I have to admit I am not a minimalist and the relocation from a row house with garden to a smaller flat has been a turning point of a new beginning. The stairs in the house had been a botheration for my heel spurs and at this stage of my life, I have to concede that getting old could be more exciting if we have to change our lifestyles and more time for ourselves,

Our former house with 4 bedrooms and about 50+ stairs had been huge for two "aging" people, hahaha. We lived there for 28 years. The cleaning had been too much for me so I had to pay a cleaning lady to do household chores. Since my daughter leads her own life now, we decided to relocate and take a smaller apartment with balcony overlooking the green fields which is more closer to nature and the National Park.

As we have no garden now, my husband is more delighted that he does not need to cut any pine hedges anymore as well as the 3 trees in the backyard, a tedious job. I didn´t do gardening in the backyard because of the slugs....so I had my container garden upstairs on the top terrace.

We have had plenty of walls in the old house and we have collected arts of all sorts, inexpensive tho...just as we like them. We have some copper etchings of a famous politician as well as other oil pantings and other memorabilia from our travels.

We also scoured the Saturday flea market as a hobby just to have fun and kill time as we both are already retired. Some of the arts displayed are personal like the "2 oils I did" below. The Lotus needlework had been painstakingly stitched and took me decades to finish.

Above is an un-finished oil painting I did in Spain, it is the window of my spanish neighbor with his jug of wine. The wine that he produced was very sweet and as he was a drinker, he probably got his diabetes from drinking too much of his wine and lost his legs....later on, he died of complications.

Sometimes when I find an art at the flea market, I make my own fabric passepartout, find the right 2nd hand frame and carefully mount the back cover like the above. Below, are portraits of my mom-in law, the left pencil is vintage and was drawn when she was a teen-ager and the one on the right had been a portrait gifted to her by my nephew @gremayo some years back.

What about the books...?

Well, as I have said our space is smaller now so I have to find ways to store parts of my books. I already threw away four boxes of collected magazines and my my books are lesser now. They are topics about Arts, crafting, DIY as well as cookbooks either bought or given by friends. I have old Ikea shelves that I hacked, got a wood from the hardware for the top cover which will soon be varnished in nut shade. I have no chance to put the books in the living room as the bookshelves there are also limited. Besides, we still have about 4 boxes of books that are still packed. My brother has been teasing me that when I get inside the CR and make my business, I might not be able to get out anymore, Lololol!

No place for more books as well as no more walls to hang the pictures in the living room.

All images taken and content originally written by @mers

Wishing you a lovely Monday and keep safe everyone!

GIF courtesy of @gremayo