Arrived

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

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

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

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

• 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

Where to Begin

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

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

Entertainment Center

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

Signs of Life

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!

Cottage Garden

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

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

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

Late Spring 2007

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

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