The rooms, they are a changing...

Took my friend C to see the house this weekend. C teaches history by day, paints by night, and lives with her two girls in a very tiny apartment in the Goutte d'Or. I wasn't sure if her bohemian instincts would be utterly disgusted by the bourgeois excess of our oversized mansion, but she was really lovely about it; she described it afterwards to her partner A, saying, "Elle est grande oui, mais d'un certain cote elle reste modeste. C'est vraiment une belle maison de famille".

There are some decent before and after photo ops now.

This room is R's bedroom. It had this odd asymmetrical thing going on around the fireplace; the door on the far right was just leaning against a hole into the next room. it didn't look terrible, until we scratched beneath the surface and found this:



There didn't seem much to do except try to put it all back together again somehow. And so now it looks like this:



Instead of the fireplace looking like a hat put on at unfortunately jaunty angle, just waiting to fall, it's regained a bit of dignity with a proper chimney breast, and where there was once a broken door there's now a nice wide niche just right for some shelves. Shelves are the things that occupy my mind most of the time nowadays, being of course the thing that one simply never has enough of, ever. I think in this house we might finally have enough shelves, and some lovely ones too. Quite by chance I discovered the gorgeous String System and have managed to justify the purchase of it for the kitchen by promising (to myself, since I don't think anyone else really cares) that the rest of the kitchen will be dirt cheap IKEA:



(Except that IKEA kitchens aren't dirt cheap any more, but nothing is really, considering that the euro seems to be the only currency not in complete freefall at the moment.)