Starting my big renovation project!

After full eight years of living in the same house - which is so far a high record level as I never ever, even as a little kid stayed in the same house for more than maximum 3-4 years, maximum - little was it done to the original structure of the house. I haven't done nothing at all, except buying a big bad and doing some small adjustments after my lovely son was born.

People usually do have different reactions when they are coming to my house, but definitely, everyone agrees that I should do more to make this little corner of Berlin more for transforming it into my home instead of just using it as a stop and working office in-between my many trips. As the birth of my son changed dramatically my lifestyle - which means that I do not travel less, but I have a different kind of agenda meaning more focused on creating a warm and friendly home for the baby.

At the end of Pesach, looking for some new projects to share and create, I suddenly decided to start a very ambitious and frightening new project: completely renovating my house, on my own. I have no previous experience in this respect, and although more than once in the last hours I was thinking that what about deciding to move out of this house in less than a year, I realized that the novelty of the project is appealing enough to want to keep it straight and doing it despite all odds. I am sure I will gain enough experience and will have a lot of fun. 

My kind of life right now...Source: Pinterest

I am doing my project will being full time mom and also working on different writing and blogging projects at the same time. My time, as usual, is very limited, therefore I have to schedule the activities for each day. In the case of painting days, I should keep in mind that me and the baby we will shortly go out after the work is done, in order to avoid the smell of the paint. My plan is to finish everything within one month, with a relatively limited - but not small - budget and with serious time constraints. I will not work on Saturdays and on Fridays I am trying to finish everything as soon as possible.

Step-by-step

Here are my first steps for actually beginning

the process

Day 1

- Having a look at each room in order to realize what it doesn't work and what I don't like about the setting. I only have two rooms, a kitchen and the bathroom to fix, with the child's room with minimal investments as I already did some furniture decluttering already. I only need to fix small things, like changing the jalousies or painting the radiators.

- Assign for each space a color or a special style. For instance, I want my living room to be very cozy, I want my bathroom to have variations of silver and black.

- Set up the available budget for your investment. Start doing a little market research to more than 2 shops. Yesterday, I went to both Bauhaus and Poco for seaching for the best deals, and I've found good deals for different products. I took pictures and made a list of the things I need and where the price is better.

- Create a schedule of to-do-list for each room. For instance, I would love to start cleaning seriously every corner but if I have to paint first, I better start with paiting and leave the cleaning after that as there is a high probability that I might need to do some extra cleaning after anyway.

- See the limits of your technical abilities. For example, changing the taps and the lamp is obviously more than I can know via YouTube and Google. I want to do this last anyway, but until then I should also search for a technical expert that will help me. It saves nerves and money in case I may damage seriously the entire electricity system.

- Ask for advice. As my neighbour just finished her own DIY painting project last summer, I visited her yesterday and was lucky enough to leave with some brushes and recommendations. For instance, to always use some plastic cover when I paint to avoid damaging the carpets or the floor. 

- Last but not least, take measurements. As I will need wall tattoos and tapet and some new bed coverings and jalousies and so on and so forth, knowing the dimensions is a very important stage of the project. I carefully measured everything that I needed and right now I am more focused on what I can find for advancing my plans.

That's all for now. I promise to write more and more updates in the next days. For today, I already have a little plan and I am looking forward to it!

A litle bit of DIY: Peacock feathers from Tiger

When I am looking for that little thing that will make my life a bit colourful, but without a bigger investment, I am heading to my local Tiger shop. If you are a well experienced hobby lover, you would rather look for something more complicated, but in my case, I am always out of time, with resources directed towards other objectives - such as travel - so I rather would try something minimal. During the intensive shopping preparations for the beginning of the school, I decided to offer myself as well a little funny present. 

I am a very big lover of peacock feather for their delicacy and beauty and combination of colours. No wonder that I left the shop with those little pieces, that suit very well both my cell phone and my small camera. You can place them in different positions, together or separately.

They are relatively good quality, resistant - although the eye of one of the feathers went away a couple of days after I applied it, but for the rest of it, is getting well, even one month after. It looks discreet, a little sparkle of beauty on the simplest daily tools. 

Ready for Tu B'Shvat - and some funny decorations ideas

I love Tu B'Shvat because it announces the spring, my favourite season of the year. Although born on Purim and very happy to celebrate it each time, Tu B'Shvat, which starts tonight, is more a bit more far away of the Pesach cleaning.  

Usually, I don't cook too much on this day, either because we are always invited to some nice seder, or simply because I always prefer to enjoy more veggie and fruity meals. 

This time, I prepared a salad with few of the main ingredients requested for this holiday:

It has a very simple recipe: baby salad leaves, roasted almonds, pomegranate seeds, olive oil, tomatoes and cashew nuts. The preparation of the roasted almonds takes around 10 minutes, and the overall preparation maximum 15. I will continue with some special meals for tomorrow's lunch and will be back with more fancy recipes. 

Each year, we keep the tradition of buying new - and sometimes exotic fruits. As we already tried maybe too many special ones, we reached almost the limit of the choices in the old Europe. We spent the last Tu B'Shvat in London and went to Harrods for finding the unique fruits. This year we made some serious investigations at the Berlin equivalent - the glorious KDW - and ended up with some Latin American good looking fruits: mellow fruit (the yellow one) and tomate de arbol (a kind of tomato that grows in the tree). Will write more after we will taste it tonight. 

Our fruit basket looks like this:

We have there raisins, pears, dates, figs, apricots, kiwi, dried grapes.

As on the occasion of every holiday, I enjoy very much the family moments, not only when we cook and think together about the menu, but also the special gatherings when we try to make some decorations together. I did my best to calm the enthusiasm for too many of them, warning that we need more energy and ideas to be kept for Purim. 

However, we succeeded to have some colourful painted balloons, hanging some garlands over the living room table that usually is my little home office. Also, we decided to change completely a very modest basket, with some blue and red flowers adorned on all sides.

We bought the small pieces and the basket for less than 8 EUR, after a tour of the most convenient stores we found in Berlin: Strauss, Rossmann, McGeiz and Nanu Nana. It is the season of sales and thus we got some pretty good deals. 

The green wire used for attaching the flowers is both strong and looks good with the beige of the basket. With it, we hanged the flowers randomly around the edges. It was fun without taking too much precious time while giving me a relaxing time after relatively hectic last days.

The last but not least piece of decoration for this Tu B'Shvat is a colourful painting made by lovely S.: a free inspiration and cute combination of colours. 

Hag Sameach everyone!