My Dreamhouse in Progress

Finished again!

September 11, 2009

I’ve been on a finishing roll, and I finally managed to finish a simple project I’ve been dragging around since 2001. Way back then we went on my dream vacation to Rome. In November even, so I got to wander around my dream city when it was rainy and crisp and glorious. We stayed in this little hotel right on the edge of an enormous park and scoured the city looking for all the artwork I had learned about in my Western Civ classes. Bear still teases me about my obsessive fixation with Bernini.

While strolling through one piazza or another, we came across a few booths with artists selling their work and snapped up this lovely little watercolor.

I love this piece, but the only problem is that it is such an odd size I could *not* find a frame for it. I looked at getting it custom framed but it’s just so very expensive and we have never been in a position where I could make that a high priority, so it’s been sitting, carefully, in the bottom of my work in progress drawer, only getting out when it was time to put it in a box and move to the next house where it went back in it’s drawer.

Whenever I’m at a thrift store, I always scout through the frames, hoping I’ll find something that just happens to be right. When I was up in Utah I found something that still isn’t perfect, but is close enough. It’s a few inches too long, and I wish it was just a little bit taller, but I’ll deal with the extra white space if it means I get to actually look at it instead of just squirrel it away.

It was a light blond wood, so I gave it a good sanding and painted it with Folk Arts enamel paints. This worked great! You get a good hard cure so it’s WAY stronger than acrylics, but you can save yourself the trouble of busting out the spray paint.

This hangs in my studio just above my ironing board, and I’m wondering how long it will be before I burn something because I’m too busy staring at it. It was those two tiny people walking through the arch that really captured my imagination, and it brings back such sweet memories of walking through an ancient city hand in hand with my love.

Filed Under: Mushy Love Stuff, My Dreamhouse in Progress, Stuff I Make, The Good Life

Design Book

July 31, 2009

I can’t believe I haven’t gotten around to sharing this yet. This is one of those things that’s been in the back of my mind for years now, but I kept thinking that I had to have covered it already. I couldn’t seem to find anything, so I figured I better just get it off my chest already.

Back when we first bought this house, we knew that every single room needed fairly significant renovations. The layout of this place is an open floorplan, so not only did every room need serious work, but each room had to work together and I could not go through systematically one room at a time. I had a million decisions to make and they all had to be made together.

At the same time, we were going from an apartment to our first house, so we had A. LOT. of furniture to buy. On a serious budget. Which meant that I needed to be prepared to pounce on any bargain I found and couldn’t waste time by running home to take measurements. And garage sales aren’t really known for their generous return policy.

I had to make myself some way to keep track of every decision I was trying to make, so I started by making myself a cute little book. I gave every room in the house a few pages, and separated them with little tabs.

The first order of business was coming up with a color scheme. Mine was inspired by a peacock feather (remember this was over two years ago. I was totally original at the time. :wink:). Each room on the main floor uses a combination of these colors in different proportions. Over the past two years, these swatches must have gotten switched. My walls are not navy and my ceiling is not pink. It’s the top group.

I included fabric swatches I really liked, and pictures of furniture that I saw online or in magazines so I could keep my eye out for a cheaper option. I also included complicated measurements for trouble spots I had to work with.

I also made lists of specific items I was looking for, and what their maximum sizes could be, for each room of the house. It’s a little impossible to keep track of all the furniture you’re comparison shopping for when you really need Everything.

I carried this book with me everywhere for the first year we lived in this house, and once I didn’t have to consult it every day I stuck it in the glove compartment so that I had it around if I needed to double check the size of that one niche that still needed a vase.

This book was such a serious lifesaver. I seem to be allergic to making returns – it’s hard enough for me to get out the first time, let alone a second – and this simple book saved me from making any missteps and saving my sanity over that long, stressful, renovation process.

Filed Under: My Dreamhouse in Progress, Stuff I Make

Paper Mache Decor

May 29, 2009

Like most homes in the west built past 1980, my house is filled with all kinds of random niches. These thing just plague homes I’ve seen through California and Utah, I don’t have too much experience with new homes outside those two states, but within my experience I can’t tell you how many people I know struggling to find something to fill the big random hole cut into their wall.

For the past two years I’ve been looking at a collection of vases and other tchotchkes, but my problem was always scale. At it’s tallest point this niche is four feet high. A vase that big is going to run me $100 easy, and that’s just for one. Since this isn’t the house we plan on staying in forever, the thought of moving in a few years and being stuck with $500 worth of 4 ft tall vases was really unappealing to me. But so was a big fat empty cubby hole in my wall.

I’m always inspired by solving a problem, but I have no idea where the impetus for this project began. I hadn’t seen anything that looked like this, it just seemed to pop into my head randomly one day as a way I could fill a huge space for pennies, and then throw it away in a few years without losing sleep.

Here’s what I did.

You’ll need to get a mold. You could use a balloon, but I was going for big here, so I used beach balls. For my paste I mixed together 1 part acrylic paint, 2 parts glue, and 3 parts water. You can add more paint to get the color you want, but don’t water the mix down too much. You want the whole mix to be about the consistency of acrylic craft paint.

Rip white tissue paper into chunks, and then paint the chunks onto the ball with your paste mixture. The bigger the chunks you use, the more crinkles you’ll end up with, so if you’re going for smooth then use tiny pieces.

To get that aged mottled look, I painted each piece of tissue paper on with a different color of paste mixture. I used all metallic colors, and then a green to add a little of that copper like patina effect. Let each layer dry before applying the next one. You’ll need at least four layers for it to be strong, but you could also do as many as six.

After you’ve applied your last layer, let the ball dry overnight. You could try just letting the air out of your beachball, but I ended up having to cut it out each time. Then trim up your opening so it’s nice and neat.

I have to admit, I took some shortcuts that cost me a ton of grief. Don’t skimp out on those layers, especially the bigger you go. After doing so many of these and having my whole dining room table covered for weeks, I just reached a point where I couldn’t take it anymore and called it done. I think I was able to rig it together enough to satisfy me, and I ended up digging those dents (I think it makes it look more like metal than paper mache, since these things are never seen closer than 15 feet away), but I think I would have been happier if I’d just done it right the first time.

If you don’t happen to have random holes to fill around your house, you could use this technique for making pinatas, lampshades, or for the really really cool project I’ll show you on Monday. It’s a doozy, and perfect for summer.

Filed Under: My Dreamhouse in Progress, Stuff I Make, Tutorials

2009 Year of Pleasures #20

May 19, 2009

*we’re trudging along over here, trying to deal. I can’t tell you all how much your support means to me. Especially how seriously you all take it. Sometimes people who aren’t pet lovers just think this kind of reaction is silly, but you all get me. I love you guys.*

For years and years my spice cabinet has been my secret source of shame. I am a hyper organized person. I own a PTouch labelmaker and I’ve had to buy refills. I can not only find the instruction manual for any appliance in the house in ten seconds flat, but I can tell someone else how to find it in fifteen. My idea of a spa retreat is some quality time inside a Staples. If I need a black rubon in a specific font, I can send Bear in my studio to get it for me and he’ll actually come out with it. I’m organized.

But if you cook like I do, spice cabinets are the doctrinal thesis of organization. Not only are there a zillion different bottles, each in different sizes and not easily stackable, but there are also the spices that come in pouches or plastic bags, or the ones I dry from my garden, or random things like bouillon cubes that don’t really go anywhere else. And usually the only convenient place to put them in a kitchen is in that one wonky shaped cabinet above the microwave, frequently also housing vent pipes and electrical cords.

After one too many times opening that cabinet only to have everything fall down on my head, I went on a mad search and I have to say I was really disappointed with the options. Even my beloved Container Store didn’t have the perfect solution. Everyone’s just selling some kind of a caddy that holds 16 spices at best, and they frequently come with the spices included. Bleck.

This little beauty came from Target online and if it was 1″ smaller in width it would have been absolute perfection. It fits the existing bottles, no pouring the store bottles into the ones that fit the caddy, and it uses space brilliantly. Each little tray slides out and down so you can see what you’re dealing with. After a little consolidation and creativity I was able to fit all my spices, seeds, and random baking items inside so now I just have a row of bouillon and salt and pepper next to this neat little box. It wouldn’t fit in my wonky cabinet, but it was just too close to perfect to let go of, so this is now in a cabinet with the dishes. I’ll just have to content myself with that, knowing that I’ll never again have a black eye from a bottle of falling peppercorns.

Filed Under: My Dreamhouse in Progress, Year of Pleasures

Atti’s Mobile and Door sign

May 14, 2009

I’ve been meaning to share this forever, but you know, life and all.

I made a couple additions to Atti’s room in between the time he came home and the time we transitioned him into his own crib.

For starters, I made this cute little door sign. The same friend who cut all the vinyl lettering for his walls made this little vinyl cut out for me as a gift tag. So I just grabbed a little chalkboard from Michaels, painted the outside in a color from his room, slapped the vinyl on and drew the little lightening bolts with a paint pen.

Then I had to make him a mobile. I couldn’t put my little guy to sleep in his own big boy crib without something to look at.

This one came after several failed attempts with wool roving. I finally just got too impatient for wet felting and used the leftover bedding fabric to sew up some balls of different sizes with one of the 800 patterns available on line. I found a pattern I liked (can’t remember where I got it now), brought it into a Word document, and then copy/pasted until I had three different patterns I could enlarge and shrink to the size I wanted.

I strung them together with long lengths of fishing line, tying a knot at the bottom of each ball for it to sit on.

The top of the mobile is made from two wooden square-ish pieces I found in a random little craft shop nearby. I was looking for something I could use besides an embroidery hoop because anal little me just had trouble living with something that wasn’t perfect, and the little screw at the top would have driven me nuts. I found these in an aisle with a bunch of basketweaving stuff.

The only part of this project that was at all tricky was tying the mobile pieces together while keeping it balanced. I started by tying a long piece of fishing line to each corner of the bottom piece, and then letting the bottom bit rest on a table while I tied the top piece on as close to level as I could. It took a couple of tries, but I got there. Then I took all the fishing lines together, and letting the top piece rest on the table this time, I tied them altogether to create a loop, centering the bundle inside the square so it would hang right. Don’t be discouraged if it takes a few tries. Fishing line is cheap.

Filed Under: My Dreamhouse in Progress, Stuff I Make, Tutorials

Back by popular demand

May 13, 2009

As I’ve thoroughly documented, I’m kind of obsessed with my garden. I forced myself to take a bit of a bloggy break from it though because I was getting a little single minded. It’s only one part of my homemaking efforts, so I needed to bring a little balance to the blog and to my life, but I’m starting to see some new developments so I thought it was a good time to go back outside.

The poppies are blooming! The poppies are blooming!

These little plants are so ridiculously hardy they’re almost more like a weed. All I did was toss a pack of seeds on the ground and I’m being taken over. They’ve choked out my anemones, they infiltrated the vegetable garden, they’ve grown over two feet tall in places, and this is after I thinned them out so aggressively I filled an entire landscaping garbage can. If you have a spot where nothing will grow and you need something that will take up some space, might I suggest some poppies?

My little vegetable garden is doing great. For some reason two of my melon plants keep trying to die while the third is going gangbusters, and my new strawberry plants went through some transplant shock and had to have all it’s existing growth die out before sending out some new leaves.

I planted my tomato seedlings the recommended 4 inches apart, and that was not enough. I now have one big tomato bush. But it doesn’t seem to be slowing it down much.

I had a bit of trouble starting my seedlings this year, so even after I learned a lesson with the poppies, I ended up just tossing lettuce seeds on the ground and I can’t really remember what went where. I know I had at least two different kinds of lettuce and arugula, but I can’t remember what a third seed was. Did I plant spinach? Or was that just in the failed seedlings? Was there a third lettuce here? I honestly have no clue. I’ll be sure and plant more carefully when it’s time to reseed in the fall, but for now I’ll have a whole bunch of wonderful mixed green salads.

I planted these beans on a whim. I hope they’re green beans. I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

My green pepper plant is busily making little baby green peppers.

The oldest strawberry plant is showing off those beautiful tell-tale flowers.

And my little pea plants are making honest to goodness peas! I mean, of course they are, but still, actually seeing something I recognize as food, that I grew my own self? It’s just thrilling.

Filed Under: My Dreamhouse in Progress, Stuff I Grow, The Good Life

2009 Year of Pleasures #18

May 6, 2009

I’m feeling a little bit stuck these days. Just not feeling the creative mojo. This happens to me a lot when I finish a big project, I just have trouble getting myself kick started again.

Everything I’ve been working on for the past week has been long term works in progress. As I’m sure you can see from the sidebar, I have loads of things I’d like to do and never enough time to do them all, but none of them are really getting me motivated lately. And I always feel a little anxious when I start finishing a bunch of projects without adding new ones to the list. I have that irrational fear that all creative types get at one time or another – the well has run dry and I’ll never come up with another idea again.

I spent yesterday cleaning my studio.

I don’t know what it is about a clean desk that I find so inspiring. I just have this urge to fill this desk back up with all kinds of messy things. But I also have an urge to just sit down in my comfy chair, prop my elbows up on this nice clean desk, and dream about what’s going to come next.

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

Plate Wall

May 1, 2009

I’ve finally managed to tackle another big job I’ve been putting off and get all these plates I’ve been collecting over the past year hung up along the staircase. Living with those brown paper circles was making me batty!

This was a big job because it really required a solid uninterrupted couple of hours work for each phase of the project. Which is why I got stalled at the paper template phase for over a month. It’s simple, but it does take some time. Especially if you do it on a staircase like I did. Staircases and ladders get complicated.

The plates are a collection I’ve put together by culling ebay and vintage shops looking for glass plates made in the 50’s and 60’s. It all started with those peach saucers. Bear’s mom Sally had a bowl she inherited from her mom in that same finish – peach lusterware. I’m a sucker for anything that’s iridescent or opalescent, and that lusterware has such a gorgeous rainbow shine on top of the peach. I started looking into that and discovered a whole world of fantastic glass dishes. The most famous is milk glass, and then after Martha Stewart a lot of people have heard of Jadeite, that green glass that is so highly coveted. Lusterware is definitely collectible, but it isn’t quite as in demand yet. Hopefully I can collect a full set some day. Although I was super jealous when I saw that Eddie Ross has not only a full dish set, but a punch bowl and cups!

I arranged the plates in kind of a wedge shape so that it would look interesting, but also because it looked the best on that particular wall. The ceiling at the base of the stairs is over 20 feet high, so if I didn’t make the design wider down there it just looked minuscule.

This is another kind of glass I learned about called Carnival glass. It’s crazy expensive, but I lucked into this little gem on ebay. It’s got that beautiful iridescent rainbow shine I’m so obsessed with.

Regular plate hangers wouldn’t work on some of the smaller or oddly shaped pieces, but Martha came through for me with her plate hanger tutorial. It worked like a dream.

These two are the only modern plates I hung. These were at Anthropologie on clearance for dirt cheap and I couldn’t resist. The colors were perfect, they actually had our initials, and I liked the idea of adding a weird little monogram to the collection.

Over the years I’ve really struggled to identify my personal style. I love high glam, austere, modern design, and I really love the homemade traditional look. It’s my constant challenge to find ways to marry those two passions. I think the traditional decor of decorating with plates still fits with my modern decor thanks to the nontraditional arrangement and the high gloss of the glass. Even though these plates are (mostly) all vintage, the glass and finish just makes them look so modern.

Filed Under: My Dreamhouse in Progress, Stuff I Make, The Good Life

One last garden post…

April 30, 2009

I know I’m in danger of becoming obsessed, but what is a blog for if not to document everything we can’t stop thinking about?

This is what’s keeping me away from all my responsibilities.

When I planted them I took all the packets of bulbs, emptied them into one big container, and then planted them randomly throughout the planter. I wanted a glorious random mix. I wanted my backyard to almost be an eyesore with color. I wanted it to look like an outfit a preschooler put together.

I can’t get over how different each flower looks. Some of them are the tight bulbs I typically think of, some of them almost look like anemones but with a thicker fringe of petals. And there are so many different colors, even within a color. There are some that are crazy variegations of green and red, copper and yellow, peach and pink.

One of my dahlia’s exploded too. Except this one is apparently shy and only wants to face the brick wall.

I brought in a few the other day and combined them with some flowers from my overrun parsley plant and it was a perfect combination. Those parsley flowers are almost acid green and with the neon pinks and yellows of the ranunclus it looked like an arrangement that Andy Warhol would have put together.

I can never decide if I should cut these and fill the house with them, or let them stay and just ignore everything I’m supposed to be doing so I can be outside. Either way, I just want to be where they are.

Filed Under: My Dreamhouse in Progress, Stuff I Grow, The Good Life

My little backyard cutting garden

April 16, 2009

It’s done. I did it. I got everything planted that I wanted to plant, and everything is taking off and it is miraculous.

I’ve had a few learning experiences along the way, for some reason I cannot seem to grow a seedling in a pot but I’m going to keep working on that one, I think I let my poppies choke out my anemones so I might have to replant those, and my magnolia tree does not seem to want to rebound from it’s years of neglect – not really sure what to do about that – but overall it’s been a wonderfully successful and deeply enjoyable project.

I grew up all over the west, and moving around so much never really allowed us to settle in and make a plot of land our own. Even when we managed to stay in one place for while, I think it was a habit that was just too hard to break. By the time I was a teenager the only gardening I knew how to do was chopping down blackberry brambles and painting the stumps over with lacquer. In our part of Washington, the blackberries would swallow your house whole if you let them.

I tried container gardening once, and it was a terrible failure. Have I told you guys about this before? I tried keeping a lemon tree and a lime tree in a pot on my deck, but I was so over excited about it that I flooded them everyday and killed them. By the time I finally threw them out they slid out of their pots with an audible slurp like a can of cream soup.

I finally seemed to have found the knack. I’m sure that living in this climate where everything grows doesn’t hurt anything, but I’m so proud of myself that I’m just going to take credit for that too.

I wanted my dream garden to be functional. I didn’t want it to just be some nice looking plants that would hold the dirt in place or that went with the look of the house. I wanted it to be personal. So every thing I planted, every single thing, can be brought inside to bring me a little harmony, a little nature, a little nudge along the way of appreciating the bounty around me. Everything flowers, everything has vibrant color or sweet fragrance, or both, and there’s space leftover for food. I think as it grows in it will be a beautiful place to be, but it will also make it so easy to incorporate the outdoors into our lives.

In the shade of the house I’ve planted Gardenias and Hydrangeas. The scent of gardenia is maybe my favorite thing ever, and the color of hydrangeas are maybe my favorite thing ever, so I love having this big aisle where they can grow together.

On the other side of the door is my herb garden. The parsley and cilantro are always trying to take over everything. I’ve had to uncover the poor oregano more than once. I think it’s time for me to make another big batch of chimmichurri sauce.

Then continuing around the corner we have our grill, and then this long planter starts that I’ve filled with ranunculus bulbs and roses.

I should have ranunculus showing up any day now.

I got super lucky on the roses. I don’t think I would have been able to put them in this year without showing up at the nursery on the perfect day. They were just transplanting all their winter rose stock into 5 gallon buckets, and were selling the leftover bare root roses at 75% off the original price. I snapped up 9 gorgeous rose bushes for $5 a piece, when the 5 gallon roses are now selling for $40. I basically got 9 for the price of 1.

I sorted through the varieties, trying to find them represented in the more mature flowers so I could get a preview of what I was buying. They had these huge fat white roses with a deep strong fragrance called John Paul’s, so I picked up four of those, and then I just took a chance on the others, hoping that I’d get a good mix of colors and figuring that as long as I had my fragrant John Paul’s, it wouldn’t really matter if none of the others had a strong scent.

They’ve already started blooming and I had such a pleasant discovery.
Here’s Cinco de Mayo:

And John Bradley:

And this one’s called Rock and Roll:

It’s hard to distinguish in pictures because right now everything is pretty much the same height, but in that long planter there are two little circles meant for trees. So I planted a lemon and a lime at the end of last summer, and they’re now growing their little juicy jewels.

The planter rounds a corner to a bigger section where that sad Magnolia lives. I’ve shown you this section over and over again because at the foot of this tree is where the poppies and anemones have been fighting it out. But behind the tree, along the brick wall, I planted a bunch of dahlias and they are growing up like corn stalks. I should see some flowers from them any day now too.

There was one part of that planter left bare after all the poppies I attempted to transplant died dramatically. So I decided I would take that opportunity to put in my one favorite flower that I had left out so far. I planted this new variety of lilac. It’s this fabulous deep magenta and one whiff brings me right back to a summer as a kid playing under lilac branches.

Then, around the corner of the house, next to the planter is my vegetable garden, but across from that, right up by the house is a nice shady spot, perfect for one last little flowering shrub. So I planted this salmon pink Camellia.

I saved a lot of money by buying everything small and immature. So even after all this planting the backyard looks pretty bare. I can’t wait what happens to everything through the summer, but I know that by next Spring I’ll have a little wonderland back here.

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