My Dreamhouse in Progress

A Koala and his tree

August 13, 2010

From very early in Atti’s life, we’ve been calling him a Koala bear. I even dressed him up as one last Halloween. As I wrote back then, it just seemed appropriate, and totally ridiculously sappy, that if Bear is called Bear, and I am called Tree, then our offspring would be a bear (or marsupial, whatevs.) that lives in a tree. Thus, Koala.

My sister is a really talented artist, usually working in watercolor but not exclusively, so I commissioned her to get to work making me some artwork of a koala in a tree. I told her I wanted a cross between a Japanese watercolor, and a Disney cartoon. I think she got it exactly right.

I was only expecting one picture of a koala on a tree branch, but she decided to do a series of four. The koala approaches the tree, he asks to be lifted up, the tree bends down to get him, and snuggles. It is so so sweet, and such a compelling symbol of motherhood.

I’ve been begging her to get an etsy shop ever since I got my hands on these. I know I’m not the only mom who would get misty at this image.

Filed Under: mama musings, My Dreamhouse in Progress

Brightening up with new pillows

July 26, 2010

I was never truly happy with the pillows I did the first time around. I ended up with too much brown in all of them, but the ones I loved the best ended up somehow being the exact color of the couch. You couldn’t even tell they were there sometimes. I needed a whole lot more contrast. Then a bunch of them got mangled after a particularly robust party, so I had the opportunity I needed.

This gray one is an exact copy of the pillow I made before, I just used gray fabric instead of brown. I actually ended up just stuffing the old pillow right inside of this one and zipping it up. I wanted something a little reminiscent of the stained glass windows of Frank Lloyd Wright, but with kind of a mod kick. They were super fun to make, which kind of surprised me. I’m not really an organic creator, I’m a planner. But to make these I had to cut out the colored squares, position them where I wanted them, and then measure the spaces between them as I went to fill in the background. It was a little fly by the seat of my pants and I loved it. It was like playing tetris.

The lighting in this house is still giving me trouble and I just could not get a decent shot of the blue pillow. I wanted to keep it solid but provide some texture, so I was looking around the internet for a tutorial on a pleated pillow. There were lots of great pillows that involved just pressed pleats, but with the wear and tear we put our pillows through, that would not have been successful for long. This was the tutorial I liked the best because all her pleats are sewn in and not going anywhere.

I used my own measurements because I wanted this pillow to be just a bit smaller than a pillow you’d use on your bed. Because we totally use these pillows to lay on while we’re watching TV, and I figured it would be better to just go with it than to fight the facts and let another set of pillows get bent into the shape we want them to be anyway.

I think I need one more set of pillows on this couch, and I can’t quite decide what color they should be. With how cool the blue and gray are together, I’m tempted to use the rose color, but I’ve already got a lot of that in there with the rug. The walls are green, so I don’t know about using more of that, but I’m worried that teal will be just too much. I’m going to have to think about this. Preferably with my feet up and my head on my new comfy pillows.

Filed Under: My Dreamhouse in Progress, Stuff I Make

House PAINTED!!

July 19, 2010

The last unpainted room in this house was the upstairs bathroom. We had friends coming over on a Tuesday, and we finished painting this room at about midnight on Monday. If it weren’t for this show offy streak in me, sometimes I wonder if I’d ever get anything done.

We kept it almost exactly the same as our last bathroom, except this time I didn’t shell out for really nice hooks. The only noteworthy part of this process was in hanging the towels.

I recently posted about how I used masking tape to hang a vertical row of pictures, so I thought today I’d show you how I used it to hang a horizontal row of towels.

This way is a little bit trickier because you have to keep the tape level and you don’t have the weight of the roll to do it for you. Masking tape is super flexible, so you have to be careful not to stretch it out of shape.

Start by taping one end how high you want the top of your line to be.

Line the tape up with the bottom of a bubble level, then slide the level along the wall so that only a few inches of level tape is lined up along the bottom, and press more of the tape to the wall. Keep sliding along the wall like this, making the tape level about a foot at a time, until you have your whole space marked off.

To me the real virtue of this method is that I can make as many marks as I want to make sure I get that space divided up properly between the items I need to hang, and then I just pull them all down when I take down the tape. No touching up, no trying to erase pencil marks, just ball them up and throw them away.

Now that I’ve got this trick in my back pocket, I may never need to buy a laser level at all.

Filed Under: My Dreamhouse in Progress, Tutorials

Atti’s finished room

July 16, 2010

We had two last unpainted rooms in this place, and after our weeks long painting marathon, I could not get back up and finish those last two rooms. Ug. Even the thought was exhausting.

But then I volunteered to host a get together with my friends from church, and my pride kicked in to get me over that last hump.

Since we’re renting this place, I didn’t want to buy more vinyl letters to just leave them behind again, so I couldn’t replicate my alphabet border. We also figured that it would be safer to just paint one color since we’re painting without permission and gambling with our security deposit.

Now that my baby is 2 1/2, a mobile over his crib really doesn’t do much for him, but I loved how it looked over the chair. We also had to upgrade to a much bigger bookshelf for my little bookworm.

After my successful hanging of a vertical line of pictures, I brought the masking tape back out to hang a horizontal row and it worked like a dream. I’ll have a post next week going into that in more detail.

It’s really exciting to me to see Atti responding more and more to his environment. He loves having his own space, and he’s so excited that he can play in here, and that it’s not just a room covered in stuff to step over on the way to the crib. Although I think he does miss having all his books in piles to chew on as his little heart desired.

Filed Under: Atticus, My Dreamhouse in Progress

How to hang a row of pictures.

July 9, 2010

So I had this long narrow section of wall in between a window in the back door. But I also had a set of three wooden panels that used to sit in three wall cutouts in the last house, so that it seemed like a match made in heaven. Until I set about trying to hang them.

I suppose if you had a laser level or something, it wouldn’t be terribly complicated, but laser levels require you to put holes in your wall and/or have a second person around to help, not to mention that I don’t own a laser level, so that wasn’t a good solution for me.

Typically when you need to mark a straight line, particularly a vertical one, you use a chalk plumb. It looks like a tape measure, but when you pull it out it’s a string covered with chalk dust, and the weight of the housing pulls the string to level. Then the chalk marks that straight line where you need it. But I did not want to buy a chalk plumb to hang three stupid pictures.

So then I had the brilliant idea of using a roll of masking tape as if it was a plumb.

I started the tape up higher than I wanted the picture, in the middle of the space I had, and then being careful to not let the tape attach in any other place, I let the weight of the roll of tape make a vertical line. Then I just smoothed the tape straight to the wall being extra careful to not bend it out of shape.

If your pictures need one hook, you can nail right through the center of the tape. I needed to use two hooks, so I measured out from the end of the tape, and then made sure it was level.

This was one of the first pictures I took in this new place, and my inexperience shows. The colors are all wonky, the lighting is horrible, and the shadows are making the panels look a little uneven when I obsess over it. But bad pictures notwithstanding, I was overjoyed to create this technique so that my OCD self can calm down about imperfect lines.

Filed Under: My Dreamhouse in Progress, Tutorials

2010 Year of Pleasures #24

June 15, 2010

I spent an entire day last week trying to track down lumber options to have my kitchen island custom built, and guess what we found this weekend?

It was absolute serendipity. We were making plans to drive an hour a way in a rented pickup truck to buy the materials we’d need, when Bear got a text with a picture of the kitchen island and the text, “at Big Lots” from a number he didn’t recognize. Turns out that someone he works with saw it and thought it would be good for the office.

Every kitchen island I looked at cost thousands of dollars. Even my custom made super simple one was going to cost $500. This one cost us $229 and a days labor. Now *this* is a kitchen I can work in.

Filed Under: My Dreamhouse in Progress, The Good Life, Year of Pleasures

Modern Art in Quilt Form

June 9, 2010

Having so thoroughly expressed my love for midcentury design, it should probably come as no surprise that my favorite painters come from the modern art category. I love the art nouveau work of Klimt, I love the whimsy of late Kandinsky, the color fields of Rothko, the cubism of Picasso, and of course, the clean lines of Piet Mondrian.

When I look at so many of those modern painters, but ESPECIALLY Mondrian, I think of quilts. Around the internet you can mind lots of quilters that were inspired by him, but I wanted to make a full on reproduction. His work just seems to beg for it.

I mean, look at this one! Or this! And of course, his masterpiece, Broadway Boogie Woogie.

The piece I chose to start with is called Composition: Light Color Planes with Grey Contours. Painted in 1919. I love the subtle differences in color, and the grays will work perfectly in my bedroom.

I printed a copy out months ago, and every few weeks I’d glance at it to try and figure out how I was going to construct the whole thing. Then the other day, in my procrastination marathon, I finally cracked it. I figured out how to take the image, size it to the finished size, break it apart to make 12″ blocks, and make each block eventually come together to complete the work of art.

It took two solid days of photoshop drafting, but I’ve got the pattern. Now it should just take me another year or two to get it made.

And somehow I’ve got to keep all the blocks straight in the meantime.

Filed Under: Grand Schemes and Other Plans, My Dreamhouse in Progress, Stuff I Make

2010 Year of Pleasures #22

June 2, 2010

I worry you guys are going to get so sick of my bragging.

Solid wood dresser, beat up pretty badly but super sturdy.

$15.

I think I have a Craigslist angel.

This was actually a total accidental bit of serendipity. I have been working for weeks to try to get the garage in enough order to actually be able to park our cars inside. But I couldn’t unpack the last of the boxes because we didn’t have any shelving to put the stuff on. And it was all stuff we actually use. Tools, messy craft supplies, stuff that I didn’t want to just leave packed in a big box to dig through every time I needed to hang a picture.

But I also didn’t want to pay for shelving in a house we’re renting.

During my daily perusal of Craigslist, I see this dresser and in the description the seller mentions using it in a garage since the finish is so beat up. Ding Ding Ding!! The perfect answer to my problem. For fifteen measly dollars. I hadn’t even considered getting a dresser. I just kept trying to consolidate and stack things more carefully. Now it’s like I have my own little tool chest, except instead of lug nuts, it’s full of metal screening and feathers.

Filed Under: My Dreamhouse in Progress, The Good Life, Year of Pleasures

The unveiling of Round 1

May 24, 2010

First of all, I feel compelled to apologize for the photos. Looking back through old pictures, it looks like it took me a solid year to figure out how to take pictures in the last house, and even then it was often a struggle. I’m totally starting from scratch here. I have no idea how to take pictures of most of these rooms without making them look like caves.

Anyhoo, ready for the poorly lit tour?

Here’s a pieced together view of the front room. It’s quite big, big enough for my little library room and a dining room with my enormous table, but I realize now that I have been forever spoiled by the super tall ceilings in the last house. Not having them has made painting a breeze, but the house feels so much smaller to me. Despite the fact that, thanks to the housing boom and then bust, we have some slightly embarrassing square footage at our disposal.

I debated and debated whether I should put the plate wall back along the staircase or put it somewhere more prominent. It was such a focal point of the last house and I always got so many compliments on it, it was hard to relegate it to a place where you could only see a part of it. But that is a whole lot of wall space to leave empty, so…I don’t know. One thing I do not regret is giving that mirror a more central location. That was one of my very first Craigslist scores, and I’m happy that it has a place of prominence here.

The family room is so big that I feel a sudden compulsion to buy all new furniture. I’ll be keeping my eye out for a bargain couch, but I usually hate entertainment centers and was so happy with this little low profile one. Maybe I can come up with some wonderful thing to put on the wall that will make it fit in better.

And the ridiculously big kitchen. The kitchen that is really too big to not have an island. I love the way the green looks with these cabinets, but I’m going to have to do something in this big fat space. I don’t think a big kitchen cart would be too hard to build. Luckily I have a local friend who’s a woodworker, so I’m going to put him to work. And then when we move to a different house where I don’t need a freestanding island, it can go outside and be the place I will one day successful germinate a seed.

Now for the upstairs…

Right at the top of the stairs is this loft room, and we’ve put our ancient TV here so that Atti can jump in his bouncer and watch Sesame Street while I type on the internet. The great thing about this space is that it essentially functions as Atti’s playroom. We can put most of the big play stuff up here, away from the adult spaces, and there are tons of closets upstairs to stash his toys. Our last house was starting to get seriously overwhelmed with all his equipment.

The cave-iest of the cave pictures, I actually love how our bedroom turned out. In our last house I chickened out on the paint colors and ended up with lavender walls with a brown accent wall. It was fine, but not at all what I was going for. This is what I was going for. Gray walls with a charcoal, almost black, accent wall.

Someday we’ll replace this ancient queen bed with a king (three cats, two tall people and a growing toddler had us finally seeing the need) and when that happens I’ll build us a headboard, get this bed off the floor and finally live like grownups.

We moved that great dresser I put in my studio last time into the bedroom, and now Bear and I each have our own dressers. It’s a luxury unlike anything I’ve experienced in my married life.

But still, with two dressers, a queen bed, a small jewelry cabinet and an endtable, we are nowhere close to filling up this room. And we never will. Honestly, sometimes I just don’t know what builders are thinking when they design these houses. What else do you need in a bedroom? Why put all the square footage here?

This house is way bigger than our last one, which is sometimes good (like the loft) and sometimes bad. During the housing boom there were several building companies creating these new developments, and they almost got competitive over who could build the bigger house. There is a lot of wasted space just to make things bigger. I’d love to have the master be half the size and have another usable bedroom. Or make the overall house a little smaller on the lot so that my neighbor and I don’t have to fight over where we put our trash cans. Truth be told, if a smaller option was available when we were looking I probably would have taken it. But overall, it’s a great house and we got so lucky to find it when we needed it.

Filed Under: My Dreamhouse in Progress, The Good Life

The neverending move

May 14, 2010

As much fun as I had at MaxFunCon, and I had a ton and do not regret it one iota, it has made this move last forever. I’ve still got boxes in the livingroom, the silverware that got left behind has still not shown up in the mail, and every single day I wake up, put on the smelly grubby clothes and lift the paintbrush over my head.

I have painted more than my share of houses before, and I am shocked at how different it is this time. This post pregnancy body of mine doesn’t have much in the common with the body I left behind. I move so much slower, I get aches and pains in places I never had before, I have to take things a lot easier. If I was doing this with the me from 3 years ago all the painting would be done by now. But in my current incarnation I’m only halfway done. It’s so stinking frustrating that I can’t pick up the pace.

By the end of the weekend we should (hopefully) be done with the bulk of the painting. We’ll still have a couple of bathrooms and Atti’s room, but we’ll have enough done that we can get settled. I can unpack the books and roll out the rugs and give everything a place and then I’m going to sit on the couch and not move for a couple of days. Probably with a heating pad on my old lady self.

Filed Under: Grand Schemes and Other Plans, My Dreamhouse in Progress, The Good Life