Up to speed…

We moved in a few months ago and much has happened, so I will need to bring you up to speed.

First we went to see the apartment.

And thought it looked great, so we thought we’d take the plunge and apply for it.

After jumping through all the hoops we got it! After we got the news I got us a 1930’s table and six chairs for the living room, it was discounted so it cost something like 140 euro, a bargain really!

Then we start moving in…

Got some help from a friend to carry all the heavy things, thanks Tommi! The living room is still looking quite desolate…

Then we got some more furniture in, the sketches of what the living room should look like are tried out at this stage.

My room, it looks terrifying.

The hallway, shabby chic. Persian semi-antique (in other words: faded) carpet on the floor. Hardly visible in the picture.

The kitchen, trying on the living room curtains in the kitchen. So far they have stayed there. The curtains were a cheap find on the Swedish eBay, Tradera.com. The ladder is very hand when attaching lamps in the three meter tall rooms.

Then when we get all the stuff in we start decorating. One of the first things I got was a gorgeous curtain on a Finnish online classifieds website, Tori.fi. Better pictures on that thing when I finally get it hanging…

Thrifted some miscellanea…

Then I thought I’d make a sign on the door because guests came calling on the wrong doors. We weren’t sure if there would ever be any signs on the front doors since we did not even have a door handle for the first two months!

I chose to make something out of copper, just to try it out. I didn’t have any proper tools, though, so I used the other end of a potato peeler to execute the design.

The sign says Käpylinna, a name we chose for our apartment. It’s translatable as the castle of pinecones. The story behind the name is too long to account here. And yes, I know the design is barely legible, maybe the next one – if there’ll ever be one – will be better.

More pictures to come in the next post!

New apartment!

I recently moved into a new place with two friends, a stunning three bedroom castle smack in the middle of Tampere, the biggest inland city of the Nordic countries. The house was built in 1907 and it was drawn by a Finnish architect Birger Federley.

In short: the apartment is huge! Having lived for three years in a small studio, you can really feel the difference. The rooms are three meters tall, which makes even the tiny rooms feel much bigger. It also gives much needed vertical space for our walk-in wardrobe. Yes, I am not kidding, we have one. More info on that later, though.

Pictures:

Pictures courtesy of Aamulehti (Ilkka Laitinen ja Mika Kanerva)