I’ve been using these $15-back-when-I-bought-’em folding chairs from Target as dining room chairs for a long time. Say, four years now? They’re fine and all, but eventually they break, and now I’m down to three, plus two sets of random chairs that definitely don’t go together (projects. of course. sigh). So when I volunteered to host a foodie meetup dinner at my house for twelve, I took a look at my seven mismatched chairs and decided they would not do.
Off to Craigslist.
I was washing dishes this morning and realized this is the view from the kitchen. It made me happy.
When you consume massive amounts of design/homegood blogs on a daily basis, it’s a little like watching TV and absorbing the advertising. I saw this post on bud vases on Apartment Therapy last week. Over the weekend I was at a BevMo and saw this tiny bottle of vodka near the register. Brain immediately made a connection. Now if I can only get someone over here to drink the stuff, then I too can have a darling tiny blue bud vase. (For the record, the vodka was $5.99 - the same price as the AT vases, but naturally getting the vodka too increases your “score!” factor.)
It is true: Safeway flowers suck. These tulips lasted two days, though I had been careful to select a bunch that had not yet opened. But while their visit was short, I did appreciate them dropping in. I could write something philosophical and justify this post for the “living mindfully” tab, but I’ll just say this instead: It’s important, on a multitude of levels, to bring living things into the home.
I am in the process of joining a CSA that will put a bouquet of flowers in my box for an extra $6 a week. I’m thrilled.
I had a dinner party at my house Friday night. It was awesome. As I was desultorily cleaning up Saturday morning, I realized I’d learned a few things.
First is not why you should have a party at your house, but why you should have said party on a Friday rather than a Saturday. The reason? If you have it on Saturday, you will spend all day cleaning and prepping. By having it on Friday, I had to split my cleaning and prepping among the weeknights prior, and I had to be smart about it because I had limited time and energy after a full day at work. I spent maybe three hours getting ready - compared to the eight or nine I would have spent on a Saturday. Nobody at your party can tell the difference, so why not take the less effort/time route? Plus, when I woke up Saturday, my house had been dusted, vacuumed, and all decks swabbed, so I had no Saturday chores! I had the whole day to myself!
Second, here are good reasons to have the party at your house instead of your friends’:
If you are not on a Home Depot email list, you should be. I’m on the gardening list and once a month they send me tips and coupons related to all things yard, garden, patio, and houseplant related. December’s coupon was a two-for-one amaryllis offer. So off I went to get two huge Red Lion bulbs in cute little fancy copper pots for something like seven bucks including tax. They’ve been a long time blooming, but they’re finally here, and aren’t they gorgeous?
When you are a kid, your grandmother’s square, silken scarves are a staple of make-believe play. As a grown-up, unless you have swan neck that looks fab with a square scarf artfully tied ’round it, these fellows tend to fall to the bottom of your drawer. I have tons of long woolly scarves that I use daily, rapturously, in the winter. Rayon, polyester, acrylic, and silk squares? Not so much. They’re not warm enough for winter, and in the summer I don’t want anything at all around my neck. Nor am I cool enough to pull off this look.
But I love my little orange and yellow ballerina scarf. It pains me to only see it twice a year when I plumb the depths of my box o’ ball caps (one accessory I do not want to rescue at all). I also have beautiful red scarves I bought in Barcelona, when I got a short spiked “European” hair cut and tried to pretend I did have a neck worthy of the artful scarf. What to do with them?
My daily ritual of tying back the thermal curtains on the south side of my apartment gave me the answer. The silver ribbon I’d been using was leaving crinkled wrinkles in my drapes. A soft fabric tie would be preferable. And what kind of decorative soft fabric did I have in the house…?
Sometimes the weak light of a rainy Saturday morning is as beautiful as all get out.
Someday I will be in my own home for the holidays, and I will decorate to my heart’s content. Maybe I will finally have a tree again! Until then, a girl gets her cheer on in what little ways she can. Greens and rosemary tend to still be alive when you come back from your cross-country trek, so they’re a good bet. And what good would December be without the strange little Christmas tchotchkie that have made regular appearances at your Christmases since before you can remember?
May your weekend be happy and bright, and full of things that warm the heart if not your toes and fingers!
I have no idea what I’m going to do with this Jonathan Adler knockoff I stumbled across, but it made me laugh a little, so I bought it. Maybe eBay it? I wish it had been the bowl - that’s my favorite
I’ve been without internet for a few days, so I have a backlog of posts to make. Coming up: Chocolate chip cookies with fresh mint leaves!
They will never let me be a famous design blogger because in my eagerness to share what I’ve been doing on a particular day, I frequently fail to properly stage my photographs. That, and ’cause I keep posting food…
Today I finished up some pillow covers for a friend that have been sitting undone on my dining table for the better part of two weeks. They’re nice. They have envelope closures and everything. Thus, I will blog them before they go away.
If living in a drywall box sans any architectural consideration at all, with beige carpet and popcorn ceilings, offends you as much as it offends me, chances are you chose to live in an older building. Chances are, as well, you’re liable to freeze to death this winter. Ha, ha, ha….ah, the price we pay.
Myself, I live in a hundred year-old Victorian with huge single-paned windows all over the place. I got great light. I got lousy heat retention. And you know what? Flannel pants, sweaters, and fleece slippers only go so far. Sometimes, you just need to make the place warmer.
Obviously replacing your single-paned windows with double-paned low-E new ones is beyond your control as a renter. As is new blown-in insulation or upgrading to a heat pump with a higher SEER . But there are certainly some ways to be warmer this season that won’t pad your landlord’s property value while bleeding you dry. Personally, I’m not only living on a budget, but I’m also planning to move soon - so my strategies need to be really cost-effective.
First up? Shrink wrap those bleedin’ windows!
This acrylic cover from an architectural model makes a great coffee table. The boss usually reuses these, but there are no models coming down the pipeline that will have a square base, so he gave it away rather than have it take up space at the office. Lucky me. It’s not my usual taste in furniture, but I am attracted to the fact that it looks like some ridiculously priced piece of nonsense from DWR.
This is how I craft: I break out a bottle of gold leaf and look for something to attack. I spent five minutes rummaging around, and there they were: (more…)
Carnival glass is one of those things that’s so bad it’s good. More often than not, the pieces are tacky as all get out. They’re kept around the house either out of nostalgia or because you’ve a fascination with baroque, overdone vintage. My candy dish has survived Goodwill because it reminds me off all the pieces my grandmothers owned. I’ve never found a single use for it until this week. I’m hosting a pumpkin carving party Saturday and I think this assemblage will look very fine indeed on the buffet. The iridescent amber is just right for fall, and while the shape is too awkward for many uses, it holds caramel apple lollipops perfectly.
I found this excerpt in one of my journals, dating back to 2004. It amused me so much, I thought I’d repost it.
I saw a bright orange six drawer tool chest in the sale papers today. As I’ve nothing more than a folding table heaped with various powertools on the back porch, I’ve been considering investing in some kind of appropriate container once I get settled on the other side of the country. Tabletop belt sanders aren’t the objects de arte I had in mind for my apartment. With enough bravado, do you think I could pass off a tall tool chest as indoor furniture? I already have a bright blue retro laminate dresser from a modern furniture store. I’m seriously thinking of getting a funky tool box and putting the TV on top of it in the living room. It’s that or get a second dresser. Clothes dressers don’t have those handy shallow top drawers, though, and neither do they come with ball-bearing drawer rollers, which are essential with heavier tools. Add another item to the list of things I must invent and market myself: tool chests for people who have no sheds, garages, basements, or workshops. Tool chests that look good in the hallway! Tool chests to fool your guests! Do I hear an “Amen, sister”?!
Do you think the above bright blue Clarke chest could be adequately worked into a living room scheme? Could it be coated with fun wood veneer à la Todd Oldham? Either way, I’d be a-okay with having a kitchen counter that looked like the red workspace on this page.
All ye of small spaces, what do you keep your tools in?
Seeing all the beautifully colored abodes over at AT’s Fall Colors Contest makes me nostalgic for the first apartment I had in Tucson. This blue was perhaps the most thrilling thing I’d painted in my life, and paired with a bright brick red oriental rug and a cream slipcovered loveseat, I would happily spend hours nestled in my tiny living room. Color had never made me so happy as it did when the second coat of that paint dried.
I have much admiration for anyone doing the Fall Cure this year, and I have been quite the lurker spying on everyone’s progress. The end of September also marks the wrap up of Adornment Month.
Amy Butler and Michael Miller fabrics, bought by the yard on Ebay. If only the Belle Coriander print on the far left were on bark cloth or other upholstery weight fabric, I would so be doing the side chair in it.
The best thing about a long weekend is Getting Stuff Done. Amidst projects and cooking and a quick trip to Napa Valley, there was the ceremonial Changing Of The Sheets, which is supposed to happen once a week but doesn’t always. This gorgeous silver and fuchsia set came back from India in my luggage, but was waiting for the perfect weekend to debut. The bliss of not having to go to work today seemed a ripe reason to tear open the packaging and luxuriate in the super-saturated color of it all.
I don’t know what has come over me lately, but I can’t leave Craigslist alone. Maybe it’s the weekly Craigslist roundup at Apartment Therapy that only seems to list $200+ items only in San Fran proper that has me daily trawling the more local South Bay page for more affordable items. Small successes, like scoring hot lime green Crate and Barrel bentwood chairs (for A, now in his apartment), or a vintage dresser for $15, keep me going, like mild fixes. I currently have four (4, count ‘em) Craigslist items in various stages of undress. Which is to say, I’ve procured them, plan to refinish them, and haven’t quite finished any of them. I was going to wait until the items were finished, then publish a play-by-play of their revival and rebirth. But that’s going to take too long. Plus, I could use some encouragement to finish what I start. Maybe if I get some admiring comments, the admiration will become my fix instead of new pieces, and I’ll attack my refurbishing with renewed gusto.
First posted “project”….one that I’m not even bothering to refinish at the moment. The fourth item acquired, it’s last in line for refinishing, and it’s perfectly usable (and photogenic) without the new coat of stain I have planned for it. It’s really similar to this (made in Yugoslavia just the same!) but was aquired for 8% of the cost.
Everyone always blogs pictures of their apartments when they’ve immaculately cleaned all surfaces and arranged things just so. So I decided to be anti-that. Here’s the dining room in its usual disarray.
Not to mention taking pictures is an excellent way to procrastinate doing CAD work.
This pic does remind me what a luxury space is. I am paying far too much for my apartment, it is in far too shabby a condition, and the landlord is far too indifferent….but I’ve got space, which a lot of people in this town don’t have.
I find it hard to express just how badly I want to buy the whole house and renovate it. It’s got such good bones.
