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!