It's coming along!

Slowly but surely. The painter did a great job, the electrical guy, not so. He wired four lights to one switch (all the lights in the living and dining room), then left the second switch doing nothing. His guys keep coming back but it's not exactly clear what they do each time. The painter guy also had an accident, he swopped the colours of the bedroom and the living room (they were a close shade, so it took me a little while in the apartment to notice) but at least he was nice about fixing the colour and the good thing is at least I saw it on the walls and got to make a last-minute colour change decision in the process.


We were particularly happy with the fans and lights as we sprayed them black ourselves. Or at least we did with the lights, Z. came up with the brilliant idea to take the existing fans down to a car workshop and have them sprayed matt black. It was much cheaper and we didn't have to buy new black cafe fans.


This is the kitchen. The colour is known as Aquatint. I keep calling it Acquafresh. It's a really small space but the colours make me smile, it looks vaguely retro. I think the red kitchenaid will be happy here.

We went to Ikea today and although we really loved this Swedish designed table ($950- how is that cheap?) we found a black one of a fairly good size, in the As Is section for $120. We also picked up a wardrobe with a sliding door which was on their weekly special and a couple of other larger-ticket items like the seagrass rug.


I always loved Ikea but these couple of weeks, I've found things not to like. For example, their inventory stock is really, really low. I'm not sure if they've seen pullback from the economic environment (doesn't sound likely) but there were lots of items that we just completely out of stock. The prime example were those black spotlights, they only had white. Then the lighting, the black ones were again out of stock (thus we had to get yellow ones and spray paint them). Then, we were looking for lampshades, each of the designs we looked at (there were three) were all unavailable.

I wanted the rug in the largest 3x2m size, also unavailable and they didn't know when a shipment was going to come in. We wound up having to purchase it in one size smaller, which really doesn't look as good. (I'm contemplating buying a second rug). It was somewhat ridiculous. Then their returns policy. How can you possible only return something in it's original condition and original packaging when you have to assemble and affix most of the things you buy there? We have two larger black lights that went onto the ceilings before we realized they were way too large. I guess those are other items will just wind up completely wasted, which is a shame.