Munich Gardener

Arrived

2009-10-11T21:24:00.003+02:00

It's been a long weekend but I am in the new apartment. Just had my first soak in the tub and it is awesome!

I ordered the dining table yesterday (pictured in an earlier post. It should be here in early December, hopefully in time for my sister's visit.

The mattress I ordered seems to have gone missing so have to chase that up this week again. I am sleeping on a cushion the landlord has let me borrow. I feel like a vagrant but waking up in the morning to all the bright windows and cityscape takes the edge off!

Tomorrow

2009-10-08T20:51:00.002+02:00

Finally.

Tomorrow is the big move. I am not in good shape for it to be honest. After 3 weeks out of town for work, I returned late last night and awoke this morning feeling like I had no energy. Completely dead. I had planned to get up early, get the place packed up and ready so that I could finish the move by mid-afternoon tomorrow.

This doesn't seem likely anymore. I spent a lot of the day sleeping and finally started packing this evening. I can take until Sunday to get out of the apartment but was hoping to use Friday to move, Saturday morning to clean the old apartment out and then the rest of the weekend to get settled in the new apartment with my meager belongings.

I had some time to look for some inspiration in the last days and am finally having a breakthrough on how I want the apartment to look. I will spend some time in it first to make sure my ideas fit the place but now it is feeling less like pressure and more like a release, a new way to channel my creative energy. That is the right state of mind for a project like this.

The Task Ahead

2009-09-26T13:05:00.004+02:00

When I think about starting from scratch on an apartment and all that will entail, I feel like an ant! First visitors are just around the corner and my friends are dicussing a possible New Year's in Munich with me. Fortunately ants are known to be ably to carry many times their own body weight.

A New Table

2009-09-23T23:17:00.002+02:00

The first priority in the new apartment is a magnificent bed. I have ordered a mattress now from a company called Grüne Erde and I hope it is the son of my infamous 'Cloud'. The Cloud bed made the sweetest whoooosh sound when I fell into it every night. I loved that bed. The Grüne Erde products are meant to be natural and environmentally sound. The mattress I tested felt great too.

I made my second stop at the Maßtisch store, where I fell in love with this table. Isn't the wood gorgeous? I like that it looks rustic and modern all at once. I haven't ordered anything so far as I am also trying to identify the dominant style of the apartment first but I seem to just have eclectic taste.

Free Association

2009-09-23T23:14:00.001+02:00

Black, White, Red
2 Clocks on the Wall EST Time and CET Time
Chalkboard
White Orchids
Candles
Seagrass
Lots of Places to Display My Photographs
Mirrors
Wood

Yellow, Blue, Green, Sand, Wood

2009-09-15T01:09:00.005+02:00

Where to Begin

2009-09-13T11:17:00.004+02:00

I know what I like when I see it when it comes to home decorating. But I have no idea how to make it happen myself. Whenever set to the task of home decorating (which has happened many times due to many moves and circumstances in my life), I immediately get overwhelmed, try to control it all with a set of lists, excel spreadsheets and other obsessive-compulsive behaviours and then finally give in to making the inevitable mistakes just to stop the madness.

Let's recall for a moment a bedroom that gave a vibe that can only be compared to drowning in a swimming pool (I like robin's egg blue and thought it would look nice on the walls). The other common mistakes are to take the cheapy route and then after finding that I am not the master of shabby chic, yardsale and Target home decor, swinging in the other direction and going completely over the top resulting in some serious buyer's remorse. And a schizophrenic apartment.

Selecting art makes me even more nervous than furniture. What looks stunning in the first moment can quickly become tacky and cheap or just uninteresting. Similar to my logic in never getting a tattoo, I think tastes and interests change but the investment is long term so how can you ever decide?

Now that I finally have found an apartment in Munich to call home, I want to do it up right but am again confronted with the feeling that the task is insurmountable.

The objective is clear. I want a place where I can both live comfortably and entertain proudly, that is quality but doesn't break the bank and that looks like it was assembled deliberately rather than thrown together in knee-jerk fashion with too much compromise in every direction. Too tall an order? I really hope not.

So where to begin? The apartment has a very nice kitchen already, a wood stove and I bought the Ikea cabinets in the bedroom from the current tenants. Other than that it is empty. So I am looking for my grain of sand, the seed for the pearl, the inspiration to build the rest of the concept around.

In the meantime, I am making one simple list. A list of things that I must have right away. It is short. And that is already a step in the right direction.

New Life

2009-09-11T20:47:00.005+02:00

Life has a way of changing and change it did a year ago. The home that I made in the earlier posts of this blog doesn't belong to me anymore and I didn't take too much of it with me.

After a year of living in Singapore, Zürich, Köln and a furnished apartment in München (hmm, seems like I like cities with umlauts in their names), I signed a lease on my own apartment and will move in a few short weeks.

I am starting with absolutely nothing other than a few kitchen things, my clothes and my dreams.

So, a few shots of the place (with the previous tenant's furniture). What to do...

Spring Garden Photos

2008-05-03T19:14:00.003+02:00

Entertainment Center

2008-05-03T19:12:00.001+02:00

The new entertainment center came a couple of weeks ago and we are definitely pleased!

Signs of Life

2008-02-24T23:17:00.002+01:00

Today was truly spring-like. I wonder if we are being set up for a long cold March with big snow storms or if we are well on our way to an early spring?

Our garden is coming to life with the tulip, narcissus and crocus leaves poking out of the dirt. We also have a few snowdrops peaking out.

The Maßtisch has arrived!

2007-11-11T10:53:00.000+01:00

Cottage Garden

2007-09-13T00:01:00.000+02:00

I think my ideal garden is a cottage garden. When I visited my sister in Maine this summer, I dragged her around in search of the perfect Moosehead Lake cottage garden. My pictures didn't so most of them justice, but here is one I really liked.

Dahlia

2007-09-09T19:44:00.000+02:00

These are from a florist on the Viktualienmarkt but perhaps an idea to grow next year? I'm not sure if dahlias are easy to grow or not but will do a little research.

Frauenchiemsee

2007-09-04T22:46:00.000+02:00

A little inspiration.. this island in Chiemsee is GORGEOUS!! I would love to have a cottage garden like this.

Late Spring 2007

2007-09-03T19:59:00.000+02:00

Starting a garden from scratch is a lot of work but the spring passed quickly and every weekend I looked forward to coming home and digging around in the garden. The weather made quite a change in May and we got hit with a damaging hail storm. The ice covered our garden for about 6 hours. By the time it melted away, we had a very torn up garden and some plants never fully recovered from the freeze.

Before the Storm

Hail Storm May 27
You Tube Video

Aftermath of the Storm

It was time to clean up and rebuild!

Sunny Garden

2007-09-02T18:06:00.000+02:00

I think zinnias will be on the list next year. They did really well in our garden.

You've Got Mail

2007-08-24T15:48:00.000+02:00

Today when I got home there were two catalogs waiting for me in the mailbox. I had been looking on vacation for seed and plant catalog companies and ordered catalogs from 'Tom-Garten' and 'Baldur-Garten'.

All are in German so it takes me awhile to work out the details but they look like a good start. The prices for bulbs are good and so may make it worthwhile to just pull out and plant new every year rather than drag on with letting the leaves store up energy for the bulbs for 1-2 months of ugliness.

I saw some miniature fruit trees for kleine Gaerten, Balkon & Terrasse that M. might really like since he has been wanting a fruit tree since day 1. A separate rose brochure came and given the success we had with them this year I may go for 1-2 more next year.

Cheaper and more convenient. Now it's time for a quality check!

Maßtisch

2007-08-18T09:36:00.000+02:00

A long delayed decision is finally made. A couple of weeks ago we were handed a flyer for a new furniture shop on Marienplatz where they build custom Maßtisch. We stopped by and picked one out and now it is ordered! It should arrive in October.

We got the table customized in brushed oak, which may be a real pain to clean since it has grooves but we loved how it looks. The size is smaller than that shown, a 4 person or tight-squeeze 6 person table. For seating, we got a bench and two low stools so it is a more informal setup. Perfect for our small kitchen/dining area and in the future would be a great breakfast nook table.

Website for the company: Maßtisch.de

Picture of the style we got:

Which Color?

2007-08-17T12:28:00.001+02:00

We will arrange to have the apartment painted and I have convinced M. that we should do some color on the walls (after a year and a half) but the question is, which color??

Spring 2007 Part II

2007-08-16T21:14:00.000+02:00

Encouraged by our success with the bulb garden, we decided to tear up a good part of the rest of our yard. We built an island in the center of our yard for the centerpiece, a Star Magnolia.

Based on a drawing I had made when I first started sketching out how I wanted the yard to look, we built a curving, winding border along one side of the yard to extend the already existing bulb garden to a much more extensive flower bed.

We planted shrubs and an herb garden. A beautiful white clematis was climbing up the lattice. I added pansies around the bulbs for some more color. I gave some seeds a try: Zinnias, Poppies, Cosmos, Beans and Narcissus.

The yard was looking good in no time and we were ready for summer!

Spring 2007 Part I

2007-08-13T18:33:00.000+02:00

Spring 2007 brought two major events to our garden. The first was the blooming of all our bulbs. The first little crocus made its way out sometime in late March/early April. The days were very warm but the evenings crisp or even cold. Watching the various bulbs emerge and bloom throughout the spring was an experience for M. and myself.

Our success with bulbs encouraged us to take a bigger step... deciding gardening is not for the faint of heart we tore up a good part of the yard to expand our garden. More in Spring 2007 Part II...

Jan 06 to Mar 06

2007-08-12T15:40:00.000+02:00

In January 2006 I moved to Munich from the US. I have a blog to tell the stories of being an expat but decided to start this second blog, a sort of home diary, to keep track of our garden and home projects that are not of general interest to the 1 or 2 readers of my other blog.

So where to begin? When I moved here in January we had a rectangular patch of grass covered with snow, surrounded by hedges that grow thick and green in the summer. We discussed doing some landscaping projects and even consulted with a landscaper/gardener but do to the uncertainty of how long I would stay, that first summer passed by with no changes to the yard. Our one big investment was in our Ikea patio furntiture and a Weber grill. Good investments I might add.

A first look at the back yard (too cold to go outside):

World Cup 2006 (furniture & Weber grill well used!):

Summertime Yard View:

At the end of the summer, we decided to start our first project, a bulb garden. I had passed through Amsterdam and couldn't resist stocking up on a bunch of bulbs to kick start our gardening adventures.

Winter came again but this time spring was going to look a little different.