Here is what our (messy) office looked like before our quick project…
… and here it is now, after redoing the worktops, adding a shelf on the wall and doing some (well needed) organizing. I love how the white worktops make the whole room feel more airy and light and the space feel more uniform. The shelves are perfect for a small room like this, they don’t make the room feel crowded but offer a much needed storage space. We still need to hide the cords (there are a million of them!) so don’t mind them!
On Saturday we spent the day at my grandparents’ summer cottage. My mother cooked for us and my sister a meal in the simple summer kitchen my grandfather built for my grandmother.
Another bigger home project during our summer holiday has been the home office, especially the worktops. We bought the solid pine worktops (IKEA Furuskog) before moving in and applied bee wax on them. The result has not been satisfying as the color of the wood changed into yellowish and the surface became sticky. We have been waiting for the summer so that we’d have the time to re-sand and treat the worktops. We didn’t want to paint or lacquer the worktops, stain didn’t sound good either. So we ended up getting different kind of wood wax that has been dyed. We chose wax because the wood’s texture and pattern can still be felt and seen.
We started this project last Sunday when we sanded the worktops in the backyard. The bee wax had soaked into the wood so the sanding took some time. On Monday we applied the Osmo wax on the back side of the worktops in the basement. On Tuesday we waxed the top sides.  The wax has a very strong smell so the whole apartment reeked for 3 days. Now we are just waiting for the wax to dry and harden. After the surface has dried completely (it takes about a week), the wax can be polished, but we probably won’t do that.
The wax gives the wood a solid surface and should help in keeping the worktops clean. In the last picture, you can see the worktop surface before and after. As you can see, earlier the worktops were dirt and dust magnets. Most importantly, the new white color makes the small room brighter.
Katja is going to blog about the overall change in the room soon.
Now that we are on summer holiday for two weeks, we have time to finalize at least some parts of our renovation which we started already in December before moving in. We have a long list of tasks to do by the end of next week and we are nicely underway.
We’ve had an empty closet in the upstairs hallway while we have had unpacked boxes in the basement. We haven’t used the closet because it has required fixing, for example it had an old built-in ironing board taking up space. During the last few days, in addition to painting the floor and door mouldings in the hallway, we fixed the closet. It was an inexpensive project because we used left-over shelf boards and paint and had to buy only two rolls of shelf paper. In the top picture on the left you can see the closet after we took the ironing board out. On the right is the fixed version with freshly painted walls and floor and papered shelves. We are going to use the closet to store decorating items (Christmas ornaments, extra frames, flower pots).
As we went through the boxed in the basement, we sorted things to three piles: throw away, give to charity and sell at the thrift store. We have a spot at local thrift store for a week starting tomorrow. We have at least three boxes of items to sell and one box and a bag to donate to the Red Cross. It’s nice to get rid of extra stuff and get things finally organized.
Saturday was a lovely sunny day so we took the ferryboat to Hailuoto, an island on the Gulf of Bothnia. Here are a few of our pictures from the day. Today the sky is grey and it has been raining for hours already but we don’t mind the rain, we have a couple of projects we’re working on around the house. For the next two weeks we’re both home on summer vacation and we have many projects we’re hoping to finish in that time. We’ll keep you posted on how that goes!
