Just in case you missed the big news... last summer we bought an apartment here in Stockholm! The apartment was built in the late 1930's and is beautiful and cosy. We decided to do some renovations before we move in. If you follow me on Instagram you might have seen some of our progress in my stories. But for those wanting more, keep reading to see how I've managed our first renovation. Forewarning, it’s a bit of a longer post, so go make yourself a cuppa, get cosy and enjoy the read :)

This is the first time I've ever renovated. In fact, this is the first home I've ever bought. I've always lived in rentals and have never been able to change anything. So renovating and making this space just the way we want it is so cool. It's been an exciting challenge, but it has certainly been a challenge. Friends of ours have also just been through a renovation so I was able to get an idea of the process from them. Even after talking to lots of people who have renovated before, I still think I went into this project with unrealistic expectations. As exciting as renovating has been, there have definitely been tears, meltdowns and many sleepless nights.

The Design Process

This was the most exciting part of the renovation and I've spent many hours scrolling through Pinterest. Luckily for both of us, Daniel and I have very similar design tastes and clear ideas on what we wanted the apartment to look like. I must say though, that even with clear ideas of what I wanted, the design process what much harder than I thought. I knew I wanted grey walls, but what shade of grey? Who knew there were so many! And then there are all the small details that I didn't think about in the beginning. How many powerpoints (sockets) do I want? Where should they go? How high do I want them? What skirting boards do I want? The list goes on... and on!

Lessons Learnt

Also, here's something I learnt after the apartment had been painted. The above picture is exactly how you are NOT supposed to test paint colours. Apparently by lining all the colours up together you can't get an accurate picture of what they will look like. Oh well, lesson learnt! I did test the colours in all rooms though, so I could get an idea of how the different the colours look in different lights.

Something else I learnt is that the direction of the sun can make a huge difference to how a colour looks, and light grey is apparently one of the hardest colours to get right. At first I was unhappy with my colour choice, but now that everything else in the apartment is coming together I love it.

I really enjoyed the process of designing and planning and then going out to look for the materials. Unfortunately I couldn't always find what I was looking for and had to settle for other solutions. On the flip side though, I found things that I loved even more. Of course every time I thought I'd made a decision, I'd sleep on it and then change my mind a million times. The amount of hours I've spent agonising over some of these decisions is crazy. It feels like any wrong decisions I might make could be a disaster. I know it's not and everything can be fixed or changed. But I'm a perfectionist and I want everything to be exactly right the first time.

Functionality

Another part of the renovation I really enjoyed was looking at the existing space and working out what we wanted to do with it. By Aussie standards it's not a big apartment, only 83 square meters. So we needed to be smart about our design choices. Luckily for us the layout was already amazing. The apartment building is whats known in Sweden as a 'Funkis'. Functionalism came to Sweden in the 1930's and many of these style apartments were built. Everything is, as the name suggests, functional. Nothing has been built just for decoration and everything was designed with light and optimal living in mind.

Style

Designing the bigger things like the kitchen and bathroom was much easier. We really love Scandinavian design so we went with that. Which will be great for resale value later on. Originally we were going to stick to the traditional Scandinavian design, however after looking at hundreds of styled apartments online and on Instagram we realised that they are all identical. Beautiful yes, but identical. Every apartment seems to be the same neutral colour pallet, all white with the same shades of grey. So we took this traditional style and added a little bit of colour to it. We added a brighter colour for the walls, a darker colour in the kitchen and some industrial elements and we had our style!

Handy Resources

My biggest saviours when it came to planning the renovation were all the online resources that are available.

1. Honourable mentions have to go to Pinterest. This really helped me see how some of my ideas might look. You can find a pin for almost every idea you have.

2. Instagram was also such a big help. We sourced so many of the materials and fittings after seeing them on Instagram. I found more companies on Instagram than I did by searching on google.

How I Feel About Renovating

I am very grateful that the process has been pretty easy for us. We were lucky enough to renovate before moving in so we didn't have to live in a construction zone and we've really only had one major problem. Having said that, there have been quite a few times were I've declared that I'll never renovate again! Most of these have to do with my inability to trust my design choices or handling deliveries or my unrealistic expectations in the first place.

Breaking that down further, starting with my indecisiveness. I felt a huge amount of pressure making final decisions and ordering things for the apartment. What if my vision wouldn't look good in reality? I'm not an interior designer and I've never done this before. I've been terrified that I'm going to spend money on something and then not like it when we're finished. So far so good though.

Managing the deliveries though has been my biggest stress point. If I'm ever to do this again one day, I definitely want to outsource that part. With us not being at the apartment to accept the deliveries it's all been very confusing. Relying on the builders to be there to accept the deliveries hasn't always gone to plan. And doing all this with my limited Swedish was also challenging. Most things got delivered eventually though, with the exception of the toilet that got sent back to Denmark.

Progress

I can't believe how quickly the demolition took. Within a week the kitchen, bathroom and toilet had all been torn down. The old tiles had been pulled up and the walls were primed and ready to be repainted. I honestly expected this part of the process to take a lot longer. I didn't expect this to be the easy part. I've been going most weekends to check in and see what's been happening. Some weeks I leave the apartment excited about how much has changed and other weeks it looks like nothing at all has been happening. We did have some long delivery times on things though, so that didn't help. There was probably a lot of waiting around for materials.

The Build Process

I'm not really sure how the build process is supposed to go for a renovation like this. But it does seem to be happening in a strange order. For example, they paint first, but then bump and mark the walls a million times and have to keep repainting. Also for some reason the kitchen cupboards were assembled in the main bedroom and then moved into place. I haven't been able to make sense of the order in which the build is taking place, but I guess it makes sense to them.I'm so in love with the colour of the fishbone parquet in the dining/lounge room! These are the original floors that we sanded back and stained.

Set Backs

Unfortunately we had a huge set back at Christmas. Something in our new shower leaked and caused a lot of damage. We've had to pull apart some of the shower, take out the new doorway, take out the kitchen cupboards, pull up the new floor boards and dig up some of the concrete in the kitchen. Apparently the leak went through the back wall of the bathroom and into the kitchen. It also went down into the basement below us. I guess we wont be very popular with our neighbours for awhile!

We were told that by digging up this much of the concrete floor and having fans in there it would dry in a couple of weeks. That wasn't the case and every time someone came back to access the water damage they had to dig up more floor. We ended up with a huge hole where the kitchen floor was supposed to be, probably 3 times this size.Finally though, the water damaged has dried and we've been able to rebuild!

Exactly 140 days after we started this renovation we'll be finishing it. Well, almost. There are still a few finishing touches that need to be made over the coming weeks. We have curtains to hang, the kitchen benchtop needs to be installed and we have a beautiful industrial glass wall going in. Hopefully that will all be done by the end of March.

We're moving in on Monday and as soon as I've unpacked I'll do another post with all the before and after photos. Until then, I have boxes to pack!

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed this post. Let me know in the comments if you've been through a renovation and how you managed it. Or let me know if there's something more you'd like to know about our renovation.

Cheers, Jess