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About annabelvita

I blog about home over at http://annabelvita.com - come over and say hello

Just a quick post to update you on how it went when I removed the lace window treatment with cornflour / cornstarch. When it came to be time to move out, I sprayed the lace down with water and just pulled it away. The lace came away really easily but there was a lot of residue on the window. It took me a few tries to work out how to get it clean but what eventually worked best was a scrubby sponge and VERY HOT water (so hot you need rubber gloves). Vinegar also seemed promising but the hot water worked best. It doesn’t even look real does it? Doesn’t he look like Where’s Wally’s scruffy little brother? Dodgy picture taken on my iphone through its waterproof case! The view overhead. Sigh. 

House of Vita is officially back online! In celebration I thought I’d show you a janked up panorama photo of our living room, taken with the iphone 4s and the autostitch app (love that thing). Everything is skewed and weird, but I hope you get a sense of the amazing scale and light of this room. The white shelves in the top right are temporary – that’s where my secretary desk is headed. I didn’t tidy for this photo, so excuse the clothes hanger on the table and all the other junk. We still have a lot to do but this space is already feeling like home.

Things we love about this room:

Fantastic windows! 11 foot high ceilings! Massive kivik sofa. Red ikea locker cabinet. Hand me down table and chairs. The shutters. Our one lace curtain. Old anglepoise lamp. Art on the walls. Charity shop granny square blanket. How our bookcase happens to fit perfectly in the window nook.

Things we want to change about this room:

More art on the walls. Hang the clock somewhere . More pillows on the sofas. Have more than one lace curtain up! Put my secretary desk in that nook. Finish up my little filing cabinet properly. Put away the boxes behind the sofa. Add one piece of storage for kitchen overflow items.

Although we now have the real internet, my real camera is still at my friends house. Never fear, the iphone is pretty good when the light is pretty so I’ll get some more detail shots of some nice things in this room (and things you can’t see from this angle) and blog about them this week. Top shelf: Mr V’s Buddhas; the carriage clock his parents gave us when we got engaged (did you know this was a tradition? I didn’t); a teeny vintage suitcase my mum bought me in a French brocante; a little wooden box we bought on our first camping trip. Bottom shelf: my engagement sewing box (I wonder how many people have one of them? It still has the note and ring box in it); a serving bowl I bought in a charity shop. A sunny spot in the new flat; an old angelpoise lamp; my grandmother’s kitchen table; some old school chairs mum bought in Holland in the sixties; lilies and daffodils; some stunning china mr v gave me recently (more on this soon!); my framed canvas tote; our oversized date and time clock; a cork board full of pictures.

Everything is still in flux (uh, the clock isnt staying on the radiator! I’m not too fond of the stack of boxes bottom right) but these are some things making me happy right here and now.

Happy weekend blog friends!

I thought now that we’ve left London I could share a few more details about where we used to live. I loved our little London flat. Everyone else thought it too teeny for two but Mr V and I found it the most wonderful cosy nest for our first flat together (we’d shared a single room in a shared house for six months after all).

Our flat was a strange sort of fill in extension between two Victorian mansions in Putney, near the Thames. It was the windows that sold us on the flat and they were always my favourite thing about it (catch them in action here and here).

We had four of those windows that you can see in this picture. Sure, our flat wasn’t as fancy as the ones in the old mansions themselves, but as soon as we walked in to view it we got the feeling. We fell in love with our flat hard, and even though leaving was the right thing to do and it was the right time and we had a titchy bit of a damp/mould problem caused by all those windows, we still loved it when we left. I got all defensive on its behalf when the landlord struggled to find new tenants. Who wouldn’t want our lovely flat?

Here is a picture of one of the mansions from when the founder of Jaeger (with the dashing hat and beard) lived there with his family a long long time ago. I hope they were as happy there as we were. All images taken from J. Boom’s Google places page or webshop


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