The One where It Finally Starts Looking Like A House.

So this is how it looks now.

The living room on top. Still needs wallpaper/paint, laminate flooring, shelves on the wall and sofa covers. But apart from that it’s finished 🙂

Dining room at the bottom. Still needs wallpaper/paint and laminate flooring. And I have to shorten the drapes 🙂

We’ve decided to keep our furniture for now as I really love the fact that it’s true vintage (I inherited it!) My husband isn’t into all this vintage, he likes things quite minimal and modern, but we haven’t got any money to buy new furniture so for now he gave me the go ahead to make it work. At times like these I’m happy to have studied interior design.

I’ve been pinning away lately but I think I finally figured out what I want. A few years ago I bought a digital radio designed by Orla Kiely. She’s an Irish designer and has truelly amazing stuff. Not everything is within our budget but I fell in love with her wallpapers. I would have gone all out and would have chosen the wallpaper that matches the radio, but the hubby didn’t agree, so I’ve almost convinced him of this alternative. I love the fact that it’s so bright and sunny. We haven’t got a huge open kitchen/dining room/living room but we do have a lot of natural light. I wouldn’t use it on every wall, just on the two walls behind our vintage furniture.

 

 

Ofcourse I will need matching accessories and one of them is matching pillows (1, 2 ,3 & 4) and seat covers. I’m not sure yet whether I want to buy these or just stick to the colour palette but as you can see the autumn colours make it typically me.

 

We’ve stil got a long way to go but we’re moving in the right direction at least 🙂 And I’m very glad we got this far because we’re having people over both on Saturday and Sunday to celebrate my husband’s birthday …

The One where I need Holiday Inspiration

Hi guys,

I need your help!
I want to wear something pretty for the upcoming holidays but I’m all out of ideas. I want to look pretty and festive and not feel like whale. My problem is mostly due to the fact that I have such nice fabric in my stash that it would feel like a waste using it for a one time maternity holiday dress.

Is that weird?

So any suggestions? On patterns or fabric?

And for those interested here’s a small construction and baby update:

We’re getting our central heating installed today (finally). The upstairs are finished apart from the painting. We’ve decided to keep our temporary kitchen for now since construction is so much more expensive than we originally thought and we’d like to keep some money for the baby 🙂

Speaking of the baby, it is doing perfect. Heartbeat is super strong and it moves all the time. I’ve got 8 more weeks to go and I’m definitely countng down as It’s getting harder and harder for me 🙂 The weight I gained is situated all on my belly which is good, but because of that my balance is all off and my back has to carry the shifted weight. Which caused my back muscles to tense up. I’m in constant pain so I carry around a heat pad wherever I go 🙂 The thing that bothers me most about my back is that it keeps me from sewing since sitting at my desk and bending over is nearly killing me 🙂 I’ve also stopped being able to put on my own shoes and socks, even getting in and out of the shower has proven to be difficult at times (the bath tub border is too high)

But I’m happy the baby is doing great and everything else is forgotten as soon as the baby starts kicking. I love it so much already!

The One Where We Got Organised

We had a busy few weeks. The 4 weeks of construction in our house are over and even if we’re nowhere near done, at least we’ve got flooring, ceilings, hot water and a new shower.

We’re living on the top floor of our house now. So things are temporary. My father was here everyday for the past four weeks, working day in, day out. I swear it would have been impossible without him. But now even he has to get back to his regular job and construction will be limited to weekends only.

So while life resumes we need some basic comfort. The kitchen is still a mess. I’m still using the old cabinets but cooking is like camping 🙂 Apart from a few details, the bathroom is finished, so now we don’t have to drive over to my PIL’s house every night to take a shower.

We’re still waiting for the new windows to be put in before we can finish our bedroom and dressing room but we’ve managed to put our clothes and bed in, so that’s a start.

Our living room is improvised, but we have sofas and a tv so everything’s good 🙂
And last but certainly not least, I have a temporary sewing room/office. I’m so happy with it. After a 4 week withdrawal, starting tomorrow I’ll be able to sew again 🙂

So now for some pictures…

PS There are still some boxes to be unpacked, but I’ll do some everyday and by next week I’ll be finished!

The One with All the Maternity and Moving Plans

The Moving Part

I haven’t been blogging much lately and that has everything to do with our big move which is coming up a month from today. I mainly keep busy by planning all the renovations which need to be done – it didn’t seem much at first but boy, was I wrong – Two weeks from today, the house will be officially ours and while we have already been doing construction work on it, it doesn’t feel like we can do anything we want just yet.

We are redoing the entire electrics – they date back to 1967, so they’re in dire need of an update, we’re putting in new hard wood floors in the entire house, redoing all the pipes for water and drains and redoing the kitchen. We’re actually stripping the kitchen and building a completely new one in a different part of the house. In september we’re having new windows put in because these date back to the 1930 and could use an upgrade to some more energy saving ones 🙂

Apart from the fact that I’ll have my own sewing room, I’ll have my own walk in closet/dressing room as well (which I’ll have to share with my soon to be hubby, but he doesn’t have that many clothes). And he basically gave me carte blanche for the kitchen 🙂

Interested on how my kitchen will look like? I love a retro interior, I inherited a complete 1960-1970’s dining room set so I wanted to keep the vibe going, especially since the house has been last modernised in the 60’s.

So yes, I basically want my kitchen to be teal/aqua. I just love it, I fell in love with it the moment I saw this picture. I even ordered the same type of cooker (although, I did that before deciding on the teal). We’ll be painting the cabinets ourselves so that if we don’t like the colour anymore in a few years, we can just choose a new colour and paint over the teal.

But before my house looks like that let me share some pictures of the house mid construction 🙂

This will be my seating room, we will be replacing the window with a window from ceiling to floor.

This will be the kitchen.

My sewing room gets a window from ceiling to floor as well!

Hubby-to-be’s office space 🙂

The Sewing Part

I have had time to sew while planning the house but I haven’t had the amount of time I would have wanted. I’ve made quite a few new items but the boyfriend is so busy that I’ve got no-one to take my pictures.

The hard part about sewing now is not the moving or the heat, it’s actually getting used to my changing body. It’s not like the bump is already big enough to be called an actual bump and it doesn’t ask for special maternity clothes yet but it certainly is noticeable and all my clothes are getting to tight. I’ve got one t-shirt that still fits, one skirt and one pair of pants. Luckily thanks to the heat-wave I’ve been running around in my short shorts and a bikini-top (running around the house that is). So I went through my stash and took out every piece of knit fabric I had, I went to the store and bought some more (yes, I know I’m supposed to be stash busting, but I can’t really use a lot of cotton) and made a to sew list of things I need. I’m being careful not to sew too many summer clothes because autumn starts early here and by then we’ll have moved but maybe not yet unpacked and I’ll have started a new job (hopefully) so you get my drift.

What’s on the ‘to sew’-list?

You definitely see the difference in size. And the first one had gaping, A LOT. I have proof…

1. More Tiramisu dresses (I’ve already made 2, have one more cut out and fabric for 4 more! – Blogpost on that later) Those dresses are genius. I do have to go back and fix the bodice on the first one because it’s too big but you don’t hear me complain. It takes me about 15 minutes to cut one and one hour to sew one! And they are perfect maternity wear. See colours in picture below (number 1)
2. I have 4 colours of stretch denim in my stash and was planning on making 4 pairs of jeans like the one I made before, only raising the back just a little and adding a wider waistband, again to support the bump. See colours in picture underneath (number 2)
3. I’ve got some yellow sweater knit left from my Owl Briar and bought two more colours in the same fabric and I’ll be using them to make some kind of sweater/cardigan. I haven’t decided on a pattern for those yet. See colours in picture underneath (number 3)
4. About six months ago I made a punto-di-roma knit skirt. I wore it a lot through winter but it wasn’t my favorite. I wore it again this week and somehow it fits better now than it did before. It’s super comfy, superfast to make and it has a wide knit waistband to support the growing bump. See colours in picture underneath (number 4)
   

   The skirt pattern. Lacking explanation because it took me 2 tries to get the kind of pleats right 🙂

5. I bought 5m of off-white interlock knit fabric. I pre-washed it (yes, you read that correctly) and I plan on having my own little sweat shop and making several Renfrews. I will make them a bit longer and it gives me a chance to try all sorts of embellishments. I have several knits with print in my stash and they’ll probably turn into Renfrews as well 🙂

I love ALL the knits. This is not all – some are in the washing machine being pre-washed – and the colours are a bit different in real life. The red is less bright and the blue in n3 is actually green 🙂

Each and every one of these are quick projects. But because I hate going through the motion of tracing and cutting, I’m planning on doing most of the tracing and cutting in the next few days, so that I always have something ready to be sewn. Because face it, sewing is the fun part of making your own clothes. The prep work just isn’t.

But because I have so many knits to work with in the next couple of weeks/months (I haven’t even started talking about all the cool baby patterns and fabric I have and outfits I’ve planned) I decided to follow Gillian’s advice for lazy seamstresses and invest in a cutting mat and rotary blade. Go check out her blog, she’s the queen of knits!!

The One with All the Big News

Before I get to all my big news I have to tell a little background story:

The past few weeks have been crazy busy. About 6 weeks ago our landlord decided that we didn’t pay enough for utilities, so he wanted to raise the price we paid for them. We did some calculations ourselves and turned out we were already paying way too much for utilities. So we told him we were willing to pay more if he could prove to us, we were actually spending that much, if he didn’t want to prove it, he should just let us go before our lease was up and without paying a fine.

He chose the leaving part and then decided to put our appartment up for rent with the same price for utilities but a higher rent. It was pretty much clear to us that he just wanted to raise rent and since he couldn’t do that with us in it, he wanted to get more money by raising the cost of utilities.

So we had 4 months to find a new place. We decided pretty soon that we didn’t want to go through this trouble again and decided to buy a house instead of renting one. It was a hard search. Because we’re planning on having 3 children and we both need an office/sewing area, we needed quite a big house. We also wanted a large backyard in a well-located area. I can tell you, it wasn’t easy locating anything within our budget either.

But then we found it… The perfect 5 bedroom house, with a huge backyard. It requires minimum amounts of work and I just fell in love.

So we put in our offer and a week later we got the good news!

We now actually own a house!!!

The house!

The garden is huge!

So we’re very very happy.

But that’s not the end of my story yet.

The second week of May, I wasn’t feeling MMM13 anymore. I wasn’t feeling too well, I was busy running around to get everything sorted for the new house and the weather wasn’t allowing me to wear as many Me-Mades as I wanted to. So I decided to stop taking pictures, stop blogging about it and just wear the Me-Mades I could. It felt like such a relief.

Now, I found out why I wasn’t feeling too well. I wasn’t coming down with something, apparently I’m just PREGNANT 🙂 And you can not believe how happy I am with that! We found out on Tuesday, signed the deed to our house on Wednesday so you can imagine it was a pretty hectic week.

We told our families over the weekend. My mother couldn’t stop crying, but they were happy tears 🙂

So we’re very happy to have our house and our new baby on the way (due in January).

I once said I couldn’t wait to be pregnant so I could order ALL of Megan Nielsen’s maternity patterns. Well, I splurged and I did buy them ALL!

My boyfriend is very happy as well, keeps giving little kissing on my tummy – I’m so glad he doesn’t read my blog or he would kill me for telling you this 😉

He even bought me this very very very cute set of bibs!

These will be my inspiration for the nursery, as I think they’re not gender specific and make a cute idea for both boys and girls!

So that was it. It has been a thrilling week and there is a very exciting and scary time coming, but I’m looking forward to it!

I actually got some sewing done as well this week, including a new coat, but more about that later as coats are less important than babies 🙂