Nestled In

We’ve been looking for a nice coffee table ever since we moved in but hadn’t found the right one yet. So when my grandparents offered us an old table they had sitting in the storage we decided to take it. It wasn’t perfect - not exactly what we were looking for but it was free and it had potential. It’s a simple peasant style table built in 1939 and as you can see from the ‘before’ picture (above) the top had been painted green and the legs were varnished brown. The height of the table was almost regular dining table height so my grandfather cut the legs shorter for us. Minna and I considered painting or varnishing the top and the legs different colors but at the end we decided to paint the whole table white. We chose a high gloss paint because we thought it would give the table a bit more modern look. After some sandpapering and painting we finally have a coffee table. We’re really happy with how it turned out: (See more pictures here)

And look, both ends of the table have little drawers in them. They’re perfect for storing the remote controls.

I am not an organized person. I try to be but I am not. I have drawers and boxes and baskets and files full of things (and I sure like to buy things that help me get a bit more organized) but mostly I have piles of things that should be organized and put in their right place but in the piles they stay. And we have too much stuff. We both have a lot of magazines, books, CDs and DVDs. So I decided that the first step to getting more organized is to get rid of some stuff that we really don’t need anymore. Inspired by Benita from Chez Larsson and her amazing organizing skills, especially her post on organizing magazines, I decided to sort out my magazines first. So last night (yes, this is exactly the kind of stuff I do on Saturday nights), armed with scissors and a glass of delicious pear cider I looked through all my decorating magazines and cut out to save only the pages that had something inspiring on them. Like Benita, I am going to put them into a folder for easy access and storage. It was fun to look through all my magazines, especially the different Finnish, Swedish, English and American interior design magazines from the last couple of years. It was interesting to see if the images I had liked the best two years ago were the same ones that caught my eye now (some were and some were not). I think I’ll scan some of my favorite images and share them with you next week.

Here is the second chair project we worked on over the weekend. This is an old chair that was left in my grandparents’ summer cabin by the previous owner of the cabin and it’s been sitting in their storage since. The chair is in a good condition, only the seat (and the padding under the fabric) was dirty and very dusty, not to mention kind of smelly. So we ripped off the old fabric and the padding underneath and made a new seat cover from the same Patricia fabric we used earlier on the other chair. We bought some inexpensive foam material to put underneath the fabric and then fixed the fabric on the chair with a stapler gun. It would have been a simple and fun little project but the material of the chair was very tough so getting the staples to fix on was a problem. We were so frustrated with the staples that we nearly gave up but I’m happy we didn’t because I think that the end result looks great!

Here is the first of two simple chair projects we did over the weekend. The chair in question used to be Minna’s office chair but since it was replaced by a white Snille chair from IKEA it’s been in the kitchen where it goes well with our black Olle chairs. The only thing we haven’t been so crazy about is the bright red color of the seat, it doesn’t really go with anything else in our home. This weekend we covered the red with nice black and white Patricia fabric from IKEA. We cut and hemmed the fabric and then used a stapler gun to fix the fabric to the seat. We think it looks so much nicer now!

Lissu likes to help. She’s feeling much better already!

Tomorrow we’ll head for IKEA but today we had some sorting to do. We have had a couple of boxes full of miscellaneous stuff lying around the apartment and tonight we went throught them. There were lots of loose photos, small coat racks/hooks, lamps, photo frames and such, and now they are sorted into four piles. In one pile there’re all the things we plan to put into the storage, one pile has all the stuff we’ll take to the thrift store, one pile goes straight to the garbage and the rest we’ll keep in the apartment.