Black, white and wood


Don't you just love the combination?


By themselves, black and white can be a little bit too stark a combination for me... but add the warmth of (especially well-worn) wood to the mix, and it is pure perfection.








(images: 1.cinq via ici, 2.8.9. canadian house and home, 3. diana yen via design sponge, 4. marie claire maison via this is glamorous, 5. james tse via head over heels, 6. abingdon 12 new york via remodelista, 7. domino magazine)

A good house


Remember this? Go on and take a moment to read it if you haven't already... There's no rush, so take your time; I'll be right here, waiting for you to come back.

Not only was I lucky to have such unexpected, wonderful guests that afternoon, but I have also kept in touch with the daughter.... And she was kind enough to look through her pictures and found this little treasure, which she generously sent our way (on loan) so that Bill could scan it at work and I could post here.

This is our house in the 30's. It certainly helps explain why I've never liked the massive brick columns holding the porch up - they are not original to the house (see pictures of the exterior of the house when we first got it, plus current ones here). I am glad that the brackets we put back on the house are fairly close to the originals, and breaking up the color on the columns at least gives the appearance of the original design.

When I showed him the picture, Noah wanted to know why our house looked "old-fashioned" and why all those trees from the old picture were now gone.... and then he repeated the story I was told about the Dogwood being the size of the Oak tree up front. I have to confess that while the boys turned the picture this way and that, now distracted with the old Model T parked in the carport, I got a bit misty-eyed. I love that the stories about this old house are being passed on. What a gift we've been given... It is my hope that we will be able to pass it on ourselves one day, when we are too old to climb stairs, and the house has simply become too big for just two.

One man's trash...

So, take a look at this beauty - I found it on my walk around the neighborhood the other morning:


I just can't pass by something this classic and gorgeous and not drag it home. I'm thinking that, after a good scrubbing and replacing that handle that's missing on the hot faucet, we may want to use it in our upstairs bathroom when we really renovate it (we've just given it a face-lift for now):

I am not a big fan of vanities (I'd rather have a pedestal sink and a small piece of furniture), and even though we reinvented ours to be a little more unique and our style, I still would like to have something a bit less bulky. Now that I found that sink on the side of the road, I'm thinking about something along these lines:

I like that it's airy, and we actually have a leftover marble slab from the downstairs bathroom, so this could totally work.

And I already have a pair of old crates for extra storage:

Add to that the already painted black clawfoot tub we have stashed in Bill's Dad's garage, paired with pretty marble hexagonal tile on the floor, like so, and I think we're onto something:

And I kind of like this idea, since we don't have enough room for a separate shower in our bathroom either:

But it looks like it may be way too expensive for us, though.

Plus, I don't know if I'd be able to resist playing with extra long fabric for a shower curtain, or maybe even something frilly and girly like this little Anthropologie number:

(images: 1. & 2. yours truly, 3. via cottage living, 4. via real simple, 5. via design*sponge, 6. via down and out chic, 7. via antropologie)

The Dining Room

So, this is the view from the living room, when you first enter the house. I still haven't painted the ceiling, but I'm feeling a little lazy, so I'm not sure it'll happen any time soon.

Here is a shot of all four necessary curtain panels, as promised:


The view from the kitchen:

This next shot here is of what I'll call my problem wall, mainly because that IKEA bookshelf is temporary, until we can afford what I really want.

And what would that be, you may ask yourself? An oversize vintage chalkboard? Why, yes. That would be quite lovely.

Perhaps an old church pew to go underneath it, with some fun pillows and throws for extra seating and lounging? Why, that would be great!

Or a vintage map, you say? With a cool old bench underneath it? Yes, yes, oh yes.

Truth be told, I could also totally go with a modern painting, provided it had the right colors, such as this one (oh, and I'd take those chairs, too):

For now, however, the dining room is done. Until I get a bug to paint it again, that is, or if I happen to win the lottery and I'm able to buy all of the above-mentioned wish list items. Sigh.

(images: first 4, moi; 5. via cottage living; 6. via apartment therapy; 7. country decorating ideas via poppytalk; via down and out chic)

Pretty things

Window film. It is just lovely. Makes me wish we had not ordered that window with the pebbly glass for the downstairs bathroom... Note to self: must use when we uncover that other window upstairs....


Emma Jeffs has delicate, vintage-inspired designs, reminiscent of lace. It is so pretty, it almost takes my breath away.



She also has more mod designs, like this one here, just as lovely:


And Trove has just crazy beautiful stuff:


(images: 1. rachael smith via bliss, 2. & 3. emma jeffs via 2jane, 4. trove)

The office - a work in progress

What I love the most? The bird's eye view we get of our tree-lined street through our beautiful, old windows, wavy glass still intact.


This is the rocking chair that Bill's mom used to rock Bill to sleep when he was a baby. It was given to us when Noah was born, so he too was rocked on this chair.

We've ordered some hooks and we'll hang Bill's guitars from the wall - they'll be accessible and off the floor, which makes my sweet husband very happy. And the sheer orderliness of it of course appeals to me. (Yeah, I know.)


The desk is made of a hollow-core door ($24 at Lowes) resting on an old metal bookshelf on one side and file cabinet on the other, both of which we got at the Habitat store. I painted them white and hung a little curtain to hide the open shelves. We're not quite done, but I do think we got quite a bit accomplished for a Sunday afternoon. Especially after we'd tackled the den and the dining room that same weekend!

More on all house projects soon... It is almost the weekend after all!

The den (revisited) and dining room peek

So, we were busy with house projects this weekend (enter Bill's sigh and roll of the eyes here, because this usually involves him standing high on a ladder, holding something heavy, and me going, "A little more to the right. No, no - a smidgen to the left. Okay, can you go a little to the right now?" and so on and so forth).

Although I was excited to have curtains up in the den a couple of weeks ago, I was not really that happy with the overall result, I realized. Something was bugging me. The room was too busy and loud (visually speaking), especially for a space where we spend a lot of our time. I knew I liked all of the individual parts, I just wasn't sure I liked them all together.

For instance, I knew I loved the couch and chair with the denim slipcovers because I can wash them, and like a good pair of jeans, they hide dirt fairly well and they only get better with time. I liked the new curtains, too. I liked the rug and the new little pillow that looks like a flower (or fish scales, if you ask Bill).


And I love the color blue, but the one in the ceiling was killing me - it was too decisively blue, and nothing made it more apparent than adding more blue with those curtains. I like colors that are more indefinite, that live in gray areas (and I mean that metaphorically, yes, but also quite literally: gray is one of my favorite hues).

I actually never intended for the blue on that ceiling to be so intense to begin with - it was supposed to be the same bluish gray as on the kitchen ceiling, but I think the mix got botched somehow and I didn't notice the mistake until I had already painted the entire ceiling. By that point, I was just too tired to redo it, so I left it as it was. Very blue. With blue slipcovers and now curtains with blue accents. A little too much blueness for me.

So, even though I liked the new curtains, I just did not like them in this room. I decided to take them down and brought in white curtains I had in the guest bedroom. And I also decided I had lived with the loud blue of the ceiling long enough - so I painted it a soothing gray instead. (I believe the name is Winter White, by Benjamin Moore).


I think our dog, Lena (Lay-nah) Bean, approves. Or, as we affectionately refer to her, The Bean. Yes, I think The Bean approves.


And now, instead of pattern and jarring color, we have visual peace and quiet, which suits my personality and makes me very happy.

And so, you may be wondering, what did I do with the curtains that were in the den? Well, I put them in the dining room, which of course meant I had to change the wall color there too. Heh. It's yet another shade of gray, only on the taupe side this time. It's very soothing and calming, too.

I actually now need to go get two more panels because there are three windows in the dining room, so I'll have to show you pictures when all the curtains are up. And I also want to paint the ceiling in here. It's a disease, I know - but these kinds of projects bring me such joy..!

And we also started setting up the office upstairs this weekend (Bill's rolling of the eyes is not for naught). But I'll save that for a later post.

**Paint colors: den's walls, Woodrow Wilson Putty (6006-1A), at Lowes; den's ceiling, Winter White (OC-21) by Benjamin Moore; dining room walls, Taupe Stone (SR304), at Lowes.**

(images: me)

The new paint chip

Geninne, of Geninne's Art Blog, has just stepped up the game for designers everywhere:


Wouldn't it be nice if paint chips looked like this? Maybe people would not feel as intimidated by color. I mean, would recalling a bunny cozy in its burrow, or a bright-feathered bird, or a soothing aloe plant as you looked at a freshly painted wall ever feel wrong?

I didn't think so.

And the little peeks of her home and studio are just as beautiful and inspiring:




And she also posts photos of her adorable new puppy, Turbo, who apparently has sprouted a blog all of its own.

Need I say any more for you to go visit? What are you still doing here?? Now go, already, go! Oh, and don't forget to stop by her Etsy shop, too!


Oh, my... And she is having a stamp giveaway.

Of life and dreams

Noah painted this clay dinosaur last year. He was four. We were celebrating his friend's birthday at one of these pottery places where the kids choose a figurine and then decorate it with paint however they want to and get to keep it after it comes out of the kiln. Noah was unequivocally certain about his choice: he wanted the dinosaur.

This year, my beautiful boy wants to be a search and rescue hero. He piles the couch pillows high atop his old stuffed animals and fearlessly dives in, saving them all. He wants to live by the ocean, so he figures perhaps he'll be in the Coast Guard when he grows up.

The following short short is one of my favorites - it deals with dreams, our children, and really, our aging parents, too. I think the author captures the complexity of all of this - of life - in a beautifully touching way... Here's to hoping the dream is alive and well in all of us. Enjoy.

...........................................



Dinosaur
A short story by Bruce Holland Rogers

When he was very young, he waved his arms, snapped his massive jaws, and tromped around the house so that dishes trembled in the china cabinet. "Oh, for goodness' sake," his mother said. "You are not a dinosaur! You are a human being!" Since he was not a dinosaur, he thought for a time that he might be a pirate. "Seriously," his father said to him after school one day, "what do you want to be?" A fireman, maybe. Or a policeman. Or a soldier. Some kind of hero.

But in high school they gave him tests and told him he was good with numbers. Perhaps he'd like to be a math teacher? Or a tax accountant? He could make a lot of money doing that. It seemed a good idea to make money, what with falling in love and thinking about raising a family. So he became a tax accountant, even though he sometimes regretted it, because it made him feel, well, small. And he felt even smaller when he was no longer a tax accountant, but a retired tax accountant. Still worse: a retired tax accountant who forgot things. He forgot to take the garbage to the curb, to take his pill, to turn his hearing aid on. Every day it seemed he forgot more things, important things, like where his children lived and which of them were married or divorced.

Then one day, when he was out for a walk by the lake, he forgot what his mother had told him. He forgot that he was not a dinosaur. He stood blinking his dinosaur eyes in the bright sunlight, feeling its familiar warmth on his dinosaur skin, watching dragonflies flitting among the horsetails at the water's edge.

Many, many thanks to Bruce Holland Rogers for kindly giving me permission to publish this story here. To read more of his fantastic work, click here.(sunset image: vaeltaja via flicker)

The Hallway

While we were redoing our downstairs bathroom, much to Bill's horror, I got sidetracked and started working on the hallway. It is a beautifully wide space that was totally underused. My neighbor was getting rid of a pair of handmade benches, so I took them, made a couple of changes to them and painted them. Then I bought some wood, brackets, and a handful of hooks and got to work....and this is the end result. Not bad for a side job..!

The den

Our kitchen and den are one big open space in the back of the house. Our house was originally your classic shotgun bungalow, with a living room, dining room and kitchen on one side, and three bedrooms and a bathroom on the other, all separated by a generous hallway that ran the length of the house. At some point, that last bedroom in the back of the house was opened up to the kitchen and now we have one big open space facing the backyard, which is great.


The problem is that when the previous to last owners did their own kitchen remodel, they laid wood floors on top of the original ones and a layer of linoleum tiles on the kitchen side, and they just put carpet in the den (old bedroom) section. I of course promptly removed the carpet when we moved in. In fact, I dislike carpet so much, that I didn't mind that the wood floors underneath were painted black. I figured this was a temporary measure and I just painted the floors brown to sort of match the ones that were already in the kitchen area to "trick" the eye into thinking, at first glance, that it was all the same floor. But the floors of course are not the same and there is a little step down into the den. Not enough to call it a step really, but high enough that the furniture needs to be placed squarely on one side or the other, otherwise it tilts.


At any rate. Originally we had high dreams of replacing the floor in the entire back of the house, something rustic and lovely, and done right - meaning, removing the old flooring so that all of the floors in the house would be the same height. However, we've decided not to spend that kind of money, and rather the plan is to now hopefully match the existing kitchen floor and run it into the den. In part, this is because we'd really like to put a little wood-burning stove in the fireplace (which at the moment has gas logs that are not hooked up), and that will take money too.


So. I think we're ready to have the floors in the back of the house match. But, old houses are complicated that way. Nothing is ever simple, and one action might trigger another 327 other things that need to happen before the original issue can be addressed, and of course our old house is no exception. So, in order to (try to match and) finish the existing floor from the kitchen into the den, we have to cut a gas line that is capped and sticks out from the floor and is currently hidden under the couch. (I am completely mystified by this, and have absolutely no idea why it is so.) And since we want to put a stove in there, it would make sense to have the stove guy take care of the gas line when he's installing the stove. But it's not even that simple. The chimney is not tall enough, because the people that lived here in the 30's expanded the attic and so the roof line is now higher than the chimney - not up to code if we want a wood-burning stove. So we need to take care of that too.

So... Now we're talking about a couple of thousand dollars, even if we are planning on putting the floor down and maybe even dropping the liner for the stove ourselves. Oh, and we'd also have to remove the mantel and re-invent it because as it is, the top would be too close to the stove. Oh, and also the couch, in its current position, would be too close to the stove. (Combustible sources, couch and house going up in flames, blablahblah.)


Anyway. Since the idea of all of this was completely daunting, I contented myself with hanging these IKEA curtains last weekend, just to make me feel better about the room. I had purchased the curtains a while back and stashed them away for when the floor and stove were in place, and the couch was moved to the center of the room facing the mantel... I have no idea why I didn't do this before. The room looks so much more finished now, and I love the way the dusty blue in the curtains brings out the blue in the ceiling....

So. Deep breath in. The floors will be done. Some day we'll have a cozy fire warming our stockinged feet. It's going to be all right.



**See the new and improved (I think) version of the den here.**

If there ever was...

...a dream house, this would be very close to it for me.







The lovely London home of Jane Cumberbatch, as photographed for Light Locations. I am still trying to figure out how to copy pictures that are anything other than jpeg so that I can post them on vintage simple, so I was really happy to see the photographs (in jpeg) on Remodelista! A huge thank you to Julie over there for posting such lovely photos and allowing the less tech-savvy among us share in the beauty!

Don't you love...


...chippy shades of grays and blues?


...and little vases with flowers?


...and vintage mirrors?

...and leaded glass windows?


...and that intangible quality that speaks of home, so different for each one of us and yet so irrevocably true in our gut when we see it?


(images: liz demos, nicolette camille and kat heyes, all via design sponge)

The dresser


So, now that we've moved our bedroom to the open loft area, we have the little adjoining room left in the front of the house pretty much empty, suffering from somewhat of an identity crisis. I figured we needed a focal piece in there, some sort of dresser or credenza, and I was leaning toward something with a mid-century modern vibe, like the one on the picture above (via Apartment Therapy).

So, off I went to the Goodwill and Salvation Army with that image in mind. But, after a few days of fruitless searching, I turned up empty-handed. So I decided to visit this little shop in my neighborhood called Shinola.... It's a great spot - just the right combination of antiques and junk, all towering precariously in piles that go up to the ceiling so as to overwhelm the most focused shopper. I love it.

I looked around for a little while, opening drawers, lifting statuettes, peering into vases... And then, amidst all the chaos, I spotted it, lovely and serene, a little bit on the serious side compared to its more ornate neighbors...and what can I say, friends, but that it was love at first sight?


It's clearly not as mod as the dresser I had in mind, but I actually like it better. It has these deco lines that sort of speak to the house's age, which I like. I love its rolled detail on the top,


and the curve at the bottom, and its little wheels (that work perfectly!):


Part of me wants to leave it just as it is, but another part of me wants to, oh I don't know... wallpaper the face of the drawers? Maybe. Barb Blair at knack studios does that all the time, with beautiful results:














And this all would fit nicely with the wallpaper fantasies I've been having (see here), without having to commit to an entire wall ...but the thing is, will I tire of it too? (Just like I might tire of it on a wall?) Maybe I'll just wallpaper the inside of the drawers, like so:

(The image above comes courtesy of Liz Carney of sticks and bricks; she does some pretty amazing work as well...I mean, the carvings? Just beautiful.) But back to the issue at hand...

Maybe I could just find some really big chunky vintage glass knobs (that would be a very non-committal choice, since I could swap them back and forth as I wanted), like these on this dresser from Chicago Home and Garden via Apartment Therapy:

...or I could just leave the dresser as is, since I do love its lines - why mess with something that's perfectly beautiful as it is? As usual, I'll sit on it for a while and see... I'll keep you posted!