Hello, hi! Long time no see! I’m back. And just like that… it’s summer again. Our summer here in the Netherlands started off with lots of wind and rain, but suddenly, this past week the weather has changed into real sunny summer weather, which makes me so happy. The sun is out almost every day. I have to really keep a close eye on the garden now, especially the plants that are in pots. So I’ve been on watering duty every night when the sun starts to go down.
My flowers have been loving the sun as well. I make these tiny little bouquets for our bedroom. This one has cosmos and zinnias in it. I’ve also been growing sweet peas in different colors which has given me many flowers as well. The flower growing this year has been a success overall. The only flower I’ve been wanting to grow but haven’t been able to is the dahlia. I had about 10 dahlia bulbs and had started them in the greenhouse in early spring. After I planted them out they just got munched up by slugs and have not been able to grow since. I’ve been a bit sad about this, but I guess I am just going to try again next year.
Because this garden is my first garden ever, and we planted it only last year, I am always on the lookout for interesting plants. When I’m out and about I keep on eye on the greenery around me and I spotted these pretty alliums last week which were still in bloom. I’ve googled these and they appear to be the ‘Allium Sphaerocephalon’ (a very fancy name!). I will look for some bulbs and plant them so I’ll hopefully have some of these in my garden next year.
Our cat Mr. Pietersen has been enjoying the sun as well. When the weather was still rainy, he would come up to the first floor each night and sleep in front of out bedroom door. Now, with this sunny weather, he loves staying outside at night. And now kind of miss him in front of our door…
Our renovation has been moving along the last couple of weeks. We got a really nice and smooth concrete floor (which was so much better then the bumpy, uneven dusty mess it was before), and then it got ‘ruined’ again with underfloor heating pipes. They will probably close the floor back up on Monday though (yay!). For those who don’t know, my husband and me bought a house a couple of years ago which had to be top-to-toe renovated. We started the renovations upstairs and worked our way down to this ground floor. This ground floor has been the biggest project so far. The flooring and electricity needed to be redone completely to bring the house up to today’s standards. We already got new windows and frames last year (so the patio doors in the first picture are also new!). I think I will make a separate post of this ground floor reno in the near future.
With the floor in place, I thought it was time we started looking for flooring. We went to a store called Kwantum and picked a couple of different options. This one here we really liked but it’s glue-on PVC and we’ve decided we wanted the click PVC, which can easily be installed by ourselves (so much cheaper!). After our visit to this store I went online and found a really good offer for a click PVC floor on the website of Leen Bakker. So we ordered a floor from there that same night (since the offer was expiring at midnight). It was kind of scary to order without having seen the floor in real life, so I’m kind of nervous to receive the floor. I looked at some Insta pictures of someone who had this floor and really liked it, so it must be okay, right?
This is me in the middle of taking pictures for my Vinted account. On Vinted you can sell your clothes online, and I’ve been selling lots of my old clothes because this year I have also bought lots of new things. I’ve kind of switched up my style a little bit, so out with the old, in with the new!
