When you are an expat you usually think that your home is temporary. This translates into semi-furmished apartments, hidden boxes in the most unexpected places and the permanent feeling of unease when in comes to decor: what’s the point if I’m leaving? We’ve been living in the same apartment for almost five years, yet we still think that we might move soon. That’s why we are still decorating, adding personal touches  and reluctantly admitting that we might stay for a while. The last update was very simple but really nice, if I may say so myself. It’s a little DIY, it involves just one nail, a very special book and has completely changed our kitchen.

The moment I saw that adorable print ^ at the Slowrevolution Market in Madrid last December I knew I wanted to hang it in our kitchen. In particular I pictured it on top of our kitchen library. And that’s where it is now. We bought it from a cute and new shop called Bandide. They sell the most adorable children linen and a few prints. You can buy ours here. But how sweet is this little panda print?
Back to our kitchen library. We had this small, quite uncomfortable serving hatch that we never used. So we decided to fill it with our cookbooks. And there you go! A little improvised kitchen library that cheers up the room! Besides, it’s really handy since we have all our favorite recipes within reach! The problem now is that we need more space since we love cookbooks… Anyway, we wanted to add a few nice touches to this tiny space but we didn’t want to do any effort. We are leaving soon, remember? And we had just used a nail, a nail in a rented apartment?!?! Crazy, I know.
Flowers make everything better so we added a bunch of white buttercups. They are one of our favorite flowers and the beautiful white shade tones down the multi-color library. But then our friends gave us this book. Inspiration! Exactly what we needed.
It belongs to the foodies collection at Kikki.K, a wonderful shop that we are dying to visit in our next trip to London. It features recipe cards, notepaper, table place cards, stickers, labels, tags… It’s a dream. Expect to see more of it in our Food section. It will improve our recipes and table settings for sure! So what we did was take four cards that suited the color scheme of the Bandide print, make a quick trip to Ikea to buy four simple black frames… and voilà! Easy, rental-friendly kitchen art! We are quite happy with the result. We can move everything around, change it weekly if we don’t like it… But for now we love it!