mimou is a company with retailers in Sweden and Norway that carries accessories for the home (bedlinens, cushions, table linens, wallpaper, fabric) along with accessories to wear (necklaces, bags and shawls). They have a set of inspiration photos on their website that are so beautifully styled I had to feature some of favourites.

Robin emailed the other day looking for some colour inspiration: “I was wondering if you could dig up some photos of orange rooms. I painted my living room a clay orange to match a fabric I love and now I’ve lost the orange inspiration! Help!” I dug up some photos of spaces with orangey walls to hopefully help Robin finish her living room. Note: grey, white, taupe and chartreuse seems to be popular choices to use with orange.

Apartment Therapy	Steve Learner
Bo Bedre	Apartment Therapy
White Webb	Tocar Interior Design
30E design	Apartment Therapy
Bo Bedre	kontakt magazine
Côté Maison	Delson or Sherman Architects
Image Locations	Maison Jardin
Michael Robinson	Mark Lund
Michael Wells	Michael Robinson
New York Spaces	II BY IV

Yesterday I went to the Third World Bazaar – a huge barn out in Manotick where for 6 weeks in the fall they sell products from all over the world. Clothing, jewelry, housewares, carpets, Christmas decorations, furniture….and everything is reasonably priced and absolutely gorgeous. Knowing shortly I will have a new kitchen to furnish, I went a little nuts with purchases. It didn’t help that they have beautiful kilims for GREAT prices. I had to bring a great big one home because the price was too good to pass up ($155) although I have no clue where it will go. I picked up some baskets, a table runner, placemats, a little teak opium table, 3 kilims and 4 kilim pillows (some went to my boyfriend’s apartment). Check here for details. In the end, I’m ecstatic with my purchases. They are open one more weekend after this one so folks in Ottawa, you’ve got time to check it out.

I am blogging my entire kitchen renovation from start to finish. Greentea Design has provided me with their solid wood kitchen cabinets, and I’m taking care of the rest.

If you’d like to be brought up to date, check out my kitchen remodel blog for an archive of previous posts. I posted recently about the removal of the old kitchen, and now for more demolition and work begun by my contractor.

Once my boyfriend and I removed the old cabinets and tile floor, the contractor started his work. And of course as it always goes with an old house, there was more work than originally anticipated. And it probably didn’t help that I added a little project (ummm, not that little) onto the ever growing list of things that needed to be completed before the cabinets arrive.

I’ve got to start by talking about the amazing discoveries on the walls behind the drywall and wood panelling. I have never seen so many layers of wallpaper and newspaper in one space. We all got a really good laugh out of that. My boyfriend counted 15 different wallpapers on one chunk he removed.

When we discovered newspaper on the walls behind the wallpaper, I was excited to see how old it was and if there were any dates visible. When I bought this house the age was not disclosed and all I got was the inspector’s guess that it was about 90 years old. I did find one date, and although the builders may have used old newspapers they had stashed away, it is amazing to think that this house was built so long ago.

So once the kitchen was stripped bare of all the drywall and the plywood removed from the floor, the contractor got to work on levelling the floor. This was a crucial step as the cabinets would have been on a really obvious slant. The contractor nailed down new thinner plywood over the floorboards (the floorboards were in too much of a rough shape to have skipped this layer), then added strips of wood which he used to level another thin layer of plywood. This will mean that the kitchen floor will be higher than the living room floor but there’s nothing I can do about it, and with the floors painted the same colour throughout it won’t be that noticeable that there is a little step up into the kitchen.

During the process of removing all the drywall, conversations were had about the wall covering the staircase. I was concerned that it would be a tight fit having a table down the center of the space and trying to get around it with people seated there. Before the demo I took my desk out of my office (which would be a similar width) and we tried it in the kitchen. In the photo below you can see a bit of the wall in question on the left side. On the right there is a little brown rug that shows the depth of the cabinets.

If you’d like to see what I decided to do with the wall (a HUGE success) and more of the construction in preparation for the cabinets, click HERE.