As you maybe know, we will move soon. Actually, we have one more week end in our current appartement, and then, we are in the new house. This is going fast! This new house, we are renting it. It is for us a good compromise 1) to know if we like the life on the country side 2) because it was the only thing we found to live in with that short lap of time 3) to have time to find a good place to live later and 4) to make a calm and intelligent decision about the way and the place we want to live in the 10 coming years.

In Sweden is interior design a big subject on the blogs all around and I never put so much energy in it in the different places I lived in. But this time, we have a challenge: make the house nice to live in for an affordable cost. This is the reason why I decided to create a new category in the blog: the category Interior. The goal is to reflect, post ideas (from others) and to get some tips from you as well! Don’t forget to write comments to help me in our work!

So the first subject is one of our biggest trouble with the house: there is no storage! The house is tiny (60m2) and even if we don’t have that much furnitures or things, we found out that we need storage in the kitchen, the bedroom and the bathroom. Let’s start with the kitchen!

This is how it looks today:

On the east side of the house, we have a water place, a fridge/freezer and an owen, some places to work on and some few storage. This looks at least practical to cook in: concentrated, no lost place and all the tools closed to each other. Another nice thing is the possibility to look through the window while washing the dishes.

On the west side of the house, the front door and entrance come directly in this part of the kitchen. You can’t see it on the picture, but the wall on the right has kind of a “window”, which makes this wall unsuable for storage. The wall on the left though could be used for something. And will have too since we need a place to put our dishes.

The wall is about 2m20 high and 1m35 long. This is not too much but gives some space to make something of it. Here are the solutions I thought of so far.

Solution one: to use sparring shelves (or similar) to cover the wall with.

This is -in my opinion- the best way to use this space of wall to its maximum. We can put shelves everywhere and get a maximum of storage. The shelves could have different depth as well. The problem is that we would have to make wholes in the whole wall and I am not a fan of this. We are just renting the house, so it doesn’t feel really good to “destroy” a wall. Then, the material can maybe cost a little fortune, depending on which material we choose. And another little negative aspect is that the things are “outside”, totally ready to get the dust and everything. But here are some exampels about it it can looks like (picture borrowed from here: http://norrgavel.se/mobel/norrgavel-sparring/ ):

Solution two: to use independant shelves

This is a practical idea, and can almost cover the whole wall, depending on which modell we find. The negative aspects from dust and so are still here, but it won’t destroy the wall as much and solution one and we will be able to take it to our new place to live later. One negative point here is that mayve the shelves would be too deep and take too much space from the hall. But it would work. Here is an exampel of IKEA (picture borrowed here: http://livethemma.ikea.se/hylla-hobbyn/ ):

 

I also thought of shelves in metal, that can carry pretty much and are not that high but have the same function. A point with that is that it would fit in a garage later or somewhere outside if we would move in a house. There are pretty cheap as well, depending on how much weight you want them to carry.

Solution three: to use an independant cabinet

This solution is the one my heart likes the most: to have a nice and smart piece of furniture that is both usefull and beautiful. My wallet does like this solution a little less: this is kind of an investment and since we don’t know which kind of living we will have in 1 or 2 years, it seems a bit strange to put so much money in something we will maybe use a so short time. But let’s see what I found!

Here is an example of one traditionel cabinet, that can be used in the kitchen for disches now, but even later as book shelve or so. This modell is made on order, which means that you can choose exactly everything: the width, the color, the finish, if you want glas for the doors or plain wood and so on. Another plus is that they are ecologically made. (picture borrowed here: http://norrgavel.se/mobel/hoga-skap/ ):

 

When I was googling, I even found this kind of modell, which is the ultimatum of practicality: the cabinet seems to be a little bigger than normal ones, but everything fits in it. There were no prices on the website, so I don’t know really how big fortune you need to buy it, but it seems to me to be one of the best alternative: everything fits in, you can take it with you when you move and this is a nice piece of furniture (picture borrowed here: http://www.stockholm.bulthaup.com/)