Chez Larsson

Cute as a Button

If you follow my Lovely things Pinterest board you might have seen this pin and my comment to it. Ever since pinning that button trivet I’ve been wanting one. Lotta A pointed out that I could make one by using a cheese board from the local supermarket but although I’ve been keeping an eye out I haven’t seen one. Until I went to my mom’s place a couple of weeks ago. There, under a bunch of stuff in a drawer I was organizing, it was!

 

It had seen better days so I sanded it down. First coarse sandpaper and then finer.

 

Like so.

 

I’m sure there are more scientific ways to figure out the spacing of the holes for my button but I’m no mathematician so I just eyeballed the middle, marked that with a pencil and used stickers to mark where the holes could go. I moved the stickers around a little until I got a good feeling about it.

 

After marking the middle of each sticker with an awl through to the wood I drilled the holes. I only had this super long drill bit but a normal one will do too obviously.

 

I finished off by sanding the holes using sandpaper wrapped around my finger.

 

Done.

 

To seal I used some countertop oil. I did a couple of coats, letting each coat sink into the wood and after a while I wiped off any still greasy areas.

 

Tada! A button trivet ready to be used! Love it!

Edit: If you want a ready made one check them out at Snug.

Gray Wall

Remember my green wall?

 

Going, going…

 

…gone!

 

I just felt like having something calmer in the desk area and the grey is actually from a can I rescued from being tossed at work years ago (back in 2002 according to the date on the can). We were trying out a new store concept and were playing around with different grays.

 

I’m glad we didn’t use it back then because here it’s pretty much perfect! If you’re wondering about the name, it says NCS 1502-Y50R on the can. A good paint store should be able to translate the NCS color system to your country’s system. Anyway I love how it turned out and it was such a quick fix!

Our Old Apartment

I got an e-mail from Martin saying our old apartment is for sale! It’s where Martin and I lived for a few years and where we had Wille.
I really like what they’ve done to the place since we moved back in 1995. It’s so much more modernized. We still had a marble kitchen sink (sounds lovely but the sink was tiny), a deadly gas stove which got red hot (the entire thing) when you had the oven on and the oven itself was itty bitty so you could only ever do half a recipe of anything. I love that they opened up the window into a door (something we would also have done had we stayed) and that they kept the glass pantry door that Martin and I dug out of a dumpster ca 1992. As a matter of fact they kept a lot of the original cabinets and shelves which is nice to see. The rest of the apartment looks a bit odd. They split a not very big room to begin with into two and I can only imagine how cramped that must be IRL although it looks quite spacious in the realtors photos.

 

 

Here are a couple of shots of what it looked like in the very early days when we lived there. Check out more images of the apartment as it looks nowadays here.The images are no longer available. Edit: Either it's sold or we crashed their server :).

Oh, and price wise, we paid 575 000 SEK back in 1989 and sold for 425 000 in 1995 making a loss (but gaining a nice big rental instead). Today’s price 3 795 000 SEK. Yeah.

The Flower Bed

Here’s a long overdue post. For some reason these garden posts are the hardest to put together. I guess it’s because I’m never really happy with the photos in them. Too green, to bright yadda yadda yadda. Anyway this is also the second time I write it because as I was happy to have finished it an hour ago I for some reason wasn’t able to save and it was all gone. So frustrating!

Anyway. Here goes.

The photo above is from just before we moved in a bit over two years ago. The flower bed in front of the basement stairs looked very sad an bare. As did those god awful fleshy pavers.

 

After a couple of months, not so bare anymore but still sad. Everything as so overgrown with weeds and grass.

 

I tried best as I could to sort things out but the layout and the multitude of different flowers was just too much and I knew I would have to do something drastic about it.

 

So I started to make plans for a simpler back yard. Both simpler to the eyes and to maintain. I actually ended up doing pretty much what was in my plan except for the concrete pavers which I skipped.

 

 

As the deck got built the flower bed became a continuation of it. I didn’t save a whole lot of what was originally there, gave most of it away to neighbors and random people via the internet. I did save some hostas, the clematis and a peony.

 

I also saved that yellow thingy close to the deck but later got rid of that too as yellow in the garden’s not my thing.

 

I finally got started replanting after the deck was finished. I basically dug all this out.

 

Like so, only leaving the peony in it’s place and a tiny white rose which I salvaged from another flower bed. Also the clematis runs wild in my back yard and I intend to keep it that way so I just left that as is.

 

I lifted the clumps of hostas out on to the lawn…

 

… divided and replanted them as a border. They did look a bit sad and leggy last summer since they didn’t have anything to lean against. I also added three white Endless Summer hydrangeas which look puny here but which are supposed to become 150 cm tall eventually.

 

This photo was taken earlier this summer. I’m really pleased with the hosta border. The hydrangeas are still quite small but have had beautiful blooms (there are still some).

 

Until the hydrangeas reach their full height and width I’ve filled the gaps with some marguerite daises. And that white blob towards the back is the white rose I saved which turned out to be beautiful once it got better growing conditions..

 

And there it is all nice and lush. As you can see from this view the lawn was still in pretty bad shape earlier when I took these photos (we’d hardly not had any rain so my grass seeds didn’t want do do their thing) but happily that’s filled in since.

 

There, I did it! The post is up, finally!

If you want to know more about the garden there’s a category in the archives named  In the garden so check that out. If you want more about the deck and how it was built etc , try typing in “the deck” in the search bar at the top of the sidebar and you should find it all there. The search bar is actually a pretty great tool which I use all the time myself when I look for earlier posts.

Happy gardening!

Odd Jobs

I’m a sucker for finishing off stuff. Hate, hate hate, little things that don’t get done for one reason or another. The last week of my vacation I went around the top floor of the house with a caulk gun and wood colored filler. I filled all the little left over gaps from when the new floor was laid two and a half years ago.

 

The old floor, or rather two layers of old floor + subfloor, was higher than the new floor and while my contractors added slightly higher skirting boards there were these gaps from where the vertical trim meets the floor. I didn’t give them enough time to do the finishing touches and instead planned to do it myself. It’s bothered me every time I’ve been up there and I finally did something about it. And it feels SO good. Still to do is give the not-entirely-white skirting boards and that threshold a lick of white paint. Maybe this Christmas.

 

I also got the same little ok rosettes to cover the pipe holes like I did in Wille’s bedroom. They really do finish things off nicely. These I haven’t glued together yet as I need to paint the skirting boards behind so there’s a tiny gap so I can open them up and remove them when I’m ready to paint. After that’s done I’ll use wood glue to shut them up.

Like I said, I just love finishing things off.