Living room

I finally got a chance to photograph the rest of the top floor. As you can see in the blue prints, the whole top floor is one big room with kitchen and living room and dining room in one. We pulled down horrible old wallpaper and got the walls prepped for paint. I was pregnant at the time so ‘unfortunately’ i couldn’t take part in repainting the huge room with the sloping ceilings. That was super hard work in the summer heat ..or so I hear 🙂

The exposed beams were painted with a horrible glossy white paint that had turned completely yellow over time. Our initial plan was to remove the paint since we really wanted the beams to be natural wood, but it turned out to be too much work for this time around since the white paint had gone into every little line in the wood and neither paint strippers or sanding seemed to work well enough. At some point we still want to strip them of paint, but that will be at a later point where maybe we can get professional help to do it. If anyone has experience with this, let me know if you have any tips.

So Instead of natural wood we chose to paint the beams black to make them stand out more in the room.

Finally we had the fireplace put in and O M G I love this! It is one of my absolute favourite things about this place and has been both so cozy and effective this winter in heating up this huge room – The whole room is probably around 60m2 (more than our old apartment!) and the ceilings are around 5m at the highest point. When the contractors started working on this floor last summer we thought we wanted to build a wall to the staircase in order to close off the room and to be able to heat it in the winter. But when we saw how awesome the room looked and felt without the wall we decided to try it out for one winter. And we are definitely keeping it this way: With the fireplace it is no problem to heat the room and it feels so much connected to the floor below.

The loft space ("hems" in danish) above the living room area was also one of the things that stood out to me when we first saw the place – I will show you details of it another time, but it is just a perfect cozy space with mattress on the floor and lots of pillows and blankets. We also have our old tv up there and the xbox.

The big room is separated in 3-4 zones; Kitchen, Dining area, sofa area and ‘undefined play area’ – oh the luxury of having a lot of space. The only thing I am missing now is a rocking chair to have right by the fireplace. During the winter we also have a stack of firewood next to the chimney – the firewood under the ceiling is more of a decorative reserve. I can’t figure out if we should also fill out the area on the other side of the chimney under the ceiling with firewood? What do you guys think?

The whole dining area is also a work in progress – I made the table as a test of the linoleum I wanted to use in the kitchen, but I really want a big, solid dining table .. just haven’t ever found one that I really like. The same goes for chairs. Right now we have a pretty random selection thrift store finds, but that is totally by accident because we can’t decide on a good looking and functional dining chair. I don’t think I really like sitting in any of the ones we have now. + we constantly switch around the art around the table. We haven’t really nailed that area yet.

The biggest change we still want to make on this floor is change windows and at the same time put in french balconies in place of the two windows towards the garden (the ones by the kitchen and dining area). That would be such an amazing change brining in a ton of light and connecting the room with the garden in a new way, I can hardly wait .. wait till we save up money to do it, that is. I think I need to put up a picture of french balconies on the fridge to constantly remind me of that goal ..or maybe on my credit card.

That’s it – I hope you get a sense of the whole top floor now. Still to come: more details from this floor + the bathroom, the office, the bedrooms and the whole staircase.