It's like a holiday, but better

My mum arrived on Tuesday the previous week, the renovations finished on Friday and this week felt like a very chilled out holiday. Last few days I felt more relaxed than during most of the holidays I had since I became a mother – it is so nice to know that I have an option of sitting on the couch all day doing nothing. I suspect if I choose that option I would be bored in the space of 10 minutes, so with all the extra free time available to me I’m trying to finish few crochet and knitting projects and make a Waldorf-style doll for my daughter for the birth of the baby. To me having time to make things is even more precious and more energizing than having time to laze about.

I don’t seem to be able to resist the urge of making toys despite knowing that I’ll get frustrated by fiddly sewing bits. At the moment my daughter doesn’t even play with the dolls, but maybe it will change when there is a baby in the house, otherwise I'll have to play with that doll myself.

To practice making heads I finally got around to replacing a head for the doll I made two years ago. The original head had two newbie mistakes: the neck wasn’t thick enough resulting in ugly folds on the face and the head was also too long. This one has a proper neck, but is still slightly too long.

I did few more practice heads before making the big one for the 16 inch doll and now I have to make the decision on which body pattern to use from the ones in the Maricristin Sealey's book "Making Waldorf Dolls".

These are the two of the best heads together with the big one.

P.S. The photos of the new new bathrooms can be found on Flickr, but I think only the people, who saw the original bathrooms in the last few weeks, will appreciate the improvements to their full extent. I regret not taking the pre-renovation photos, though at the time it felt embarrassing to photograph something so ugly and falling apart.

Light-switch cord

This is the cord from the top bathroom, which one is supposed to pull to turn on the light. (English bathroom are often strange: separate taps for cold & hot water, carpets, pull-cords. The most impractical one I saw was at B&B - not only it had carpet on the floor, but also wallpaper on the walls.) Anyway, the cord broke off last Sunday. Therefore for one week we had to use a little torch. Its blueish light made me feel like I'm in a teenage horror flick or a cheap sci-fi movie. Luckily the renovations of the main bathroom are now finished. It is such a pleasure to walk into a bathroom and use it without worrying about something coming off in one’s hands; without discovering afterwards that something else sprouted a leak and the water is dripping off the ceiling onto the recently painted walls or our beautiful bookshelf; without spending ages trying to get the toilet to flash. Tomorrow I’m planning to have a long soak in the bathtub, as I believe that lazing in a bath for a silly period of time should be one of the privileges of being pregnant.

P.S. And yes, now we have a normal light switch and mixer water tap.

Jazzing up the window

A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm's reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm's reach, so that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door.
Hundertwasser Window Dictatorship and Window Right

One day I'll build my own little house or a studio and it will have grass roof, plenty of plants, odd shaped windows, curved benches and mosaic inserts, but for now I'm just changing the decorations attached to the kitchen window. Few weeks ago we took down the snowflakes and to add some colour to our greyish view my daughter and I made three stars from the kite paper.

Katya choose her favourite colours (red, yellow & orange) to make a star with some help from me and this detail tutorial. I made the other two and there are still three more variations that we can try making.

Bye-bye TV

Good bye TV

Welcome aquarium

If everything goes to plan we'll get some goldfish this weekend.

Lighter, cleaner, better

I think I discovered a cure for my bookoholism – painting a bookshelf was very time consuming and an oil-based paint gave me mild headaches and left me feeling slightly nauseous. But the pleasure of putting all our books up in the nice single rows somehow dulls the memory of the hours spent painting. The sight of the white bookshelf and the multi-colourfull & multi-sized books makes me smile. I am one of those people, who gets the desire to stroke the books when I pass by them.

We are acting like the downstairs renovations are finished, but there are still few little things to get done, like painting the skirting behind the refrigerator and making curtains.

I’ve uploaded some photos of the ground floor prior to renovations to Flickr, in case you want to see the changes for yourself.

A week later

I took this photo today in the morning, so there was even more progress by the end of today. I find the noise and presence of strangers in the house somewhat stressful, specially because Katya thinks that they are great fun and periodically screams about going downstairs to help the builders or calls them upstairs to play. So most of last week we spent outside visiting museums and parks until I caught a cold. This week we spent at home with only short escapes to get food and tomorrow is promising to be even worse than today (and it was one long boring & tiring day) since Katya is now also sick.

Renovations started

The builders (or Bodie Builder as Katya calls them, though she means to say Bob The Builder) started today. Bye-bye old kitchen! Bye-bye the wall, Bye-bye ugly carpet and ceiling. Bye fridge (I miss you already)!

1. Today: Morning, 2. Today: Late afternoon

Question to self: Why didn't we try all the various colours on the bit of the wall that was destined to be removed? (and we still have no idea what colour we will paint the walls)

Oops

I'm glad the builders are coming on Monday to start work downstairs, as our kitchen is starting to fall apart

In last few weeks

Was it really more than a month without posts? But I guess you know how it is – I didn’t post for few days and there were more and more topics I wanted to write about, so I kept on postponing until tomorrow and with every day it was getting harder and harder to find time to sit down and start typing.
It’s been busy few weeks:
We painted the guest room, which will become the study/studio at the end of this summer. Katya helped, so it took much longer than expected.

I finally made something from Weekend Sewing book by Heather Ross - one headscarf for me and one for my daughter. I'm planning to make few other things from that book, maybe even next week.

Paul from Oz and his lovely girlfriend stayed with us and on their departure gave Katya a box of LEGO DUPLO . She loves playing with it and so do I.

Few other friends were in London for few days, but we didn't get to spend as much time with them as we would like.

My mum managed to get to our house despite Tube (underground) strike and spent three weeks with us. Every morning she managed to tempt Katya into hairbrushing by promise of braids.

We went to Chatham Dockyards and Maritime museum at Greenwich, which reminded me that I find naval (especially Arctic exploration) history fascinating.

While my mum babysat, my husband and I went to Browns for high afternoon tea (delicious, relaxing and fascinating part of English culture) and to see new Star Trek movie, which made me want to run away from home to join Starfleet.

I got a box of books at the Amnesty International book sale and one of them, Mog in The Dark by Judith Kerr, became Katya's new favourite. I'm so glad I no longer have to read "Railway Series" stories everyday.

We are slowly adding plants to our garden, but I came to accept that it will take years to get it to the harmonious state.
Katya seem to like wakeing up shortly after sunrise - it's not too bad during long London winter nights, but is pretty early (even for me) in summer. Tomorrow she'll be up at around 5:30, it's almost 10pm now and so it's time for me to go off to bed. Sweet dreams to you all.

Changes in the garden

On Saturday we physically exerted ourselves by walking around beautiful countryside. The next two days of the long weekend we worked in the garden. Today my whole body hurts, but at least there is some progress to be seen outside.

Discovered

On Sunday Can and I discovered this little flowering bush in our garden among all the weeds

After spending almost two years in a flat, I'm really enjoying having a little outside space of our own to play in and run around, specially on the days when we are stuck at home waiting for yet another delivery. A lawnmower arrived yesterday, so we can finally cut the grass once the husband is back from the work trip to New York.