Bedroom art

A couple of years ago I had an idea to glue black&white pics to an old wardrobe door. Dad made trims to it so it's deeper than a regular wardrobe door. The pictures are from my childhood when I liked to cover the walls of my room with tiny black and white pictures. Here's a picture of me doing the decoupage.

And here some close ups.

 

 It used to hang on the wall in my ex-homes, but now it looks better just leaning to the wall on the Ikea Malm drawers. The bedspread is from Tallinn, which is a great shopping city! Not as good as Helsinki but cheaper :)

Last spring I bought 5 meters of top quality silk from Bangkok and turned them into curtains. I love the deep dark blue colour in them and how they look so bright and cheery in sunlight :) And they cost almost nothing :)

Funny Ideas

Winter Helsinki

The beautiful view from the living room & balcony :) I live in Vallila, but the view is right to the artistic and the most famous part of Helsinki, Kallio. It starts from the neighbour building. Every time you go out, you can see some pretty peculiar people out there...

New living room

After two weeks of living in Helsinki my living room looks like this.


I love it. The shape of it is kind of triangual, but still it's not at all unefficient. The apartment is only 38 square meters so it's important to use those squares thoughtfully. Like here :) Luckilly there's a balcony so that counts for an extra room in summer.

I needed two new lamps and some curtains. I got the curtains (the outer panel curtains in the pic below) and also some new plants. My old ones didn't survive the 600 km move from Oulu to Helsinki :( Now in the living room there is this Kerä from Kodin1. I have been dreaming about this since last summer, and now my dream came true :)

It's kind of a copy from my extremely favourite lamp Random Light by Moooi:

The funny thing about Kerä is that it works well only with an energy saver bulb. First I tried with this old fashioned bulb and I got very blue, because I thought the whole lamp's a dissapointment. It created these stringy shadows all over the living room. The room got very very dark and cave-like.. Like spider webs and darkness all over. So it was like the opposite of a lamp. It made the room darker.

But when I put an energy saver to it: no shadows whatsoever! And I bought this massive bulb into it, because they're the most showy.

My very first restoration project

The story of this chair is very scpecial for me. It started in 2008 when I wanted to start a new hobby, restoration. I signed up to a course in the workers' institute that was about painting and restoratin small pieces of furniture or other objects. BUT I never went there. However, I had visited (almost) all the antique shops in Oulu to find something to restorate. In the sixth or something I got these three chairs for free!!! First they recommended some 50 euro rocking chair and I said it's way too much. Then they searched some pieces of wood from the darkest corner of the store. Obviously they thought it was a stack of junk and gave it for free :)



For me it was a treasure. I soon found out, however, that there would be only two chairs. Some of the pieces were in such a bad shape that I had to choose only the somewhat healthy pieces.


Then I had to wait for the summer. Because I didn't go to the course, because it was so far from my home and I don't have a car and that would have ment missing almost half of my weekends that 6 months... I'm an expert making up excuses for not taking part of stuff that's outside my comfort zone (like a course with complete strangers) :D

So I had to wait for the summer 2009 because then I could use my dad's workshop (garage) in Kempele. I just bought equipment (like an extra tiny gruinder and some Osmo tree wax, ebony). I didn't need a course to make these decisions, because my dad helped me and he's really talented as a free-time-carpenter.

With the help of him we grinded the extremely demanding layers of varnish and paint for two days. Then I applied/rubbed the wax to the chairs with a help of an old pillowcase. Two-three layers. I don't even remember anymore :) This was six months ago! Anyway, this is the result: