Displaying posts labeled "Kim’s House"

About a month ago my husband and I took on a quick project in our home that was literally life changing. I wanted to share it with you all now that I finally have photos thanks to a bit of free time over the holidays. My house is quite small as I have complained MANY times here, and has no decent storage. We eat at home alot, and despite having a fabulous new kitchen, there was still not enough storage for food after our trips to the grocery store. Another dilemma we have with this house is there is NO closet on the main floor. When you walk in the front door you are smack in the middle of the living room. This is Ottawa, so having no adequate space to dump wet snowy jackets and boots was beyond annoying. There is a room at the back of the house just beyond the kitchen. We decided to turn the space into a pantry/cold storage(LOL)/coat room. Here is a post of it when I redecorated and made it my office. I am so freaking happy with the space now. We have FOUR Ikea shelving units to store the majority of our food, some dishes, and office supplies! YESSS!!! My husband also built a storage unit to house all of our coats, boots and seasonal accoutrements. 🙂 A dump of a space turned out to be one of the most useful in the house, and it’s pretty cute to boot! (Sorry, I took an overabundance of photos)

This room is not wired for lighting so we had to improvise and bought some cute clamp lights for the top of the shelves. We can finally see in there!

A photo by my friend Maura and my beloved South African Wonki Ware dishes from Green Light District

The microwave is plugged in and now lives on the firt shelf so it’s easy to get to. LOVE not having it on the kitchen counter.

We bought 7 or 8 of the hanging baskets above – they’re GREAT!

Thanks to all this shelving I was able to utilize a bunch of my vintage storage containers (I’m a bit obsessed) – apple baskets, metal locker bins, crates… and that’s Pheoebe. I could not find a black and white runner anywhere so red for now.

I found an old can of charcoal grey paint in the basement so I painted 2 walls with it, as well as the front vertical sections of the shelving.

I didn’t want the table above in the space but I brought in that succulent planter for the winter and had no other place for it, and one of my cats Lucky adores that hammock so it had to stay. It needs a paint job (we found it in the AS IS section at Ikea for about $50). The white shelving to the right is the cat perch made out of an Ikea baby change table that we chopped in half and mounted to the wall.

The back door is now our main entrance. And that’s Felix. He’s huge.

My husband whipped up this unit out of some plywood one afternoon. It’s been over 6 years since I’ve had a proper place to hang my jackets. 🙂 I decided to leave it unpainted because it was too damn cold out and I like raw plywood.

Felix (and Mimin’s tongue)

Mimin

Jo mentioned back in this post a few weeks ago that the lovely folks over at Arte Limited offered us some prints that they carry in their online shop. I was super excited because I love art, was craving some new pieces for my home, and the artists on their roster are REALLY talented. I picked out 3 I thought would work in my home, and I adore all 3. I went with inexpensive Ikea frames because why not. One ended up in my kitchen and it makes me smile every time I pass by it. It is a giclée by Mikel Nilsson called Couch.

The other 2 happened to feature portraits of women, so the only place that seemed to make sense for them was on my living room “chick wall”.

The print to the right of the TV is Tender is the Night, a giclée by Lina Ekstrand. 

I must add a couple of things at this point. First, my husband has some cord wrangling on his TODO list. Second, see that long black rectangle under the TV? That was one of the presents I bought my husband for Christmas. It is a sound bar, and pretty amazing I must admit – a present I am enjoying immensely as well. 🙂 Anyway, I had a small vintage Asian cabinet as the TV stand (as seen here) but that bar was too long so my husband whipped this shelving unit up one day over the holidays. I really like it! It’s alot less bulky than the last one and doesn’t stick out into the room as much – a bonus since this wall is only a small space between the front door and the stairs to the second floor (beyond annoying).

The print to the right is a giclée by Florian Meacci titled Beautiful death.

I spent all day yesterday getting the majority of my Christmas shopping done so I didn’t have much time to prepare a post for today. I thought I’d just share some photos of new stuff around my house. To start, I finally pulled something out of storage I’ve been dying to display for a few years. When I got married in 2010, Jo sent me a Moroccan wedding blanket as a wedding gift. It is absolutely beautiful and one of my most treasured possessions. I had planned to hang it in the bedroom of my new house but since that house has been delayed, I figured to hell with it, and hung it over a branch we found at my sister’s cottage and positioned it over the bed as a headboard. I love that I can see it every day. And the cats leave it alone so that’s a bonus. (To note, my bedroom is a dumping ground for furniture that doesn’t work in any other room, and has linens picked more out of necessity than anything else so one day I hope to have my bedroom set up a little more planned/calculated)

Phoebe came in after a few minutes of me snapping photos – coincidentally she matches the room rather well so I included her in some shots. (Consider this my pets on furniture entry for this week).

Yesterday I went to my favourite local housewares/furniture store, The Modern Shop, to pick up some Christmas presents and could not resist a couple presents for myself. The owner Mke is a super nice guy and long time advertiser on our blog, and he carries some of my all time favourite brands like Hay Denmark and Normann Copenhagen. He always has about 5 chairs in stock that I end up drooling over, and yesterday was no exception. I’ve been dying for a Hay chair and there was a grey J104 on the floor that my husband and I decided we needed to bring home because our tiny house needed yet another chair apparently.

It was supposed to be my husband’s new chair at the dining table but because of the arms and my super narrow house it didn’t quite work out, so my upholstered eames office chair is being relegated once again to the basement and it is my new desk chair.

I also picked up some Hay scissors – love the shape!

I was thinking of hanging them on the wall somewhere in the kitchen but for now they are resting on my backsplash.

Another stop yesterday was a little town south west of Ottawa called Merrickville, where my husband insisted on picking up what is our only Christmas decoration. His name is Arthur, and he’s going to hang out next to the sofa.

A while back FLOS offered me a light fixture to try, I absolutely could not say no. FLOS is one of the coolest lighting companies there is. I have to admit I had not heard of the light before and now I’m kicking myself for not having known about it sooner. Designed and created in Italy, AIM is a uniquely minimalist suspended light designed by brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. In their own words, AIM is a “new type of lamp that is naturally positioned in space – like a plant – with long cables providing maximum freedom to adjust the direction and height of the light source.” Similar to hanging vines, the long, free wires allow for “infinite adjustability” while providing a sense of the natural, as the wires seem to “develop and grow like branches or climbing plants”. AIM also uses warm LED, meaning that it is a very low energy consumption lamp. 

When the light finally arrived I was SO excited to get it installed. Knowing I was getting 1 fixture, the only place I thought I could put it was in my bedroom as it’s the only room besides my dining room and dressing room with an overhead fixture (stupid old house with bad wiring!). But when I unwrapped the light I realized it was larger than I had expected, and even more gorgeous in person. I went with black, and it’s a matte finish! *sigh* (It also comes in white and polished aluminum). My husband, who is thankfully quite the handyman, suggested we put it in the corner of our living room, and he would wire a plug to the end of it so we could plug it in to the wall but mount it to the ceiling so it looked like it was wired up there. GENIUS! We both LOVE the AIM. It looks incredible in the living room. I can imagine a few of these grouped together over a dining table, or over a large desk. A few hanging in a staircase would be cool too.

This post is in partnership with FLOS USA but all opinions are my own.

As much as I am dying for a new house, I keep trying to keep myself from going crazy while stuck here by continuing to do small projects and picking up little things here and there I totally don’t need or have room for (LOL). Here are the latest bits and bobs that I’ve worked on or purchased. 

First up – I got a little tired and bored with the centrepiece on my dining table. Because my house is so small and my dining space is in the middle of the kitchen, it means the dining table is prime real estate for displays. (You can see photos of what has been hanging out on my table for the past several months here). I went to Value Village Friday and found a wooden tray for $3.99, then went around the house collecting pieces I thought would work for a fall theme. I have a red and orange batik table runner I may put down too (but the cats tend to lay on the table where there’s fabric on it).

While rearranging the dining table decor, I decided to switch things up a bit on the display shelving in the kitchen (this is what it looked like). It’s the same colour scheme as before and alot of the same pieces but I was dying to get my Catherine Holm enamel pot out of storage. 

I unearthed a few things from the basement that I was anxious to put to use again, like a couple of vintage floral frogs. One of them is now on the kitchen counter with some ceramic branches (actually oil diffuser reeds) next to Larry, my Chive gnome. 

I don’t recall sharing my vintage radio here on the blog so I snapped some photos yesterday. My husband and brother-in-law have a little side business called Daff Design where they gut old radios and refit them with modern components (like speakers and bluetooth). This one is on the opposite wall of my desk so I play music via my Mac through it while I’m working. Handy, and looks cool to boot! 

When I was perusing the aisles of Value Village Friday I came across a large storage container. I thought it was pretty sweet, but saw the $60 price tag and moved on. Saturday morning I remembered it and showed my husband a quick photo I had snapped of it on Instagram. He liked it too so I hopped in the car and went back to the store to grab it (the cashier told me he didn’t think anyone would pay $60 – sucker that I am). It is made of fibreglass and was used in the military (it has a sticker on it that says National Defense and Petawawa). It is 20″ wide and about 2.5 ft tall. I’m thinking of using it in the upstairs bathroom instead of the 2 ceramic stools I have in there that I hate, to store extra pillows and linens in it. It needs a good cleaning first. 

I picked up yet another wooden crate last month (a beautiful one found at High Jinx) and thought it could be put to good use to store some of my favourite wool blankets I wouldn’t dare actually use in a house full of cat fur. Fed up with them being stashed out of sight, they now reside in the living room where I can admire them often.

With the cold weather making it’s way here, I started pulling out rugs and sheepskins from storage to keep things a little cozier in this drafty house. This season I decided on some wool Flor carpet tiles I had received to review on the blog a while back as the living room rug. LOVE these – I am a huge fan of the versatility of carpet tiles (esoecially when cats seem to aim barf at carpets).