Enclosed gardens

We have a garden. A nice little garden, small lawn, beautiful flowers and roses- some old ones and som new.
The garden is placed in front of our house facing the street. This means that our house is withdrawn from the street which is nice, but sadly it also means that our garden is a popular place for people to relieve themselves of litter or body fluids.

Also last year all our roses was stolen. Made me quite grumpy I must say...

Still- we love our garden but we would very much like to make it into an enclosed garden, a japanese enclosed garden. This is perfect since our garden has just a couple of hours of sunlight each day and it would look great with gravel, moss, a little pond and shadowloving plants! Making it an enclosed garden would open up for a different and of course a more private use of this space. We do not use it much now- just keeping it as nice and tidy as possible. Has to stay a dream for now- other projects are more urgent and we do like to travel also- so until further we choose to dream about it.

Have an absolutely fabulous evening! Found some pictures to inspire our garden dream!

Customizing grumpyhouse

When you live in an old house where no corners have the right angle, floors and walls and even the ceiling leans in all directions one has to be good at customizing.

We bought some new kitchen cabinets a while ago and ended up with a small space between the cabinet and the wall. Finally Mr Grumpy made what I wanted to have here. A small shelf for cutting boards.

Perfect!!

We have also customized shoe shelfs, stereounit, and we ( = I have plans for Mr Grumpy) plan to make several shelfs in otherwise useless places in the house, and a storage place for firewood in the living room.

Before there was no shelf even-
now there is a very useful shelf

Perfect!

Scaffolding is gone! Wiiiiii! And since we are hiring people to finish for us Mr Grumpy has the time to do things like this! Love it!

Floor plans ( I hope....)

What can I say. These are our floor plans. Since our house is around 20 meters long (at least main floor, actually the house is longer than 20 meters) we wanted to give it one floor to combine all the rooms.

We completly fell for Dinesen floors. You can check their website here: Dinesen floors

Look at this! Isn`t it awesome??

from pinterest

It is not difficult to see why we want this floor. It is absolutely stunning. Grumpy and Mr Grumpy have always agreed on this matter. There is only one floor we want and it has to be made of solid wood.
And the best ones are Dinesen.

We started the process with Dinesen a couple of years ago but had to postpone the whole thing due to other pressing rehabilitation dutys.
At Dinesen they are extremly serviceminded and kind and I highly recommend them! I still have a bad conscience about our last minute withdrawal. We were just about to press the "BUY" button and then we said no.

I wondered if I should have called this post floor dreams but that would be a defeat. It is still a plan.

However we have to wait some more. We do not want to lay this floor down ourselves so we have to wait until we can afford it- both workers, shipping and floor. Although it looks expensive it isn`t actually when you compare it to other solid floors. What`s expensive about it for our part is the preparing and the shipping costs. So we wait. Patience is a virtue when you refurbish- a ground rule if you ask me.

Mr Grumpy gets sick every time he hears the words "do something" so it is out of the question that he will have any other role in this but to be a supervisor.

He has got so fed up the last weeks so we are hiring people to do some of those finishing touches. Might be unnecessary but for Mr Grumpy it is crucial that he gets some time off.

So maybe- if Mr Grumpy reads this he can look at these pictures and imagine how great it will be. In our house this will be incredibly good looking. Long solid wood- 20 meters down. *sigh* :D

From http://design-conscious.blogspot.no/2010/04/dinesen.html

If you can dream it you can do it.
Just keep swimming!

Combat sports

Grumpy and Mr Grumpy are nerds when it comes to martial arts and combat sports. Mr Grumpy loves wushu, Grumpy loves kickboxing. Grumpy`s big project in 2012 was losing weigth, and kickboxing killed soooo many calories! Grumpy is a thinner and much fitter grumpy person now. I recommended kickboxing as a sport mainly because you will achieve peace with the universe after training (and if you are looking for a fun sport and lose weight at the same time... don`t hesitate. Find the nearest club ASAP!!).

There is nothing left afterwards but peace.
The sky might fall down- you will not care.

Try it! (especially healthy during house rehabilitation- and that is a promise!)

Look at those bold colours! Need some of that in my home for sure!
(Picture from Artslink.wordpress.com)

Wishing you a kicking good day!
Grumpy

Easter tranquility

Finished with two shifts at work- now I will enjoy some time off and what is left of the easter holidays.

Searched for quaint houses on the web today and this article from Elle Decor came up. So many cool houses although some of them are too narrow even for me.

Check here for narrow funny houses

Enjoy the evening! I will. 

(Red wine and chocolates)

ooops

Although I don`t have many readers I think I owe the ones I have an apology. Time has had a horrible pace the last weeks and suddenly I haven`t had the time, the energy or any interesting themes to blog about. So over two weeks have passed without any blog posts. I apologize.

I am generally tired at the moment. All the little finishing touches are still undone- I can only hope Mr Grumpy will manage to fix some of them during easter. I have some time off during easter and hopefully I`ll find some inspiration then.
I am not a professional blogger, just an ordinary woman a with full time job AND a second full time job at home. .
Sometimes it is overwhelming, and my blogging will be random.

Have a great night- talk soon!

PS- I always crave chocolate when I am exhausted. This was a weird picture that came up in a google search for "chocolate heaven". Doesn`t look very heavenly if you ask me....

Corbijn love

I am a huge Depeche Mode fan, and a Corbijn fan. His photos and their music are a perfect match.
Emmas designblogg had this post some time ago about Corbijn`s new studio- just gotta love it! I find this inspiring when it comes to decorating my house too.

More pictures here:
Check out Emmas blogg  too!

Day off = kitchen pleasures

I could have written kitchen dutys, but staying in the kitchen a whole day is to me just pure relaxation. So I am spending my day off happy in my kitchen!
Today I will bake a couple of breads, a pizza or two and I am going to try out this recipe for Oliveoil cake.

Picture from Madame Laurien

Talk soon!

Beautiful colours

I love Loris blog automatism. She always has beautiful pictures to present. One of the best I have seen lately is this one:

So beautiful with the deep green colour and the golden hair!
In our next round of renovation we are planning to build a library. We have not decided colours yet, but if it is all up to me it will be decorated with deep colours.

Wish you all a pleasant day (or night :D)
Grumpy

Those finishing touches

A little presentation of the "details" remaining. You know those finishing touches necessary to create a complete look. Yup, we have a lot of details remaning. Not quite sure they are details though...

And this is the year without any renovation. Somebody give me some strength and serenity. Now please!!!!

Wires hanging all over......
.

Wires again, need some serious covering up, message from the electrician still visible at the plasterboard, and no we haven`t painted the wall either.

Visible sewage pipes. Nice.

Wires and ventilation, even more covering  up needed

Need I say more?

Yup, you got it. Grumpykids play here. A bit embarrasing actually.

More sewagepipes

Goodlooking tiles with badlooking grout

Nice and white and newly painted kitchen.  Just some spots left. Still annoying though.

Nice tiles, just lacking a little piece

Mr Grumpy are you reading this? Well go on then- get back to work! Shush!

Cottage dreams

Last weekend we visited friends at their cottage. They own an old cottage with thick timber walls, it is absolutely adorable! (and the owners are adorable too :) ) They have refurbished parts of the cottage and since their taste in interior is exquisite it looks fab!

Turned out to be an oldfashioned experience, at least in some ways-  the well had frozen and they have an outhouse for the necessities. We were prepared so we had no worries (ok- outhouse was a bit stinky, I admit it)

All very charming and we very much enjoyed our time away from home. It meant for us a well earned break from Grumpyhouse.

We would love to have a cottage of our own. Although I love love love old houses, our cottage would have to be a new and modern style one. One old grumpy house is more than enough.

I like this one- maybe one day if  I ever get to be a millionaire.....

Cottage dream

By Snohetta architects.

Quaint and cool

As you know I am a fan of quaint houses, obviously because I live in one myself.

Grumpyhouse could have been different and more square, but for some odd reason not known to me, they decided to build a long and narrow house although it wasn`t necessary. These architect drawn "built in" quaint houses are so cool! If I just had the land Grumpyhouse stands on and wanted to build a new house I would definetly contact an architect to help us get a similar cool house.

Have a nice weekend!

More here:

Floors

Mr Grumpy and myself have a wet dream.... One floor througout the whole mainfloor of our house. Our house is narrow, long and tall. We have a basement, loft and three apartments. We live in two and let out one.
Our floors today is a little bouqet of materials- all from different decades....

Our most beautiful floor is the one in our living room. It is the original wooden floor and I will hate to see it go.... Sadly we have no choice since it practically cracks up. It squeaks, it leans heavily in every direction, nails constantly pop out and there is a always a risk of splinters in our feet. We could of course just put a new floor on top of the old but Mr Grumpy has raised his voice loud and clear: "We need to ISOLATE mrs Grumpy. You will not get your new floor if I can not get my isolation!!" So old floors and that clay/ sand they isolated houses with a 100 years ago needs to go.
End of discussion.

As I have told you before we are soon finished with a long and hard (a clichè but true) renovation period now. We plan a sabbatical year this year and then we will see if time, energy and finances allows us to go forward with our floor dream....

Our dream floor will need a post of its own so I`ll get back to you on that matter!

Here are pictures from our current floors (and this is only in one of our apartments...)

The old beatiful floor- over a 100 years old

Kitchen floor from the 80s

Staircase with two different kinds of flooring.
awful but will stay like this for a long time...

TV- room floor from the 60s, also leaning heavily and
there is  a hole in it that we cover up with a thick rug

Any flooring dreams out there??

Cold and cozy Grumpyhouse

Today ended good. A hard workout, a well earned compliment or two and I am back on track!

Grumpyhouse is a cold place during winter. When the temperature sinks below 0 degrees C outside we have on average around 14 degrees C inside. It is still a cold house although we have isolated and installed a heat pump during our recent round of renovation.

But! it is better belive it or not! Last winter we had 11 degrees C inside during winter so it is actually 3 degrees up!

We are dependent on our fire place to keep the house warm. So despite the fact that it is cold when we get up in the morning, in the evenings we have the best heat source ever- a fireplace :) I love the kind of heat you get from fireplaces. So much better than other heat sources!

It makes our living room so cozy and warm that I don`t want to be anywhere else. It kind of orders us to relax. I spend my evenings under a wool blanket, feet against the fireplace, coffee in my mug and a laptop or a book in my lap. Haven`t bothered with the telly for several days.

This is truly as close as I get to my happy place. I absolutely love it!

Sometimes life is not a bitch but an as....

I am truly sorry about the headline but life punched me in the face today. Twice.
Although I have tried to block everything out jedi- style it ruined my day. Sadly innocent people was hurt in the process because of the anger I had built up during the day.

I would very much like to get better at handling these unexpected turns in life because I hate it when the Grumpy in me can not let things go. I try several things:

1- "Will this matter in 5 years?"
2- I try to go to my happy place (but I am not sure where it is!)
3- I try to think about other stuff, fun things, pretty men etc etc
4- Hard workouts usually helps but today is not my workout day
5- I go for a walk, but again- this is not my workout day.

Today and other days also none of this helped. Then what? Suggestions are kindly received!

Anyways- there are good things happening too. Mr Grumpy is aaalmost finished outside, at least the scaffolding is gone. YEY!

There is a backside here as well:
He promised to be finished by new year but as always that didn`t happen because there is a "detail remaining there", and " oh I forgot Grumpy there is yet another detail at the other side too!" Since he also have started working out again, the pace he had before- rehabilitationwise -is tuned down several notches. So new year have passed without finishing, and I am sure the same thing will happen with January. This is the life in a house during rehabilitation. Patience is a virtue.
I do not think we have managed to keep one deadline we have set ourselves.

Enjoy your evening, I will try to enjoy mine. Maybe I should do yoga or try meditating...

My o` my o` my

Finally! My computer is back from the repairshop!!! 3 weeks. I `d say- a minute more and they would have to admit me at psych ward... Sorry- but I have really really missed my computer!

I haven`t taken one photo during the holidays... I have to tidy a bit at the blog now and come back with lots of interesting and less interesting posts!!

Have an exquisite evening and give your computer a hug. I know mine will get one ;)