kitchen euforia

look - two years of cooking on the floor is over - we got the oven in place, finished the bench and today I have been cooking mungbeans, parmesan-baked endives, bread with bulghur and rhubarb pie with a little help from two chubby hands.

snowday

We got one snowday! We made a snowman, but he is all gone today.

I started making a bench in the kitchen with white tiles.

Top: view from the garden

Bottom: the bench, my town

the kitchen chronicles

One of the first things we bought to the house was this deer hook by Jorine Oosterhoff dedicated to the kitchen, the first room we started working on after moving in. And we are still working, or - at the moment - mainly scratching our heads to figure out how to deal with all strange angles - and the fact that nothing is straight and simple. The deer hook somehow marked a start to the kitchen-work, and will also mark its ending. Because one day, the kitchen will be done, shiny and new. That day, I will solemnly find a place for it, drink some champagne and be very happy.

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The plan is to make the kitchen the heart of the house. We want it to be a place for slow, happy cooking, dinnerparties, cookbook-reading and kitchen-playing for the boys. We want it to be full of fresh herbs, homegrown organic veggies, vintage tablewear, candles and books.

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The kitchen had - sadly - been renovated in the easiest and cheapest possible way some time in the eighties, so the first thing we did was to tear out everything - layers and layers of greasy linoleum, old isolation material, walls, floor, flaking ceiling. I remember finding small, fragile skeletons of mice and old textiles used for isolation in the walls, and a recipe for "simple cookies" cut out from a magazine.

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Next step was to build up everything again; white ceiling, chess floor, and walls painted the most delicious shade of blue. Now we are scratching or heads to figure out how to continue - getting everything in place, building a shelf under the window, the details.
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I try to enjoy the process - but honestly - right now all I want to do is to hang up the deer hook, have some champagne and start baking.

home

today I have been home, really just been home. Doing laundry, cleaning, planning, looking around, taking notes, making decisions, kissing babycheek and picking a last bouquet of garden flowers. Tomorrow I will start working on our kitchen again after a long renovation break.

the house

The house we renovate is a white wooden house built in the early twenties. The roof is made of beautiful chiffer tiles. It has a sunporch and many windows so the light floats beautifully through the rooms.When the sun sets we have a fantastic light show on our livingroom walls. We call it our private cinema.

We were looking for a place where we could realize some of our plans and projects; an organic garden, an atelier for S, a room for me to write in, a big kitchen for our veggie experiments, and a factory for smallscale production of something good. We wanted to be able to build up a sound studio, an organic bakery and plant a walnut tree if we felt like it. We wanted to have the open sea within reach. Last winter we found our house. It had everything of the above, or at least a potential of getting there.

So what we have is a frame at least. We have lots of space and charm both inside and outside, and we can hear the sea roaming in the background. It is a start. There are no straight lines, the paint is falling off everywhere, we do not yet have a kitchen or a real bathroom. Yet we love our house. It has a special mood. The first time I was here, I found ladybugs on the window sill. It felt like ours from the first time we saw it.

painting, sewing

I have 12 windows to paint. Poor flies get stuck in the paint all the time.




I started making summer clothes for Leo. I tried to do a photoshoot with the model himself wearing the new outfits, but I guess that is not the way two-year-olds work. This shirt is for summerparties and is made out of my grandfathers old shirt. I love recycling textile!

blue

Top: Painting windows - the blue tape is so beautiful with the light coming through. I don't want to take it away ...

Bottom: Leo's hands - turning into spiders all the time these days ...