more kitchen

finishing an apartment takes time. with the help of my brother who visited last week, i put up a couple of posters:



the keep calm poster was a present and can be found in many shapes and sizes on etsy. the poster on the top is actually a vintage kitchen towel, and the one underneath with a print of scandinavian design classics is also from etsy.

this clock finally saw the light of day again after having been confined to a moving box for about two years.



and last but not least: a selfmade calendar with postcards from ikea, next to our wine-rack on the kitchen wall.

details

i thought i'd share a few details from the new living room - the rest of the apartment still looks like it came right out of a moving van, and we've had a minor dishwasher incident which needs to get fixed in the kitchen before i can start showing it to the world...



to get one of those ikea expedit shelves was one of the best ideas we've had - we can hide a.'s workstation behind it and it has lots of space for thrift-finds (for example, it fits our brother de luxe typewriter perfectly), books and dvds.



old picture frames waiting for pictures, and next to it a flower i gave to my favourite person in the world on our first day together. he framed it, which is such a wonderful thing to do.



i found this set in uppsala in march, when i visited a friend and went on a couple of thrifting trips. the creamer doesn't belong to the set but i think it fits perfectly into the family.



a souvenir from the norwegian opera and ballet!



i got myself those roses for my birthday, but alas, they wouldn't survive very long. i'm glad i took this picture before they died (and really, i don't know what i did wrong.. do such miniature roses need lots of water or only very little? much sunshine or not?). i bought both the flower pot and the vase at a fleamarket this spring, and the creamer was a thrift find as well. my mother gave the candle holder to me as a present when i was 16 or 17. i remember that she got it at an arts and crafts market in nürnberg - our family had gone there together and she had a hard time distracting me from the stand with those candle holders so that she could buy one for me. i don't know how she managed but it really was a total surprise when i unwrapped the small parcel a few weeks later.

sunshine in small doses

when i think about spring i get really homesick.. i hear it is 15°C in germany, with sunshine and snowdrops and crocuses and ice-cream!





so, until the sun finally decides to come out and melt all the snow away we have to make do with sunshine in the form of colourful sunny tulips...



instant spring for little money!

new old things

this last year i've tried not to buy too many new things for the kitchen/apartment/livingroom, because we were supposedly to move away soon enough and i wouldn't want to pack it all into boxes to haul it to the other end of the world. also, norway is really expensive, even when you go thrifting and buy secondhand. however, here are a few things i bought a couple of weeks ago:





matching sugar bowl and creamer, to be used as candle holders (the costa boda "snowball" was a guest present form my swedish exchange partner back in 1998). i also got the table cloth quite recently at a thrift store - i love the print!



salt shaker and toothpick holder, in a wonderful art deco inspired stand. the pepper caster is missing, but that's nothing to be worried about since i prefer fresh ground pepper. now i'm looking for a nice vintage pepper mill...

kaffeekränzchen

dotti invited and everyone came: the first virtual coffee party! of course i went, and one could say that i brought the cream for the whole party, considering the amount of creamy lace i wore...










































also, to celebrate the event i bought a new colourful flowerful tablecloth (which had become quite necessary since we didn't own any tablecloth before..) - isn't it pretty?

light up my room

today i went to a flea market here in lüneburg. my plan was to find some nice little 50s china thing to have my sugar in, but of course i ended up buying totally different things. actually, not so many things, some clothes which i will show in another post, and - a lampshade.

up to now, i only had a lamp with a lampshade in my sleeping room, and a naked lightbulb in my kitchen/livingroom. i didn't want to have just any kind of lamp there, but something special which might go together both with my furniture and also with the lamp in my sleepingroom, which looks like this:

























when i arrived at the fleamarket, more or less the first thing i saw was a cute 50s/70s-style lampshade at one of the first stands there. i guess i passed it at least three or four times until i finally asked if it still worked? the answer was yes, resulting in me wondering if i really might dare ask how much he wanted for it. fearing the price might be way above my purse, i finally asked and got as an answer that he wanted, well, 10euros? which was definitely a lot less which i had expected, so i didn't start arguing and took it home. here it is:


























now the only question remaining is: how will i get it up to the ceiling? i do have something which might be called ladder-phobia. it's not that i am afraid of heights really, but i can't stand anything where i am up somewhere and can see down between my feet. so ladders are mostly a no go, and so are floors made of glass, even though i am training..