bottom of the tabletop.

 

The shelves then just slid over like sleeves.

 

Then I continued to paint the bottoms of the shelves white because they were originally raw Masonite

 

To attach the shelves to the wood I simply screwed them in at the top. The tops of the shelves are above eye level so you can’t see the screws standing on the floor.

 

And there they are, killing two birds with one stone. I got rid of the extra tabletop I didn’t need and I got the perfect chunky shelves!

~

Ps. Turns out that I'm nominated in two categories (Best Home Design Blog and Best DIY Blog) at The Homies over at Apartment Therapy. Thank you so much for nominating me, guys, what a nice surprise!

Valentine's Boxes

I decided to take a rest from renovating last weekend and devoted it to getting to know my new iMac but also to do some crafts. I've been longing to do crafts for crafts sake. You know just sit there with paper and scissors and create something for the fun of it. Those two boxes above are the results of my Saturday morning session. No music, no TV, just snipping and gluing away.

 

 

I'm very lucky in that Panduro Hobby sends me a package of craft supplies every two months this year. The first package arrived just before Christmas and I used some of the contents to wrap my Christmas gifts. This second package is Valentine's themed. With that in mind most of what arrived was romantic and a little on the frilly side and since I'm not in a very romantic mood I went for the cream and black card stock and the simple heart boxes for my craft.

 

I started out by covering the black box with the card stock using the lid as a template and measuring the height of the sides and cut strips for them.

Then I used gluestick to stick the card stock to the box and held it in place with some clips until dry.

For the cream box I again used the lid as a template and traced six hearts onto the card stock.

Cut them all out...

... and stacked and stitched them together on my sewing machine.

That created like a heart shaped booklet when spreading the pages...

 

... which I then stuck onto the lid of the box with glue stick.

 

Again using random clips to hold everything in place until completely dry.

To embellish the black box I cut out several smaller hearts and used adhesive pads to elevate them on each other. I trippled the pads for better height.

And there they are, my not so cutesy Valentine's boxes. I shall be filling them with some treats come the 14th. Happy V-day in advance!