love is blonde

A few updates from the housewife files…(nevermind that I am not at all a housewife)

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?

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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.

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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.

Although I’ve reached my limit (amazingly) of thinking or talking about my house, or more specifically, painting another square inch of it, I want to show you some of the photos of last week’s renovation extravaganza. I would make a terrible PR agent, as I’ve already stepped on my own “news” by posting these on flickr and twitter days ago. Good thing I never plan to work in PR…

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.

So, you may have heard it snowed here in DC. Just a few inches feet yards stories of snow. Just a few six days stuck at home with nothing but bread, milk, and booze purchased in verrrrrrrry long lines at verrrrrrry crowded grocery stores. All of this time has provided me lots of opportunities to A. decorate my house; B. think about decorating of my house, and C. mess around with Picasa to compile photos related to decorating my house.

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.

For our wedding, which was approximately leather, cloth, and paper anniversaries ago (next up: fruit & flowers…sexxxay!), we got a very generous gift card from CB2 from my aunts and uncle. It’s been in my possession ripening ever since. I simply hate the idea of wasting a gift card on something I don’t really love. I will hoard one until I can spend it on the PERFECT item. It’s a disease, really. I do it with spa gift cards too; I always figure I should wait to get a massage until I am REALLY sore from something. Except how often does that happen? Never. It’s quite dumb.

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.

Last week’s inauguration extravaganza gave me plenty of opportunities to embarrass myself in front of kind-of important people. Case in point: I was working at a private reception for a client at at the Embassy of Denmark one afternoon and found myself in a small talk situation with a tall man whose nametag read “Rasmussen.” Because my husband is a pollster, the first thing that popped into my mind was this company.

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.

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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