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The lavender is almost gone. I need to make time to cut the flowers, to use for sachets.
The honeysuckle is in full bloom. I love those strange flowers. I also love the english name. It sounds so sweet, Honey-suckle…
The plum tree has been moved a few months ago, but apparently it didn’t mind. There are about fifteen of these promising green plums hiding under the leaves. Harvest is small off this little tree, but they taste so good!
I like the way past, present and future are visible in nature. It helps me to be more mindful about changes in my life. Parents growing older, children starting to become adults, finding my own place in between. It’s just the way things are. The circle of life…
So, this is our new floor. Isn’t it beautiful? I’m really, really pleased with it.
But that’s not what I wanted to talk about today. I want to share something I have learned this week and I just hope I can put it into words right (english is not my native language).
When ones kids grow up, one may have days that mindful posts about days spent creating, teaching and playing with smaller kids can bring tears to ones eyes. One may even start to think that a family starts to fall apart when the youngest member has reached puberty. Hours are spent in their own rooms and even when they are in the living room, there is no playing with eachother like it used to be. Everybody is engaged in his/her own things. One may think that things have changed and this is it. But one is wrong about that.
The livingroom was unusable and declared off limits, when the floorthing started. The kids spent more hours in their rooms. To make up for the mess they were allowed to take their laptops into their rooms and they even were allowed longer computer hours (our rule is one or two hours a day – depending on how many schoolhours- and only in the livingroom, which is always subject for lots of discussion, since nobody else in their school has such strict parents).
After one night of dining on the kitchenfloor I brought in a campingtable and some folding chairs, thinking that would provide us with a place to have our meals. The kitchen became very cluttered and the chairs were not comfortable, but much to my surprise, that same day the kids came out of their rooms and spent hours on those crappy seats, reading, playing on the computer, writing.
We all spent hours there, gathering, being a family. We needed that. We felt lost every time when we gave up (hurting backs make you give up) and went to our own rooms. And we all felt kind of lonely and homesick, when we did.
We learned we are a real family after all. Even if we do our own things, we need to be together. Our living room is much more than a space where the table, the couch and the tv are.
It is the place where we really live.
In this small room we work, we play, we read, we write. In this small room we laugh, we cry, we talk, we sit in silence, we have small fights and we cuddle, we tell each other what is bothering us and we tell about the things that made us happy, we share our days, our feelings, our lives there.
Modern life may provide most families with large rooms-of-our-own, but I think we are lucky to have a different layout. If we need to be alone, we can. The kids each have rooms that measure about 7 square meters (75 sq feet) and the “masterbedroom” is the same size.
The livingroom is not big either, only 20 square meters (215 sq feet), including the diningarea, but it is big enough.
Our everyday life takes place in this central place. It is the heart of our home, the place where we truly feel we are a family. And that makes it more beautiful than furniture or even that beautiful new wooden floor will ever do!
Finished the floor (well, most of it). Tomorrow we can put the furniture back in.
Pretty pictures and a thoughtful post about how we discovered we really need a heart in our home also tomorrow (or at least I promise I will try)!
I’m trying real hard to think of something to photograph right now, but I soooooo tired! Things are not going fast around here, but at least they’re going.
Good things:
- The floor is in.
- Because we bought secondhand planks we can’t just paint them, there are too many holes and cracks in it. When I went shopping for laminate flooring I had some incredible luck. There was a new shop next to the one I was going to visit and I popped in to see what they had. They had an opening stunt. Real oak parquet for a reasonable price. So now I will have my real wooden floor after all.
- Just a few more days and I will be back to regular housekeeping, crafting and blogging!
The bad stuff is out (very hard to do because it pulverizes when you try to break it out) and about two third of the new floor boards is in.
It just doesn’t feel right to have that picture of our desintegrated floor on top of my blog, so here’s some other things of our weekend.
Relaxing on our bed and knitting some stress away.
Picknicking on the kitchenfloor. Saturday we ate on the roof, but Sunday the winds were so strong the plates were blown of the table.
Eating those yummy summerfruits I bought Friday. Strawberries and melon. So good!
I should have known better…
Remember I was complaining about a rotting floor? We didn’t expect it to be this bad. This picture shows the result of a few kicks. Completely gone! So it all has to come out.
About noon the floor looked like this:
We got a little help from a friend and now about one third of the floorboards (old-fashioned planks this time, because waterproof OSB sheets were not good coping with the flooding we had previous summers) is in.
Today we will hopefully finish taking out the rest of the OSB and putting in the floorboards. And then we will do some redecorating since it is already a mess and all the furniture and stuff is spread through the house (piles of books beside my bed, the diningroom chairs stacked in the hall, things like that). We’re going to paint the walls, put new woodpanelling in and a laminate (I want real wood, but our budget doesn’t agree) floor.
Ha! A lazy summer indeed!
Yay for summer!
In our little part of the world (Holland) we tend to have a heatwave early in spring and wait for some more heat all summer. Complaining about the wheather is very common here. Too cold, too wet, too hot. It’s never just right. Nag, nag, nag.
Not me, not this time: I intend to enjoy every bit of sunshine we get. I also will get into a lazy summermode now. At least I hope I will. Changing my daily routines to fit the kids having their vacations. Getting plenty of sunshine and a good rest. Eat all the good stuff that is being harvested right now and enjoy, enjoy, enjoy!
Happy solstice (tonight 23.59 CET) to everyone and let’s all have a good summer!
(Ha, I just read between the lines of my own post : no, I’m not going on a summerblogbreak (yet), I think I will manage to post while in summermode)
Yeah, I know it’s hiding behind the washer and the dryer, but I still love it. When my grandmother died we were asked if there was anything we remembered from her that we wanted to have. While other familymembers were picking jewelry or antiques, all I could think of was this cupboard. I didn’t even know at the time that my granny designed the woodwork herself.
So the cupboard made it’s way into our home. It has been in the kitchen for a year, but when we put a real kitchen in it didn’t fit anymore. It was either put it in and have very little workspace, or moving it to the livingroom. We did the latter. The livingroom was kind of full, but it looked great. I quickly claimed it to hold my yarn and fabric stash. And because of that I loved it even more. (You may have seen parts of it showing up in various pictures already).
But things are changing again. we want to put a woodburner in the livingroom and the only logical spot for that is where the cupboard was. But where to put my beloved piece of furniture? It’s too big for the bedroom, and we can’t get rid of the other cupboard in the livingroom (those are big, handy and loved too). It didn’t really fit into the hallway either, it would cover up the door to the meter cupboard (is that good english? I used an online translator, but it seems too simple).
I have been thinking about it all night and even dreamt about it and finally came to a solution. It is in the hallway now. I took out the door of the meter cupboard and now we can still reach the plugs (again: I’m not sure – is that the right word for those things that pop out when someting goes wrong with the electricity?) and see the meters. I will make a curtain to cover the opening.
It’s not holding my stash anymore, because I like to see my stuff when I’m making something and I’m not going to be banned into the hallway (ha! as if I could fit a table in there, I would have if I could). I put some dishes and plates I hardly ever use in there , a pile of winterthings (scarves and gloves) and some other seasonal things like special tablecloths, candles and eastereggs. I don’t want the old hinges to sustain frequent opening and closing of the doors, so these are the perfect things to put in there (the winterthings will be taken out in winter).
I have been moving around things the whole day now. Because on this spot was an ugly, but very sturdy cupboard that had to be moved into the storage room (ha! we call it that now, it’s very little, but has a door that goes outside and is big enough to hold some cupboards and a pile of wood (we’ll need that for the woodburner this winter). The ugly cupboard was my pantry, so I had to move a lot of food to the kitchen (that’s why those plates and dishes were moved too). I filled one of the cupboards in the storageroom with office stuff from the other cupboard in the livingroom. Am I still making sense? I’m getting lost in all the cupboard talk. Anyway, this made some room for my stash. I say some, because I really don’t know where all that yarn came from. I just does not fit. I will have to do some more moving around.
And than I will have to rearrange some things in the kitchen, since I kind of threw everything in.
But my grandmother’s cupboard looks great in the hallway, doesn’t it?
(I hesitated between this picture and one that did not show the door to the shower or the washer and dryer, but this one is more real. So there you have it. My cluttered hallway with the closet I love so much I’m writing a lengthy post about it.)
I love sewing. Which is not a surprise for anyone who has been reading the archives here.
I have been sewing since I was nineteen, but this love is a lot younger. Since last year I have been sewing like crazy. Inspiration from all over the internet!
It has been a little frustrating to find the time to sew though. We have absolutely no room that I can claim as my own and we don’t even have the room for a sewingtable. I have to use the diningtable. When nobody else is using it, that is. And when nobody else is in our livingroom trying to work, do homework , or watch tv. I have been complaining about that here before, haven’t I? (yes, I do have a handsewing machine now, but I still learning to use it)
I am slowly coming to grips with this lack of space and my jealousy of others who do have sewingrooms. I just try to sneek in as much sewing time as I can. When the kids are at school and dh is off to a client I let everything hang and pull out my sewing machine.
I do have to let go of a bit of guilt (there always are other things that I should be doing) but I love these little hours of creating.
This morning I made a skirt and a shirt (I like how that rhymes). I traced my favourite vintage skirt as a “pattern” and the skirt was made very quickly. I even got the zipper in at the first try! It only took me about an hour to start and finish the whole thing!
Then I started working on a dress, but I got frustrated when I got to the buttonholes. Since I won’t be able to fit in it anyway until I loose those pounds I have been talking about for months, I put it aside. (I did not make the dress that small intentionally, that’s just what you get sometimes by “winging” things).
So I traced a simple sleeveless shirt and thought I would finish that even faster than the skirt. But I had some issues with the neckline, so I had to change that four times. The fabric was so much stiffer than that of the original shirt (it’s a stretchy cotton, but not that stretchy) that it looked bulky, so I added a belt and beltloops.
I think it’s kind of nice now. Both the pink and the blue fabric are the same print, but I don’t think they work together. So I’ll wear a white shirt with the skirt and I think I’ll make a blue skirt to match the shirt.
Oh yes. I love sewing time and I love it when things work out the way I wanted (let’s forget about that dress for now)!
(I also like how I unintentionally managed to take a picture that doesn’t show the disassembled computer that is taking up half the table…)
