Remember this chair?

This $20 Craigslist bargain from two years ago has new fabric covering the cushions and a new home in our bedroom. I sewed the cushions myself with a little help from my DC-BFF. The pillow was clearance West Elm.

Here’s a close up the fabric. I can’t remember how much I paid for it, but it was in the ballpark of $10 at JoAnn Fabrics. So let’s call it <$50 for the entire mid-century modern chair ensemble. What do you think?

*****

Last weekend we went to Delaware for my mother-in-law’s birthday. Instead of spending a gazillion dollars on a bakery cake, I spent most of Saturday baking one, and photographing the adventure with my new camera. It was fun, messy, and more exhausting than cake baking probably should be.

But the cake was so good! My blog idol swears by Barefoot Contessa’s Beatty’s Chocolate Cake recipe so I had to make that. It calls for oil and not butter which I prefer because I think it makes for a lighter, more “box-like” fluffy cake. I knew I wanted vanilla frosting and searched some food blogs before settling on this buttercream one. Both recipes were perfect and I don’t think I’ll ever seek out alternatives (since I bake a cake only maybe once a year).

My MIL must have liked it, because she confessed to me that she woke up at 1:30am and came down to the kitchen for an encore slice as a midnight snack. And then my husband ate a piece for breakfast the next morning.

*****

While I’ve been a wee bit enthusiastic about domestic-ness lately, I must admit when I came home today to a house freshly cleaned by my monthly cleaning ladies I was soooo happy. My zeal obviously stops short of scrubbing toilets.

My parents were freaking ROCK STARS while they were here. In a span of about five days, they probably worked 65+ hours each. They got up early every morning, I fed them tea and coffee, and they worked until 10pm, 11pm, or midnight every night. We didn’t go out to one single dinner, or see one single sight. Unless Fragers or Home Depot or the tulips in my front yard count as “sights.”

They completed (with minimal help from Andrew and me): crown molding, a custom mantle and built-in bookshelf, a new front door, a totally spruced up entryway and 2nd bookshelf, and a new faucet. And my mom weeded the crap out of my front yard.

Here’s a view of the living room with the mantle and bookshelf and crown molding.

Here is the bookshelf in the back of the house. Crazy story – apparently behind this shelf is an entire little room/closet! First we found a hole in the wood, which was weird enough, but then we realize the whole shelf is removable, so we took it out and found another 2 feet of house! It even had a light back there. So weird.

The new mantle and bookshelf are gorgeous, but I think the most dramatic change is the entryway. We used to have an ugly wood door, and a REALLY ugly wooden structure thing that separated the entryway from the kitchen and did a very good job of hurting your eyes and not much else. Now it’s gone! And we also put in a full glass panel front door. Let there be light! (Don’t mind that damned blue tape, I’m still not done painting everything.)

We hardly did anything upstairs, but I did finally paint and hang my little birdies. Now I get to wake up and look at them first thing every morning, and my husband is reminded what a dork he married. Win-win, really.

There are lots more pics over on flickr, including the supersecret hidden room, the new faucet, and the be-curtained guest bedroom.

Thanks again to my awesome parents for all their free labor, and happy birthday to my dad! Love you guys.

My photo collages, let me show you them:

This is our second bedroom, formerly seen in a terribly sad state here. As you can see, the lovely Lubi Daybed from CB2 is here, the walls are greige, the heinous vertical blinds are gone, and….that’s about it. But it already looks massively better than before, if still a bit boring.

I still need:

1. Curtain panels – I can’t decide between a funky print or or plain white/billowy. I just want them to be cheap and chic.
2. A rug or Flor tiles – If I go with plain curtains I might get a funky rug (maybe zigzag?), or funky curtains with a plain rug? Again, cheap and chic is the goal here, which is why I’m scouring craigslist daily.
3. Lovely things for the walls – but this can wait until I have some kind of color scheme.
4. Refinished furniture - I want to do something to make a few side tables a little prettier. And a dresser might be nice for storing extra clothes. Again, I’m waiting to come across a good bargain on something secondhand.

And then there’s the living room. We found a gently used Crate and Barrel sofa on craigslist for less than half the price of a new one just like it. As soon as this snow melts we can get it delivered, which will hopefully be before April. Honestly, I’m not super jazzed about chocolate brown (I’m more of a gray/pewter gal) but I think the price, shape, and quality are worth it in this case.

Clockwise from top left:

1. Flor Botanicals carpet tiles – I really love these but would like to wait for Flor to have a sale before I purchase them.
2. Spring Mint (the top, lightest shade) is the current paint color. Photo courtesy of this site.
3. Inspiration on a built-in bookshelf. My parents are building me one next month!
4. The plates on my wall. Chronicled at length in my archives.
5. The C&B sofa we’re picking up this weekend.

It’s possible I am the slowest, most contemplative home decorator ever. When I watch reality shows where entire homes are redone in a matter of 48 hours, it’s almost hard to believe that is even possible. I have lived here for 2.5 years and still can’t decide on whether or not to get an area rug, let alone what color or size, and even once that’s decided it usually takes me 6+ months to commit to spending the money on whatever purchase I have finally come to grips with wanting. So I hope my snail’s-pace progress is entertaining at least, and maybe in another 2.5 years those damn curtains will be picked out, purchased, hung, photographed, and displayed for all eternity on the blog.

Anyway, all the while I’ve been hanging on to this CB2 gift card, I’ve also been lusting after the lubi daybed. I even included it on my 2007 wishlist for Santa. Santa didn’t bring it, and I (cried a little but ultimately) moved on.

At the same time, our guest bedroom, the one room in the house we’ve done absolutely nothing to fix up, really just turned to a pile of crap. It didn’t start off so bad, with perfectly plain queen bed and some mish-mash furniture. But then that bed got an extra box spring (discarded from the master bedroom) and became “triple bed” (an adventure for all who dare to sleep on it!) and everything in the room became a landing spot for junk, mostly sports equipment. For residents and guests alike, it was the least welcome room in the house.

Armed with the motivation that a new year brings, last weekend we spent a good day and a half cleaning out the room to the bare bones. I sold the bed and the extra box spring on craigslist, and… I’m guessing you can tell where this is heading… placed an order for the beloved lubi daybed!

Swoon. It will be delivered sometime next week.

I chose the rich chocolate color, not that I don’t like the orange but it just doesn’t go with anything else in the house. Now I need help finishing the room though: curtains, paint, a rug (perhaps Flor tiles). Before I was thinking about a very pale pinkish purple but I’m not loving that anymore. We could always stick with greige, the same color as the rest of the rooms on the 2nd floor. Or something else. I’m looking for curtains or a rug that will inspire me first.

So if you have any ideas or inspiration let me know. Even better if whatever you suggest is being given away for free on craigslist, because unless I have a gift card, that pretty much how I roll.

Janet: “Hello sir, are you Mr. Rasmussen of the tracking and polling company?”

Mr. Rasmussen: “No, I am the former Prime Minister of Denmark.”

Janet: “Well, I am quite embarrassed now. Nice to meet you.”

And then I ran away.

What kind of idiot do you have to be to mess up small talk THAT BADLY? My kind, I guess.

**********

Did I mention yet that Andrew and I bought a bed earlier this month, one night after we had been out drinking and decided it was a good idea to come home and spend $500 at crateandbarrel.com? The bed finally arrived on Friday and today we put it together. After years of being conditioned by horrible IKEA furniture construction, this was remarkably, unbelievably simple.

I finally love my bedroom. As with everything in the house, it’s not quite finished. We still need to hang a few wedding photos, and I need to sew a new cushion cover for the chair, but it’s oh-so-close and I want to show it to you now.

First, take a peek at what it looked like a year ago, when it was part green and part leftover blue.

And here’s how it looks today. What do you think?

On that note, it’s time to go try out the new bed…Night y’all

But I’ll still tell you about it, even though I can’t get that horrible news out of my head.

Remember back when I was gung-ho about getting the house in order and I took on a 21-Day House Makeover that lasted about a week? Well, this weekend I tried to pick up where I left off. It might take me 200 days to do my 21-Day Makeover (which, I KNOW, is totally missing the point) but I’m doing the best I can.

On Saturday, I finally gave up the idea that we were going to finish painting the house by ourselves and I hired help. Probably my best home-related decision yet — they did such a great job, and I didn’t have to climb a single ladder or clean a single paintbrush or touch a single piece of dreaded blue tape. From the bottom of our first floor stairs to the top of our third floor stairs we have a lovely coat of greige walls and shiny white trim.

While the painters were busy upstairs, I started on my plate hanging project, which I first blogged about in January. And oh, it was such a fun project for about 24 hours.

I started by cutting out paper the size of the plates and hanging them on the wall in a mock-up.

Then I glued these DISC plate hanger things on the back of each plate, following the directions with diligence and care…

Then I waited 24 hours for everything to dry, and started hanging them on the wall in place of the paper cutouts.

So far, so good, right? I got them all done but one, because the glue disc fell off when I picked it up.

WHICH SHOULD HAVE BEEN A SIGN.

But no, I perservered! Maybe it was just a fluke.

Look! Almost done! Nine out of ten!

And then a few hours later, I heard a crash. I knew what it was before I even stepped in the room.

Needless to say, I took the rest of the plates down. I really don’t know what to do next. I’ve already nailed nine holes in my wall and glued up all my plates (apparently with faulty glue). But my pattern doesn’t really work with just nine plates. And I really don’t want any more to fall and break! I’m definitely going to ask for a refund for my glue discs (I mean seriously, WTF?!) but beyond that I don’t know what to do next. Pottery Barn is no longer selling the plates so I can’t buy a replacement.

Ugh, what would you do?

Up next on the house: Hopefully the last of the IKEA furniture assembly, and hanging more things on the walls, but nothing that involves glue. Because I’m kinda mad about that right now.

So! I would like to talk about the only remaining clean-slate, plan-free room in the house: the 2nd bedroom. Also known as, where you will sleep if you come stay with me. Didn’t you know you were invited? Well, most of you, at least.

Anyway, here is what the room looks like now. It’s not pretty.

Here’s my thinking. Every other room in the house will be painted either robin’s egg blue, light gray, or dark gray. I chose these colors to give the house a modern and clean feel, even though the house is about as far from modern as possible. (It’s 99 years old!)

But I think I need to make the 2nd bedroom room a little warmer, a little more feminine. What do you think of PINK!? Don’t be scared, I don’t mean cotton candy pink or fuschia or anything. I just mean a nice, crisp, lavender-y pink. With white, brown, yellow, gold, and/or green accents. My inspriation is this:

Just thinking out loud now, here are the steps I think I need to take:

1. Clean and conquer! Not all of the things currently stored in here need to stay in here. The room is actually quite small so I want to keep the storage items elsewhere as much as possible. Uhhh, not that we have room elsewhere, but that’s another story.
2. Paint. I am leaning toward a color like Benjamin Moore Pink Innocence because I’m so inspired by Nicole‘s home.
3. New curtains! I have some crisp white IKEA ones (master bedroom rejects) that could look really nice in here. And they’re already paid for.
4. Give the chair a new look. I’m thinking white glossy paint (like the famous yellow sofa) and new cushion covers. Maybe using the Amy Butler fabric in the photo above?
5. Make the bed a focal point. The room is so small that the bed is going to be a focal point no matter what, so I should make it a good one. It needs some bedding (even if I keep the quilt in here) and a headboard.
6. Something on the walls. But I have NO IDEA what! I am totally stumped here.
7. One last thing. I think I need a nice little nightstand area with a small table, a lamp, and some books or a vase.

What do you think? Am I on the right track? Is my husband going to veto a pink room? Do I care? (kidding, love you honey, but you got your HDTV, I can have a pink room!) Anyone want to come over and help?

**********

On Friday I am a guest editor over at the fabulous site Rare Bird Finds. Nic introduced me to the site a few years ago and I was addicted from Day 1 (just read their About page and you will love them too, I promise!) Please head on over and check out my Fab 5 Friday finds. And if you feel compelled to purchase any of the items for me, I will immediately issue you an invitation to stay in the Lincoln 2nd bedroom. But, uh, you’ll have to paint.

Day 3: Yesterday was a little harder because I was feeling extremely tired after a day full of meetings. I got home and wanted to plant my butt on the couch. Instead I cooked dinner with the husband. Thankfully, cleaning up our fajita-making mess took almost half of my hour. The other half I vacuumed and measured the upstairs room for my cool floor plan.

What do you think? Right now, the room looks like it belongs in an episode of Clean House. Plus, it’s just about the weirdest shape you can possibly imagine for a room. I need some serious help. I think this floor plan will help me make it useful (exercise room), organized (desk, storage & shelving), and cozy (sofa/daybed).

Day 4: Fessing up. Haven’t done my hour today and it’s 11:48 pm. In fairness, I went straight from work to hanging out with friends for the Project Runway finale. (Speaking of which, I was a tad disappointed with the winner, were you?) And now I’m blogging. I did buy a new lampshade for my hand-me-down lamp, though! And made a decision about the bed I want to buy from Crate & Barrel. Trust me, when I made Rule #3 it’s because I knew I could easily fritter away my hour on buying things, or thinking about buying things and later changing my mind. And then changing it back again only to find out said thing is now sold out. And on and on.

So tomorrow I’ll hop back on the wagon and I promise to do much more than two hours this weekend. What fun is life if you can’t sit around talking fashion and eating Sweet Tarts with your girls?

The bathroom walls before were a glossy pale blue. The color wasn’t horrible, but it didn’t have any personality and whoever (whomever?) painted it last must have been drunk because the quality was atrocious. I had to patch several holes in the wall.

Here is the after photo (more on flickr). It took me about five hours start to finish, including scrubbing the floor (gross!) and taping (hate).

Even though it’s dark — windowless and under the stairs — it just feels so much more rich and regal now. I love it! Next I need to get a new mirror, towels, and art for the walls, but that’s the FUN part.

This post is about more than my new intimate relationship with my toilet, though. Recently I’ve been inspired by reader Jen‘s 21 Day Makeover project. Her three week makeover focused on writing for one hour each day in pursuit of eventually quitting her job to write full time. I totally relate to her need to stop talking about her goals and start acting on them in a thoughtful and measurable way.

I have decided to do a 21 Day Makeover to make my house into the home I want it to be. Instead of talking about it, blogging about it, reading design blogs, and perusing catalogs and stores, I’m going to take action to make my house clean, organized, polished, and well-designed. I want to hit the 6-month mark of homeownership and feel proud of our home and the progress we’ve made on it.

I set some rules:

1. I will work on the house for one hour every day for 21 straight days.
2. “Work” can be anything from cleaning, painting, de-cluttering, vacuuming, organizing, hanging curtains, sewing pillows, working in the yard, anything!
3. “Work” can NOT be shopping online or in stores for things for the house. I know I will need to do this but it doesn’t count toward my daily hour.
4. I am definitely allowed to drink wine while working on the house!
5. I will hold myself accountable by taking photos of the various projects and documenting them on flickr and here on the blog. I started a flickr photoset and I’ll add to it every few days.

If anyone out there reading wants to join me in a 21 Day Makeover just let me know. It can be about exercise, eating right, making art, anything. March 22nd here I come!

(click photo for larger image)

Unfortunately, the neatly made bed and lack of dust bunnies aside, my bedroom needs some serious work. Here is my tentative plan:

1. Commit to the green paint (or not) and finish painting. When my mom was here we painted the room bright green, and then, upon realizing it was radioactive, repainted slightly less bright green. But we stopped after three walls because I needed to dismantle the horrid vertical blinds before we could finish. I’m embarrassed to admit that was in November, and as of February the vertical blinds are still up and a quarter of the walls are still a faded blue. So I can’t finish this until I deal with #2 below, but I also cannot seem to fully commit to the green. Help!

2. Burn the hideous vertical blinds and replace them with something nice like curtains. The blinds have got to go, there’s no question about it. I’m considering replacing them with some floor-to-ceiling curtains over some sheers. IKEA has a nice light gray curtain I’m digging. Our windows face the street so we must have some privacy.

3. Get a headboard for the bed. I’m imagining a simple upholstered headboard and have been scouring craigslist for the perfect find. I refuse to pay a thousand bucks for one. The search continues.

4. Bring the yellow couch into the 21st century. Oh, the yellow couch. Mustard-y, velvet-y, grandma-y goodness. I plan to moderize it with a coat of glossy white paint on the wood frame and some modern throw pillows in a fabric like this Amy Butler beauty.

5. Hang some art on the walls. Perhaps wedding pictures? Perhaps some homemade (but not homemade-looking) paintings? I’ll have to decide this at the end.

Do you think I’m on the right path? Should I be given an honorary MFA in Interior Design or be forced to hand the reins over to a professional?

I even arranged my citrus all pretty like on my plate, see?

(This is me, worshiping my food, adoring my food. Not abusing my food. Not devouring my food. Repeat 25 times and your hunger will go away, or something.)

Hey, speaking of plates, I need your help on a décor issue. A Pottery Barn catalogue arrived about 2 weeks ago and thus commenced a love affair with these plates.

Aren’t they perfect? The only way I could adore them more if is Martha Stewart made them herself. Alas, I don’t know exactly what I want to do with them, other than I’d like to hang them on the wall in my dining room. I could do what the lovely folks at Pottery Barn did, and hang them in a kind of circular pattern around a larger focal point. See Exhibit A. (Image courtesy Pottery Barn)

Or, I could use these plates to make a larger, uhhhh, plate blob of many plates. Don’t let the word blob deter you, I adore this blob! See Exhibit B.

Or, I could do anything else! Straight rows and columns. A nice rectangle. None of the above. Fill in the blank.

What would you do? (Here is where I would insert a lovely little poll, but my blog can’t handle the code for it so instead you must vote the old-fashioned way. Heads down, thumbs up. Or, just in the comments. Thanks!)