Posted on May 17, 2012
It is really hard for me to write this post. So bare with me please.
My grandma is 93 years old and she is the only grandparent that I’ve ever known. The others all past away before I was born or when I was really little. She is the only grandparent that I can remember having in my life.
Here is a picture of her with our whole family back in December.
She has been living on her own since my grandpa died back in 1994.
But she has been really ill the last couple of months and so she has decided to move into an old age home where someone can take care of her 24/7.
My parents had to pack up her whole house and then she distributed her furniture amongst the grand kids. aka. me, my brother and sister.
The stuff had to be transported from George to us here in Cape Town. When that truck arrived in front of our house and they started unpacking, my heart just broke. Life is so strange… she has been collecting stuff for 93 years and now… she has nothing. A suitcase filled with clothes.
It was a really sad moment for me, but I felt proud as I started putting her stuff in my house. Things that have so much memories attached to it. It now feels like she lives here with us in Raybelle.. through her furniture.
That’s why I always say, I’d rather have furniture in my house that tell a story, than to have things around that have been bought at the local furniture store. I cherish these things like gold.
You will remember this pic from this post. My grandma gave Viv and me this really old persian carpet, it still has it’s original certificate. It is perfect for the hallway. I can remember playing with my dolls on it, like it was yesterday. Then that old cupboard at the end of the hall used to sit in my grandma’s entrance and it hosted all of our artwork from when we were little. Well, most of it was my brother’s art, he is the only one amongst the 3 of us that can draw anything worth displaying. I love having it in my house now. It still smells like my grandma’s house and it has such font memories attached to it. When I opened the drawers I even found pens and other trinkets that I can remember playing with when I was little.
She also gave me her couch and 2 chairs that used to live in her tv room. I broke up the set and the 2 seater now lives in our living room.
While the 1 chair is now in the master bedroom and the other one in the guest bedroom.
I am going to upholster them all and maybe even change the shapes a little. I am thinking of doing some chesterfield shape for the 2 seater. See that throw on the chair in our master bedroom? I am thinking of covering it in that colour, to match the colour of the scatter pillows on our bed.
I also got this coffee table. Her brother made it years ago. I am planning on painting it…
I will keep you updated on the transformation that will take place with all the pieces.
Take care and remember to cherish every second you have with your loved ones. You can never say I love you too much! It will never get old.
Love you grandma!
Posted on May 15, 2012
The Raybelle House Tour tab in the menu bar is now up to date. Check it out and let me know what you think. You will also notice a couple of new pieces of furniture lying around the house. Will post all about it tomorrow.
Click here to view.
Have a great day.
Posted on May 14, 2012
I created a new tab in the menu bar, called ‘Raybelle House Tour’.
See that pink arrow?
We forget how Raybelle looked like when we first bought her and how much has changed around here in the last year. It is good to look back and see where Raybelle has come from.
Prepare yourselves for some shocking pictures. If you haven’t followed the blog since day one and this is the first time you see what state she was in when we found her… Good luck. I still get shocked when I look at the pictures and Viv and I regularly talk about how crazy we were to take on this project. It has been so worth it.
Pop in tomorrow; I will be updating that tab to the present. Taking each room to where it is now. Looking at the transformation that has been taking place…slowly.
Have a great week.
Posted on May 7, 2012
Remember these bad boys that I bought sometime last year? I blogged about them in this post.
And this is how they have lived in Raybelle’s living room for the past 5 months.
Yes, I refer to them as my babies. I absolutely LOVE them. They are my most valuable things in our house. If our house had to burn down, I would grab them first.
But they were really ugly babies. They were in desperate need to be recovered, because they still had their original covering (+- 40 years old), which is really disgusting.
Well, babies are now looking gorgeous!
The fabric that shines silver, white/ pearl and shades of champaign, depending on what time of the day it is.
I was planning on covering them myself, but I was scared that I will make a mess as I haven’t done upholstering yet. I seriously didn’t want to try it out on my Queen Annes. I know my fellow DIYers will shake their heads in shame, but I will try and do it next time, with a piece of furniture that is not so valuable to me.
I found this gentleman by the name of Mr. Meyers to cover them for me. If you ever need to get something covered, I highly recommend this guy. He came to pick up the chairs at the house and brought them back after 5 days. And to top it all of, he is cheap. Someone quoted me R1500 to cover 1 chair, he covered both chairs for far less than the initial quote for 1. Here is his nr: 021 392 1739
I love the colour and how it blends in with the white kitchen and dining room and of coarse my hanging chair.
Did you see that little side table in the 4th pic? It is just a glimpse of some exciting stuff happening over at Raybelle. We have welcomed some new old furniture, which are all in a desperate need for an update. Loads of DIY projects to come. Exciting stuff!
Have a great week.
PS. We made our first fire for the winter in our fireplace. (which Viv tweeked with wooden planks as it was making loads of smoke. It looks horrible now, but he did an awesome job and the living room is now smoke free) I dreamt of sitting in my hanging chair with a glass of wine next to the fireplace since the day I bought that hanging chair. Pure bliss. (bad BlackBerry picture)
Posted on May 3, 2012
The one side of Raybelle was in dire need of a face lift. The passage next to the house also hosts our washing line. The ground was covered with weed and other gug that is probably 60 years old. Also, whenever something falls off the washing line, it needs to be washed all over again. Who wants 60 year old gug on their underpants?
Here is the before picture. Rooky error: I washed our white bedding the day that we decided to do this project. Note: it wasn’t a great idea.
Slowly (note the slowly part) but surely we pulled out every piece of weed and grass and removed all the gug.
Now, remember I have mentioned before that Viv is a perfectionist, which means that each and EVERY little weed that existed was removed. EVERY SINGLE ONE of them. I had no chance to jippo on this job. He has eyes like a hawk.
After about 5 trips with the wheelbarrow…
we were left with a clean slate. (and dry/dirty white bedding)
and not so clean clothes and shoes
Then we started levelling the ground. Sloping it downward for water to run into the drain and not sink into the ground immediately leaving a breeding place for mozzies. . And then we rolled out the weed guard.
It took two rolls of weed guard ( the two pieces have to overlap 5 cm) to cover the area and my mama was the “keep everything together” person. She does DIY all in style 
.
We bought 12 cement stepping stones (we had 2 left from our front gate project) and arranged them on the weed guard.
Then we just layered the gravel around the stepping stones.
Ta da! Nice and tidy washing line area. (I love how my washing line folds back onto the wall and you don’t even notice it)
Costs:
Gravel: free (leftovers from building the boundary wall)
Weed cloth: R 260 (R130 a roll)
Stepping stones: R360 (R30 each)
Total: R620 (not bad for a whole 10m area)
Posted on May 2, 2012
Whenever my BF’s little boy are done with whatever he was busy with; whether it is colouring or eating, he smiles so proud and says “All done”. That is exactly how I felt when the painters packed up all of their goodies and left on Thursday afternoon. I looked at our newly painted house and smiled proudly and said “all done!”
We are very happy about the results. We love it!
The exterior walls even match the entrance hall’s grey stripes. We also bought our first trees. We are so chuffed. Now they just need to grow bigger so that I can shape them into lollipops. Next project in line is to tile the front steps… oh and to plant grass.
We have a bunch of projects to share with you guys this week. A lot has happened, besides the exterior painting, the last couple of weeks. Looking forward to sharing it all with you.
Posted on April 18, 2012
The first coat of delicious grey was painted yesterday and it looks amazing. We are so happy with the colour. We keep on walking outside to stare at the grey walls. I think our neighbours are now happy too They might think that we are a slight bit crazy: 2 people standing outside for hours drooling over painted walls…
Remember in my previous post I said that we are going to paint the stripes that run around the house white? Now you see the stripes?
We decided to go for a grey white for the stripes, to go with the grey colour scheme we’ve got going on. We thought that a white-white would be to harsh against the grey. So we chose Midas Stacco. See the colour right at the top of the paint chip? It blends in perfectly with the grey colour range.
It looks great. (do note that it is only the first coat, hence the white marks popping out)
See the difference between the yummy newly painted walls and the dirty yucky old walls?
The picture below gives you the best, realistic idea of the colour. The pictures above does not do the colour justice. It looks to blue.
What do you guys think?
Posted on April 16, 2012
Well, this might not be as exciting for you guys as it is for us. But we have been waiting for this day, which seems like forever!!!
We have started painting and updating the exterior of Raybelle!
We had to save up some moolah before we could start updating the exterior. It took so long even our neighbours started asking when are we starting to paint the house. Guess our Raybelle was the ugly duckling in the street. But not for very long, I hope.
Because the house is so darn old, it needs A LOT of work. Not just a new coat of paint, but each and every crack needs to be drilled out and filled, the old paint needs to be removed by a pressure spray and the windows needs to be sanded off.
But, we have started and that makes me all warm inside. It still looks like a train wreck, but man it is one beautiful train wreck.
Just remember the house looked like this just a week ago. We are making progress.
Now it looks like this:
Now here is the best part of this whole project, choosing the colour. We chose grey and white; keeping the plaster band around the windows white as well as the white stripe that runs along the side of the house (you can see it clearly in picture 2) and the rest of the house grey.
Choosing a grey that we both liked was hard. Especially choosing it of paint chips. After looking at chips for a while, all the colours looked the same.
But we nailed it down to this chip:
It was between Midas Lighthouse, or Midas Goddess.
We took a sample home and found the winner: Lighthouse
We hope (and fingers crossed) that the whole project will be done by the end of the week.
Have a great week.
Posted on March 16, 2012
The hallway between our kitchen and bedrooms looked like this for weeks.
We have so many photos that we wanted to frame. I knew I wanted to create a photo wall with just white frames (in the white colour scheme). So I had to wait until all the pics were framed in white frames (what a mission to find white frames), so that I could work out the layout on the wall.
First, I traced all the frames onto paper to create templates and then arranged and re-arranged them on the wall until I was happy with the layout.
I used leftover Christmas paper. Gotto recycle right?!
And labelled all of them so that I knew which frame goes where.
Then we measured from the top of the frame to the string/ hole (whatever is there to hang the frame on) to see how many cm below the top of the frame the nail will actually sit. Then we find the center of the newspaper template (Viv is really good with this. He refuses to go a mm to the left or right. It has got to be the 100% centre. The joys of being married to a CA) and measures down the same amount. (sorry for not having pics to show you. Hope the explanation is okay)
We then made a little x on the paper where the nail had to go and hammered away through the paper and into the wall. We have found that this is the easiest way to put up frames.
As you can see in the pic above, we started with the big frame in the centre and then moved to the sides. Just for the decor-balance rule.
It now looks like this: (excuse the pictures, but it was taken at about 10pm after we had finished the job. It took forever, especially with Viv having to do everything 110% accurate)
(Never mind that silver table below the red chandelier, just a space saver for the moment. We still need to put up that art)
We want to add onto that layout; wallpaper that whole wall with frames from the ceiling to the floor. And add some trinkets of course, because I love trinkets. Like at top of this first frame is the booklet that was handed out at our wedding. It has my favourite quote in, which I love reading everytime I walk past it.
It’s far from finished. But I love the layout, it definitely has a good skeleton to work with. I already have 4 more frames to put up this weekend.
Have a great weekend.
Posted on March 12, 2012
Before I show you the after pics of our glorious walk-in-closet, please give me a moment to share with you guys how we lived for 5+ months.
That is quite embarrassing. May I please say it again- we lived like this for 5+ months. That is almost half a year. For half a year, we lived out of black bags and suitcases.
The reason why it took us that long, well, go read this post. The walk-in-closet fell into the less important category. Some people (like you mom and mom-in-law ) might place ‘having a place to put your clothes’ as priority, but we felt that ‘having a kitchen’ as right up there with ‘a place where I can actually wash myself.’
After totally losing it one morning, because I could not find something to wear for work, we decided to take on the closet and within 2 days, these boxes arrived.
Now, this is the part where I should probably prepare you for what you are about to see. You probably expected a build-in, wooden structure of some sort, well, like most things in our house- we went the industrial route, or in this case, the commercial route. We bought shop fittings! Yup, we bought shelves that one would probably find in your local Spar or Shoprite. The reason for this is, it is MUCH cheaper than wood, very easy to install and you can custom design it by adding baskets, hooks, hanging rods etc. It can be modified instantly to suite your needs and you can expand by adding onto the structure.
So, after moving everything out of the space and into our guest bedroom..
we were left with a clean slate…
We first build the structure in order to find the exact spot where it should go so that we could make little pencil markings for where to drill. Viv made me stand like this for about 30 minutes, no kidding. After this I had quite some biceps.
As you can see, it comes with long rods and hooks like this:
Then the shelves fit into those hooks.
It took a lot of moving and shuffling until the rods where level. This was the difficult thing, if the structure on the left were not 100% level, then the next structure will not fit in.
It took alot of drilling. Each rod had about 5 holes to drill.
We added these baskets at the bottom for shoes. Once again, it just slipped into the whole structure.
And these rods we used for the hanging clothes.
And after about 2 hours, we had our shelves up.
We are not done yet, as after living with the shelves like this for a couple of weeks, we want to move the shelves closer together and add more shelves and baskets at the top.
That’s the beauty of it, you can add more things to it without having to move or change the whole structure. I am also thinking of painting the walls a bright colour, add a carpet, some fun art and we are getting a sliding door at the opening. I really don’t want to lie in bed and stare at our clothes.
But watch this space.
Have a great week.
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