Now with pictures.
First up, I took down the green and stripy white panels that hung on either side of the window. There is very little space on the left side and they were covering a lot of the window itself. It was symmetrical, but unbalanced.
Instead, I put up one panel of white linen to the left of the door. Clean, white and asymmetric. Still unbalanced, but beautiful, especially when the sun shines through it.
I haven't quite decided what to do with the left side, but the preliminary ideas include a string of lights, clear glass or opal glass ornaments, and crocheted or paper snow flakes. In any combination of the above, or something else entirely.
This photo was taken before the Autumn cleaning day. Everything is still a mess, but with fewer pieces of furniture, and in different places.
Isn't it gorgeous? The paint may be rubbed off in places, the door may not close completely any more, but it is a lovely piece of high quality workmanship and I adore it. Yesterday I won a Bauhaus style bed in black and chrome at an auction. It is going to look incredible next to this beauty.
Despite there being some problems with one of the rails, I loaded the bookshelves to figure out the shelf distances. As I had suspected, if I put my cookery books in there as well, I can't fit all my books on the wall. First, I must find another place for the cookery books, and then I'll cull the paperback books some more. I just have too many.
Since I want to switch to e-books for mystery, fantasy, sci-fi and thrillers anyway, I plan to reduce the number of books on paper for those genres. Then I'll have more space for paper books on historic research and crafts. I kinda like how all the shelves are full...
What's left to do is to fix the rail (the left one is lower than the other two), move the dining table under the shelf and put some candle sticks on top. The topmost shelf is too high for me to reach comfortably, it's meant to be a visual boundary and is reserved for things that look pretty.
The striped panels hanging in the kitchen door on the left are the white ones I removed from the window. They are too wide, too stripy and too stiff for this application, but they'll do for now. I first tried with another curtain that was one wide panel, but I didn't like that at all, two work so much better with access in the middle.
The current panels are more like a proof of concept, and they have proven that I would very much like that door back. Unfortunately, it has not been stored in the building, but destroyed, so I'll have to have one made when I do the big kitchen restoration project. Some day soon I'll sew two white linen panels that are not stripy, are softer and narrower, to replace these two. But not before I get the room in some kind of sensible order.