Our new house: downstairs

As you might know, we moved into our new house this summer. I’ve already shared pictures of our front- and backyard, our kitchen and the rooms upstairs. And now it’s time to show you the last part of our new house: downstairs. On this page I’m showing you our dining room, living room and downstairs toilet. We’re also creating an office downstairs but that’s not finished yet, so I’ll share those pictures later.

I’ve spent the summer arranging everything for our new house. We bought quite a lot of new furniture for the downstairs area and I arranged all the paperwork and insurances. It’s the first time we bought a house (we rented before) so there was a lot of new information coming our way. When you buy a house in the Netherlands you need an ‘inboedelverzekering’ (home contents insurance) for the interior and an ‘opstalverzekering’ for the exterior. We got a good home contents insurance from FBTO for a secure feeling. At FBTO you can arrange your insurance online and you can also report damage online 24/7. As we’re both very busy people, this is a big pro for us.

Continue to read to find out all about the downstairs area of our new house!

Dining Room

As soon as you walk into the dining room you see our new IXXI. It’s a real eye-catcher. I wanted an IXXI as you can easily create any kind of atmosphere as you like, and it isn’t as expensive as a painting. Besides, I often think that paintings are a bit old-fashioned and an IXXI is more modern. In the entire lower floor I wanted a touch of botanic, so I also wanted something on the wall in the botanical theme. I choose for this IXXI with a painting from the Maurtishuis collection. It’s ‘vase with flowers’ from De Heem. On the IXXI website you can choose from loads of paintings and prints, and you can also upload your own picture(s).
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The dining room table is made from one big piece of a tree trunk. We ordered it at Sterkur Design. The great thing from Sterkur is that you can costumize your entire table. So we got the choose the length that we wanted, and the table legs. Michiel, the owner of Sterkur design, delivered the table at a time that suited us and made sure it was set exactly where we wanted to.

To match the touch of botanic that I wanted downstairs, we bought green velvet chairs at Houtenmetaal.nl. We chose chairs without armrests to create a more spacious feel. Our chairs have a black frame that match with the table legs, but you can also order chairs with a golden frame. They were only €79,-, which I find very reasonable for dining room chairs.

We saw a similar lamp at Buutvrij Cafe in Tilburg, and really loved it. We thought it would match our interior as well so we asked Michiel from Sterkur Design (who also made our dining room table) if he could make a lamp for us. We could let him know which sizes we wanted and how many lamps we wanted with it. He also delivered the lamp and put it up for us.

Living Room

The downstairs area of our new house is divided in two, as the front door is in the middle of the house. If you go left from the hall you’ll enter the dining room and if you go right you’ll enter the living room. You can also go from the living room to the dining room via an open passage on the other sides of the room. In that passage we put up a roll of drawing paper and my very talented sister in law made a beautiful drawing on it for us.

We split our living room into two areas; an actual living room and a home office. As I said we’re still completing the home office, so for now I’m sharing a picture of the living room area.
We’ve got a green velvet sofa from Wehkamp. I really like it, but it was quite a hassle with ordering. We ended up waiting months before it was actually delivered and it took me many hours with costumer service to arrange everything. But now that we have it, I’m really happy with it!
I bought a set of two black tables to match our interior style at Karwei.
We’re still looking for something above the sofa, like a painting or a lamp as it feels quite empty now.

Toilet

In the hall with the front door you can also find the toilet. I still want to change the toilet as I’m not quite happy with how it is now. There’s a terracotta colored line of tiles, and that isn’t really my color. I thought of painting them black but that’s quite tricky. So what I’ll probably do is look for some nice decoration. I did in the meantime make it a bit nicer with matching hand soap, a candle and matches from Me&Mats. Their handsoaps are 100% vegan and paraben free. I love the label too. This line is called Love Perfect and the label has all kinds of sweet little drawings on it.
We also got the Me&Mats soap from this line in our kitchen.

This blog post is written in a collaboration, but all opinions are my own.