70s Deco - out of the Thrift Store

In Germany the idea of Thrift Stores isn't much developed. Although it started slowly with organizations like 'oxfam' in the last five years, it still will take many years until the concept gets really accepted.
Old furniture are either antique and then sold for high prices or they are not and then got thrown away or its sold in special “Social stores” for less-income families...normal people hardly have the possibility to shop there and therefore they even don't know about this concept. E-bay opened the market for used furniture, but still it will be a long way until the whole idea gets realized for non-profit organizations and consumers.
So, when I came to Canada I was very pleased while exploring the different Thrift Stores and options it gave me to fill our flat with inexpensive, but still good quality furniture. The largest providers are the Salvation Army and much better organized but therefore more expensive- the Value Village. We got chairs, table, kitchen tools, dishes, desks, picture frames... a lot came from these stores and - often renewed with a little paint job- it found its place in our home...
For much other things we just don't have enough space, but at least I enjoy watching it in the store, like the old trunks and armchairs.




Especially 1970s-style fabrics start to be so interesting with its flowers and wild mixtures of colors. Unfortunately our house is already mixed enough, so that we can't go for wild fabrics at all, but these things are at the beginning of being real retro pieces and they just need ten years more to be again, really cool... :-)

This week I love...

....either the dark blue chinoiserie by De Gournay or the skirt by Rohit Bal (hard to decide which one looks better) in the bedroom of writer Shyama Patel in her New Yorker appartment.
The bed though, isnt so much my style, like my granny would say: 'this full-metall bed will be strucked by lightning in the next thunderstorm... ;-).' I guess a combination of dark wood and metall, in a still modern style, would fit even better to the room.

(Picture out of Elle decor, US Edition, November 2006)

Merry Christmas

The real christmas spirit...

Our Christmas Tree was supposed to be small and for a more natural feeling it didn't needed to be necessarily perfect looking. So on a Sunday afternoon we went to the next supermarket were trees were sold. At this time new snow was falling and it was cold. We weren't much able to see how the tree looked like, because it was wrapped for transportation and umm, the small sizes were all gone... So we took the Supermarket Standard Size from around 1,80 m and went back home – carrying our tree through the snow and ice by hand, like in older times the people brought their trees out of the woods...
Then, my husband was fixing his very first own Christmas tree in the tree stand and after he unwrapped it, we saw, that the tree was just fully grown and perfect... Anand was even putting the lights and decoration with balls and pine cones on it and he just let me do some small details.


Our Wall-Rug, which we bought in Jaipur was given the colors for the tree. Because its dominating the living room, it doesn't make sense to choose different colors, the result will be loud colors without harmony..
So I choosed orange, gold, antique white and a small sparkle of blue and silver as the colors for the tree ornaments. But of course I bought less things, because it was meant for a much smaller tree. So, even when all balls and ornaments were on the tree, it still looked less and I thought about buying a bit more Christmas balls. But, then I really started loving it, its just a different kind of tree.. The ornaments, balls, feathers and ribbons came from Michaels (a craft shop), Canadian Tire, the this year IKEA-Collection with shining orange glas balls (but why did they combined black with it? Does it make sense to have black ornaments hanging on a dark green tree?), Dollarama and of course some old fashioned ornaments, which I found in the Thrift Stores...


Here I just added a few picture, some more are in this small album below... merry Christmas to you ... :-)

Christmas Tree

Pick of the week

The week wasn't about useful things and even it shouldn't be too much christmas-like and it wasn't really for my flat either... I just found these very nice indian bangles and an elephant.. ;-)

Christmas Decorations II

This week I just want to show some small decorations for the kitchen table, in the living room and outside at our main door... The green fir vase on the kitchen table is decorated with wine charmers, these small deco pieces, which you can put on your wine glas to identify it from other glasses. These pieces are so small, that it was perfect for this decoration. The wood with the bow, which is laying under it, is the extra wood, which was left after putting all green in the vases...



The small santa above the window is made out of a piece of plywood, which got painted. He is hiding the end of the electric lights-curtain.



This decoration is part of a garland which hangs over the door to the living room (we actually don't have a real door there, more some kind of an opening.) Its an artificial garland, with extra (real) green in between, some wooden ornaments and a glass ornament from 1983.


Outside our living door, we dont have a big wreath, because we already customized the entry with a rajasthani mirrored welcome drapery. So I bought a small artificial (because its inside, real green fir would dry too soon) wreath, removed all the plastic decoration from it and added only two small plywood stars, which I painted in red and blue and brought it to the wreath with silver thread and some shining blue acrylic mosaic tiles... finished.

This week I love...

...these poufs and and the two side tables in a modern variation of this old Moroccan style. I know we don't have any place for it right now, but (*wink* to my hubby, just for the case he is reading this...) wouldn't it be great, when we would have the place? ... =)
3suisses.de – Belle Déco

Christmas Decorations I

Who said that christmas decorations are not meant to be kitschy? This mirror in gold and yellow shows the opposite and still everything is allowed at christmas, because it's just for some weeks.
The small socks are made out of fine indian paper.


I found the Noel-Sign in a One-Dollar-Store in White and full of coloured glitter. Its made out of some kind of a stone-plastic mixture. I tried different colour variations and finally liked this one the most, it's a sand-shade for the shadow and my usual offwhite on the foreground, but this time it's very glossy, to give it some more shining...




The bedroom with its dominating white-red scheme asked for more traditonal decoration and so I kept it very natural with a huge pine cone and a snowflake fir-tree green arrangement in the white vase. I just added small electric lights.

Pick of the week

This week I bought something I could use immediately. When I saw the white, round porcelain cookie-bowl in my favorite second-hand store, I had to buy it for the Christmas cookies I intended to bake on the very evening.
But, I was surprised, when I saw the same model in a decoration magazine just some days later. I mean I didn't bought it at IKEA where it might likely happen, that many people have the same one, but in a Thrift Store...?
Anyways, these people seem to have good taste ;-)

Easy Details

This is a close look to two different details in the bedroom, which nearly didn't cost anything.

The first one is our dramatic red panel over the bed.

The complete costs for this one were around 5 $. The core is made of a big double cardboard, which I got as a side product from our IKEA packages. But, you can also ask at any supermarket for such boards, they are just throwing it away after unpacking the goods.
I cut the board in its form and were putting a vinyl tablecloth (1$) as a first layer. Over it I drapped the rough silk fabric which I brought with me to Canada. Then I got some nice paper for scrapbooking and I just pinned it on the board. (There are various designs available, so that you can change your panel as often as you want.) Because of it's light weight, it just needed a few nails to hang and that was it...

My second detail is this small white rope I wrapped between the black metal at the bed head.

I have to admit, that I don't like the bed head much. I know that a designer was thinking a long time to make this product, but this is life, I am thinking about how to change it. My first change was this rope. (I needed two packages, each for 2 $.)


It took some longer time to finish this project and in the meantime the cats started liking it as some kind of a scratchboard, so I guess this idea is meant for a cat free household. Until now it still looks good, but my bed head transformation process isnt completed, I will try to upholster it complety, somehow.... any ideas from you are very welcome... :-)

A tour through the bedroom

In the first months we didn't had the money to make any high jumps in design spheres, my husband just started working and with a little more than 1.000,00 $ we wanted to buy furniture in short time and for the whole flat. So we didnt started searching for the best offers there or there, but went straight to IKEA and bought the things which were at that time available and cheap. Our bed was a special offer and also the bed fabrics. Then we bought the red wool carpet and the white dresser and already had the colour scheme for the room. It was definatly red and white, with some splashes of blue, so it looked in principle like the american flag. That wasnt really supposed to be like that, but the look is fresh and the best we managed in short time.


Later I added details like the blue chair, which is a tradional Shaker-Style chair. I found it black-coloured in a second-hand store, and it took some time to remove the black paint (so my neighbours learned to know me, with black hands and sand paper sitting outside on the stairs) and to recolour it in white and iceblue, but it was worth the job and is now shining again.


The small beach photo serie over the dresser is another second-hand-found. The surrounding was in yellow colour. I painted it white and added some small lines in blue and sand to give the illusion of a real frame.
Actually it was meant to hang in the bathroom, but then we thought, that its mucher better fitting next near the chair.


Our mismatched bedside tables are also just founds. The one (a former TV-Stand in dark cherry was one day standing outside for trash aka. for free ) and the other was a yellow nightstand found in internet from a moving sale for 5 $. The colour is now forming the connection between both...
The old lamp is from a thrift store and is having a beautiful glas ornament. We both really liked it, but we are also worried, because it's not really cat save....



My future ideas for the room are, to add a bit more white, for example as bed linen (to take the red lighter) and I have to think about the curtains. Right now I have rough linen with a floral pattern, but the problem is, that a street light is directly shining in the room at night and the curtains are not thick enough to filter that light.

Our Bedroom: History

When we moved in, our flat was a former model home and I really liked the elegant plum colour the designer had choosen for the bedroom.
On the other hand my husband immediately disliked it and I had to agree, that it is more some kind of a woman colour.
So we started right from the scratch to find our new furniture....