Christmas Trimmings

Before the Christmas decor gets tucked away for next year, I thought I'd share how we spruced up the house for the holidays. We keep it fairly minimal, although every year we say we're going to do a little more. This year I bought a tree skirt for the first time, so that was our addition for 2012. Enjoy and happy new year!

the front of the house lit up at night

tree tree (before I found the tree skirt)

stockings hung by the bookcase

Pumpkins on the Porch

Some multicolored gourds on our porch—the extent of fall our fall decorating this year. I figure if I don't make them into lanterns, they'll be appropriate through Thanksgiving!

New Couch in the House

I promised I'd share pics of our sectional once it arrived. Well, it's been about two weeks since the Milo has been here so I thought it was time to show it off. When it first arrived, I was a little uncertain about the way it looked in our living room. The color wasn't quite what I expected (a lot darker, it seemed to me, than the samples we had seen) and it was just so...big. I mean, bigger than anything we'd had in that space.

I had to kind of hang out with the Milo and get used to it before I got excited about finally having a sectional (something I've wanted ever since we moved into the house). It was kind of ironic that Robert, who was down with sectionals but not quite as excited about having one as me, loved it right away.

But I can say now that I'm very happy with the Milo. It's super comfortable and can easily seat five people. I also think buying a couple of cream colored pillows from Target added some color contrast to the sofa and relieved my feeling that it looked like a big block of charcoal fabric.

We did a little furniture rearrangement in the living room as well to accommodate our new set up.
The white Ikea bookcase that used to serve as our living room/lounge area room divider now serves as a media bookcase on the opposite wall.

And the Ikea sofa table that used to hold the TV got moved behind the sofa (which is very appropriate!)

I'd still like to add a couple more throw pillows to the sofa to bring in more color and texture. I have my heart set on some Chiang Mai Dragon pillows.

We'll also eventually ditch the long dark coffee table for a lighter colored ottoman (hopefully with storage) and bring in a large area rug.

Maybe we'll accomplish these other things by the time the year is out, but for now we're just enjoying being able to both lie down while we watch TV.

The Overdue Bar Stool Post

The last time you saw our Craigslist-scored bar stools, they needed a little love.

We actually liked the green vinyl on the seats, but they had seen better days. So we disassembled the stools...

and cut the vinyl off the seats (plucking off a million rusty staples along the way)...

until they were ready for some new clothes.

We covered them in a vinyl we found at a local fabric store. And since my mom is handier than us with all things upholstery, I asked her to help us cover them.

It's a little hard to see from far away, but the fabric has this greenish cross-hatch pattern that drew us to it.

Finding the stools on Craigslist (for $70) and scoring the fabric from the bargain bin at a local fabric store definitely saved us some dough. We would have spent about $160 (not including shipping) if we had gone with the Target stools we were originally going to buy.

Thinking About...Room Dividers

Since our living room/dining room/kitchen area is essentially just one big room, we've definitely struggled with differentiating space and furniture placement. We got the living room and dining room arrangement/placement figured out fairly early on, but we really didn't know what to do with the space "behind" the living room area for a long time. I used to call it "No Man's Land." Other than a low Ikea bookshelf, there was nothing in the space.

This is actually my take on what the space will look like with a sectional (which we don't have yet).


We eventually acquired a couple of lounge chairs and a coffee table for the space and I decided to make it a little lounge/reading area.

The lounge area in real life.

But without a way to define where the living room ended and the lounge area started, it kind of just looked like a big room filled with furniture. Enter the low Ikea bookshelf that used to sit next to the carport door entrance. It had to find a new home when we moved the built-in over to that side of the room. Luckily, it worked great as a way to differentiate the living room from the lounge area.

I'm glad we could reuse a piece of furniture we already owned and I suspect the Ikea bookshelf will stay there for a long time...but...I still picture something a little more grand for that space—a floor-to-ceiling divider with a retro feel. This picture always inspires me when I think about it...

So I started to do some research about pole shelving (which is what this kind of style is called). That's when I came across ISS Designs and fell in love. They offer preconfigured and custom made shelving with mid century flair, including floor-to ceiling room dividers right after my own heart:

The preconfigured dividers here range from about $1000 to $1900. You can also design your own shelving through the ISS website and they'll come back to you with ideas and pricing options. Pricing also varies depending on what kind of materials you choose for the shelving (e.g., aluminum versus wood).

I think my next step will be to take detailed measurements of our space and try to design some shelving through the ISS site. Then I can see whether my design is more economical than the preconfigured options...

Where'd That Couch Go?

On Friday afternoon our living room looked like this:

On Sunday afternoon it looked like this:

So you may be asking, "Where'd that couch go?" Well, we've had our eye on Macy's Milo Sectional for quite a while now (I wrote about it here). I check the Macy's site every so often to see if it's on sale and got pretty excited when I saw this:

Roberto and I talked about it and decided that we'd put our couch set on Craigslist: if it sold before the sale was over, we'd buy the sectional. Well, it only took about a week before it was out our door and we had a little more money to put toward the Milo. So now we're just waiting for it to be delivered, which we found out won't happen till' mid July or so ('cause they didn't have our color in stock):

In the meantime we've moved our two Danish lounge chairs from the other side of the room to where the couch used to be (so we have something to sit on while we watch TV). I'll be sure to share pics when the Milo arrives...

Stuff With Which to Organize Other Stuff

If you're like me, you're probably always trying new ways to combat paper clutter in your house. Boxes, baskets, trays—they've all come and gone as paper organizers at our place. My most recent paper-related irk was the menus piling up in one of our kitchen drawers. They were piled up on top of other stuff—loose keys, condiments from take-out meals—and I found myself having to sift through the entire drawer just to find one thing.

So when I saw this post over at Mini Manor Blog, I was immediately sold on Ashli's method for take-out menu organization. I headed to Staples to buy one of the Martha Stewart Avery Pockets (there in the bottom right below).

I also saw these nifty little blue boxes at the Martha display at Staples and thought they'd be a great way to store keys and other loose ends in the drawer. I used a promotional coupon and got 40% off the pocket (sweet). My shopping trip ended with a visit to Target, where I spotted this great teal paper tray.

The pocket went up on the inside of a kitchen cabinet and I dropped the menus into it.

The blue boxes went into the drawer and were a perfect fit for odds and ends.

And the paper tray ended up on the office desk. I figure it will be a good temporary holding place for mail/documents until I can go through them and file away important stuff in our file box. 

Product Review: LunchSkins and the Fuel Everest Sandwich Box

I'm a big fan of brown bagging breakfast and lunch for my day ahead at the office. But I started to notice just how many plastic baggies I was using to pack sandwiches and other goodies. Sometimes I'd try to save the cleanish baggies and reuse them but, let's face it, most of them got thrown away at the end of the day. So in an effort to do a little more reusing and a little less wasting, I started doing research on plastic baggy alternatives. I wanted to find something that was easy to clean and BPA/phthalate free. After some internet cruising, the options that seemed most appealing were LunchSkins reusable sandwich bags and the Trudeau Fuel Everest Sandwich Box. I decided to order both to see which one I liked best.

I chose one LunchSkin sandwich bag ($8.95) and two LunchSkin snack bags ($7.85). The smaller bag is the snack bag:

They seal with velcro and it's really easy to slide sandwiches into them (but you can also use them for other things, like leftover chopped veggies from dinner). They're also dishwasher friendly, which is great, but I've noticed that I've sometimes had to wipe them down after a wash 'cause not all the nooks and crannies got rinsed. I think perhaps putting them in the dishwasher inside out might help with that. 

I also ordered one Trudeau Fuel Everest Sandwich box (does this seem like an unnecessarily long name to anyone else?). I found varying prices for these on Amazon/Ebay but the average was about $8.50. Don't have a real-life photo of this one 'cause I think it's with Roberto at work:

The plastic construction makes it very easy to clean and it snaps close with one click. I've been pretty impressed with it and think I'll order at least one more in the future.

Overall, I've been happy with both products. At first they seemed a bit pricey, but if I think about how many boxes of plastic baggies we'd buy each year, we eventually come out ahead at the end of the day. And, hey, we're not putting as much plastic out there in the environment. I think it's a win win for sandwiches and mother nature.

New Lonny!

For those of us who loved the now-defunct Domino magazine, we can find a lot of the same style sensibility and delicious design photos in Lonny (which was actually conceived in response to the folding of the old Domino). The May 2012 edition of the online magazine is here! I thought I'd share some of its eye candy.

*All images are from the May 2012 edition of Lonny magazine:lonnymag.com

New Knobs (It's the Little Things)

I'm so excited about the newest hardware addition to our house. Two of these babies from Anthropologie:

We installed them on the folding closet doors in the master bedroom, which we had put in about two months ago (they were sliding doors before). They feel really sturdy (much better than the little wood knobs that came with the doors) and add something jazzy to an otherwise white surface.

Here's a little further out.

And further still!

The (Very) Slow Evolution of a Rock Garden

You may remember from this post way back in October and this post back in January that we've been working on a rock garden against the back wall of the house. Well, "work" is kind of an overstatement. We've been dragging our feet on it (um, I'm not really sure why) but with growing season upon us, we thought we'd better get things going a little before the bed gets taken over by weeds again.

Robert put down some weed barrier back in January but somehow little green buggers always find a way to pop up around the corners and seams. We thought a double layer of barrier and rocks would gives us a little more defense. So today we finally bought some rocks to fill in the bed. We got as many bags as my little Corolla could handle and were able to fill in about half the space:

We'll definitely need another trip to Lowe's to get more rock, but the exposed weed barrier should keep things at bay for another week or two.

Eventually I'd like the space to look a little something like this:

Once we get that first layer of small rocks down, I can start the hunt for some bouldery-type rocks and some good plants...

Making Your Own Household Cleaners

In an effort to be a little more green and a little less toxie, I've been experimenting with making my own cleaning products over the last couple of years. I started out making my own glass cleaner and just slowly added products as I found more recipes and ideas. They really aren't hard to make and can definitely save you some dollars. And the ingredients that go into them (for the most part) are common grocery store and household items: water, white distilled vinegar, baking soda, and liquid castile soap*.

Here are my favorite DIY concoctions :

glass cleaner (for windows, mirrors, shower doors)

• equal parts water and vinegar in a spray bottle
• spray and rub it down with newspaper 

all-purpose surface spray

• 2 cups water
• 1/2 cup white distilled vinegar
• 1 teaspoon castile soap
• 20 drops lavender essential oil 
• (put it all in a 32 oz. spray bottle)

For years we've been using the Method surface spray, which we've really like. It smells great is just generally a good product. But I've been experimenting with this recipe (which I found here on Young House Love) to try to match the feel and smell of a store-bought cleaner. Until recently, I hadn't been adding the essential oil 'cause I just didn't have it around the house. A trip to Whole Foods revealed just how expensive this sh*t is. Am I the only one who didn't know about this? A small 15mL bottle is like eight bucks. I bit the bullet and bought it—I figured I can get a few batches of spray out of it. And the lavender definitely adds a little something something to the mix.

soft scrub (for bathtubs, sinks, and fixtures)

•  roughly equal parts baking soda and castile soap 

The first thing I do with this is gauge the amount of surface area I'm trying to clean. Then I pour out some baking soda in a little mound right into the sink/tub/etc. I add about an equal amount of castile soap...

...and then just mix them together with my hand until the it has a pasty consistency.

I rub it over the surface I'm cleaning and then scrub it with a wet rag. Then just rinse off the remaining goop. It really does make your porcelain all nice and shiny.

There are tons of recipes you can find out there for natural household cleaners. These are just some easy ones that have worked for me (I've gotten a lot of my ideas from that post I mentioned above on YHL and from this book a friend gave to me). 

* You may have to trek it to Whole Foods to get liquid castile soap.