Renovating our Livingroom | Making home in a new country ep 2

Hello everyone, happy new year and welcome back!

In this episode I will show you how we organized our living room.
In episode one of this series, you can see in more detail how we fixed our walls, replaced the electricity cables and treated the wooden floors.

A lot of our furniture are not new. I like to collect things or buy them second hand and give them a new life. Somehow items with stories make me feel more at home.
Our green closet I saved from a bomb fire a few years ago. I really liked its shape and I wanted to see if I could get rid of the green color and reveal the wood underneath. I had never done something like this before. I decided to first try and remove as much as possible with a heatgun. For this you have to try and find a perfect distance to hold the gun so its heat can help the paint come loose from the wood. But if you keep it too close or on the same spot for too long you risk to burn the paint or the wood underneath. The remainder of the paint I removed with an electrical sander. The reason why I use this tool second is because the sandpaper gets clogged up by melted paint blobs very fast, if I would have used only the sander and not the heatgun I would have had to go through a huge amount of sand papers. I also didn’t want to use a chemical paintstripper over the entire surface of the closet because I would like to reduce the amount of waste that I produce with these projects.
Therefor I only used the paintstripper on the hardware and the legs of the closet.
All of this work took several days. In the beginning I was not sure if I would manage to get it done, but with a bit of persistence I could see more and more how I could come to an end result that I would enjoy.
I ended this project with giving this closet a good coat of furniture oil to treat the exhausted wood. Maybe next summer I might drag this closed outside again to give it a protective layer of varnish. But I don’t know it yet.

To install the wall shelves, I had to drill holes in our wall. This wasn’t easy because the outer layer is about 10 cm of cement with little stones in it. When the drill head encounters those stones, it will be redirected. So I kept the quick drying cement near to fix up any holes that ended up getting much bigger than intended.
We had the shelves precut at the shop. They just needed a bit of sanding. And I also gave them a little lick of some wood oil that we had laying around. When we are buying varnish for our kitchen cabinets, I will varnish these ones too with the leftovers. So, for now I don’t secure the shelves to the brackets.

This room has known a lot of stages already. And I love the one it is in now… Probably I’ll think of some more projects for it in the future, but then I’ll just film it and post it here!

And now I have a new favorite spot to sit when I work on little projects

For the rest of the series, I’ll have enough footage to post a renovation video about every other month. And in-between you’ll see some of my other projects.

Thank you for watching this video!
And I wish you a lovely day

Erika

#slowliving #slowlife #interior #simpleliving #homedecor #hygge #home