HAPPY NEW YEAR !

 

 

Jan and me wish you all a Happy and Healthy 2011 !

xx

So close yet so far.

Wow... A bit of before and current.

Before: Family Room & Kitchen

Before: Living Room 

After: One Big Kitchen Family Dining area...Stay Tuned

Deep Breaths and Happy Places....

So this whole living through a re-model thing is no joke. I am certainly no stranger to it because since I can remember, every childhood home I have ever lived in has been is various stages of construction. My Dad is a builder and has basically bought homes and demolished them for a living the majority of his life and mine.  My earliest memories as a kid involve watching walls come down and go up and hearing saws and nail guns blasting away.  Maybe this is why I became a designer? It's in the genes. Anyways fast forward a decade or 2 and the constant noise of construction has now infiltrated baby G's life. Wonder if she will grow up being drawn to live in a constant state of sawing and smashing? Haha. Our house is Loud and chaotic and I am LOVING every second of it...seriously. I may moan about the living quarters and the fact that the heat was off last night and we were a bit cold (thermostat read 56), and I wine about the fact that we had no hot water, but I have to be honest in saying...its my favorite kind of pain in the arse! The kind that in the end will result in one AMAZING KITCHEN and all my dream home ideas will come to fruition. .... Some more progress shots.

My last blogpost of this year is dedicated to all of you !

My dearest readers, followers, blogfriends and blogcolleagues, I would love to thank all of you for this wonderful year, joining me at Belgian Pearls.

This year I met so many new readers and blogcolleagues, and a lot of you became real friends! It is amazing how many lovely people I learned to know through blogging!

Starting my blog, I never could have imagined that meeting all of you, would have such an impact on my life!

All those sweet and lovely comments on my posts, all these emails I received from you, were to me a huge support and motivation to go on with my blog!

‘Belgian Pearls’ wouldn’t be of any meaning without all of you!

I do hope that even in 2011, I will be able to bring you blogposts you will love and enjoy! I promise to do the best I can to not disappoint you!

I also want to make my apologies to all the people amongst you, who have sent me an email on which I have not answered yet! Sometimes I am so busy with my job and my family (I am also a wife and a mum, you know !), that I really don’t find enough time to blog or to answer all my emails!

We are only a few days away from a new year, and the next two days I will have to prepare everything for New Year’s Eve because we have our family to join us. So there are still a few things to do!

This post will be the last one of this year.

To thank you for your support and friendship the past year, I want to treat you with some random chosen eye candy images from my files !

Thank you so much for being a reader, a follower or a blogfriend!

You are all so dear to me!

___

Enjoy!!

Source : Four Seasons Hotel Florence

Source : Tim Clinch photography

Source : Magazine Seasons Januari 2011 Photographer Kat de Baerdemaeker

Source : Robert Couturier

Source : Campagne – Décoration

WISH YOU ALL A NEW YEAR FILLED WITH PEACE, PROSPERITY AND HAPPINESS !

Talk to you in 2011 !!

xx

Let the Battle Commence!!

Construction has officially started on our new kitchen dining family room today!. I am both extremely excited and totally anxious. I will be posting TONS of photos of the process. My christmas this year was one of the best I have had in literally 25 years. The Duck surprised me with a snazzy new Cannon g12 and a NEW MACBOOK PRO. That last one deserved all caps, because I have been working away on my trusty old macbook for almost 6 years and it was starting to show its age. Anywhooo here is some progress photos and how we are currently living out of our office and bedroom...  Stay tuned.

Subdued color palette

I do hope you have all had a wonderful Christmas !

I want to thank everyone who has sent me their warmest Christmas wishes! I wish I could have been able to write every reader or blog colleague to give my personal wishes. But unfortunately, I wouldn’t know where to start!

There are only a few days left to a new year! Can you believe this?!

Today I love to share with you some images of Belgian interiors with a soft, subdued color palette.

They all radiate a certain serenity and calmness.

Enjoy!

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Wish you all a wonderful last week of the year!

xx

Merry Christmas !

Next Years X-mas tree...

So This year we bought a tree from Home Depot... Let me tell you I thought I had found the score of a lifetime. It was 35 bucks for a 7' noble fir. Jump till about a week ago and my thrill of the deal started to fade, along with the life of my 35 dollar tree. I won't light my stove in fear that the heat from it may ignite my tree into a fiery ball from hell. Not only is it a complete disaster waiting to happen it also STINKS! Next year its fancy tree lot all the way. There is something to be said for a pricey tree. Its an expense worth spending. It's insurance that by Christmas eve if you light a match your entire house wont internally combust. While searching google for Christmas tree safety I spotted these legendary Christmas no-no's.

Maybe 2 is better than one?

Lately I have been faced with the pressing"when are you gonna have another little nipper' question. Like "politics, religion and breastfeeding" this is a touchy subject. I am of the mind that I may be happy with one baby. Among some crowds, the minute these words leak from my mouth I get a look like I just confessed to BBQing cats. Although the idea of G having a bro or sis to play with sounds nice, I tend to think that her parents are SOOOO cool she will never miss a thing!! Whats so bad about only children anyways?  However, lately I find myself looking at rooms for 2 kidlings. Symmetry is sort of my thing and so typically I would follow suit and have a family of 2 parents, 2 children, 2 pets, and a room with 2 kids beds.......These images alone are fixing to change my mind. Maybe 2 is better than one?

Elizabeth Dinkel

Costal Living

Kristen Buckingham

Domino 

KWID

Meet Fay

 

A few days ago I discovered the new blog “A MELANGE ET MOI”, which I really love to visit! Fay, the author is English, but is living in Florence, Italy, for the past two years (she was living in London and Paris before)! She is such a very nice person! And her blogposts are so delightful!

So I definitely wanted to introduce you to Fay!

The lovely Fay in the snow!

 

Fay is living in the historic centre of Florence… and this is the view from her kitchen window…..!

...in summer …and …

…in winter…!!!

 

Fay enjoys all the good things in life.

And she has a lot of passions as…

… art and history,

 

architecture,

literature, opera,…

 

Fay fully enjoys life and appreciates the little things in life as…

 

…baking a Christmas cake…

 

…and tasting the delicious French macarons…

 

or walking with her dogs in Firenze!

 

Writing her blog “ A Melange et Moi “, Fay tries to share with us her passions and daily delights!

Please , click on logo of the blog and discover the wonderful world of our new blogger colleague Fay!

                                                               

  Let me know your thougts! I (even Fay, I might think) would love to hear !

xx

All images : blog “A Melange et Moi”