making a home

So a few months after we last saw them, all of our belongings have finally arrived via a ship from the UK. We spent the better part of last week unpacking nearly 60 boxes and trying to find a home in our fairly compact apartment for all of the contents. Not too easy a task! Thank goodness we have a garage to house all the surfboards, bikes and other random bits and pieces we can't fit anywhere else. My favourite part of setting up house is deciding where to hang all the pictures and photographs on the wall and displaying all our treasures and decorative things.

I sorted the books on our bookcase in to colour blocks which I've wanted to do for ages- I'm not under any illusuions it will stay this way for very long but I do love it. More laborious tasks such as actually putting furniture together aren't my strong point but thankfully my better half is very hands on and has an awesome talent for DIY (case in point- he spent the last two evenings building us both shoe racks to go in the bottom of our wardrobe using wooden slats from a chest we shipped over which didn't quite make in intact and arrived in pieces!)

I'll take some more photos to share when we've got it all sorted but here are couple of shots of some of my favourite bits. It's very much a mish mash of various styles of furniture that we've accumulated from various sources and definitely a work in progress.

Cushions which will live on our sofa...

These stools for our breakfast bar were a great find from a wonderful vintage furniture store here in Auckland- as you can see they are really old but we love that the seats are so marked and worn with use and age. We (ahem...Curt!) jut varnished the seat and painted the rather rusty legs with metallic blue paint.

This lamp shade below (one of a set of two) was amongst my wedding anniversary presents from Curt. The shade is made out of a special sort of plastic/velum and actually sits on top of a wine glass- we used really long stem tea light holders instead- and you put a tea light inside and it casts a really soft glow.