Everyone, meet the new look!

Other than the general behind the scenes housekeeping, I spruced up the look and feel a bit. Less grungy typerwriter and pink, more green and heavy block type. I also added a new ‘menu’ (really, just a collection of posts) for ‘House and Garden’. With our recent move to Texas and the resulting house projects, I think the focus of the blog is likely to be shared between sewing and homestuff for the foreseable future and I wanted to reflect that in the structure. Everything else is pretty much where it was before. I retired the very cool gallery-style pages for the Finished Project and Tutorial sections. Until I find a new solution, that particular plug-in is just way too time intensive, requiring a hack to get it to work that required a LOT of recoding after each update. If any of you knows of an easy (i.e., no coding/hack required) way to set up gallery pages that link back to posts, let me know, ‘K?

Oh! I almost forgot – my favorite new plug in! check out the grey Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest icons in the upper left corner!! Just click on ‘em to see my most recent posts on each platform. Cool, huh?

OK! Off I go. It’s Memorial Day, which means project-day for Mr. Bug and I! Hope you all like the new blog-digs!

Here is what one sees when coming in through the front door of the new house.

Let’s get a bit closer, shall we?

Ah, much better. I’m not gonna lie, folks, this whole tablescaping business is a bit of a mystery to me. Our Minneapolis house was a bit more akin to a ship. Compact and tidy, every piece of furniture was required to (more or less) serve a purpose. This table serves not much purpose, other than we stash our Garmin in the drawer since we have two cars and a fear of Garmin thieves.

We bought the table from craigslist. It’s not my favorite style, but I try to keep Mr. Bug in mind and it’s MUCH more to his taste – it was originally from Pottery Barn and we paid $160 for it. It’s in great shape and fits the space perfectly. I’d originally intended to just keep it simple – a mirror, a lamp and perhaps a basket for keys. I’ve had my eye on that lamp from Target for a while – I like the crackled glass! The mirror is from World Market and I had intended to put it in our powder room, but it’s just slightly the wrong size, and I’d set it on the table just as a place to stash it and ended up liking it better than the more ornate antique mirror I’d been planning to put in the foyer.

Alas, I found that just the mirror and lamp left the table looking forlorn and forgotten and since it’s the first thing we lay our peepers on when coming through the front door, I wanted it to be a bit more cozy and warm. I raided my stash of non-functional, decorative crap and added the terra cotta pear and one of my bowling pins (both from antique shops) and a crazy basket that doesn’t really have ANY use other than being cute because it’s made from chicken wire. It originally had little boxwood topiaries in it that live in other places, I thought the candles looked nice enough – not that I’d actually light them just sitting on some chicken wire!

I also put a couple of baskets under the table to warm up the space. They’re from world market as well. I’d have preferred a little less basket and to have gone with something made from wood, metal or even old suitcases, but the baskets were on sale and the most inexpensive option. I got the covered one for height and hidden storage. The two thicker braided ones got filled up with white stuff – a couple of Ikea lanterns,  a rolled up a spare blanket and some fake sheepskin from my material supply.

Now for the terrarium! I’d seen a post recently on Thrifty Decor Chic on making one, and thought they looked cute. I’m trying to keep our general palette in the cream, white and brown family with touches of chartreuse and green (the better to calm down our whirling thoughts, precious) and a bit more green is exactly what I wanted. While I’m pretty good at the outdoor gardening, I’m AWFUL at keeping houseplants alive, and I don’t really like how most of them look. Also, they remind me of cats. High maintenance creatures that don’t give a lot in return (ah! cat lovers don’t come after me! I like petting kitties, especially purring ones.)

I found the heavy green glass bowl at Hobby Lobby. At 50% off I paid $17 for it. There were less expensive options to be sure, but I really liked the shape and the heft – it’s that super heavy green glass – like what pop bottle were made from. It has a cork covering, although I leave it off most of the time.

For the plants I went with succulents. The nursery close to my house has a whole terrarium section with plants that aren’t succulents, but I like the color, shape and personality of succulents. I got one larger plant for $4 and a few of the $2 little ones.

The inside of the terrarium is layers – in order from the bottom up is rocks, charcoal, potting soil and then moss over the surface. I got my rocks at Ikea, but then realized I didn’t get enough, so I got more at Hobby Lobby, along with the moss (both are in the dry flower arranging section.) For my terrarium, which is pretty large I needed three bags of rocks – maybe a little over 2, actually. And less than one bag of moss – I bought WAY too much moss! Spring for the more expensive, sheet like moss. I got some of the stuff in pieces that says it’s great for terrariums, but some of it is really thick, and its hard to arrange it so it looks nice. I spent a few dollars per bag of rocks, about $10 on moss (I have WAY TOO MUCH MOSS) and the potting soil and charcoal were about $15 all together, but again, I have tons left over.

The best way to water these is to spray with water. A few other things I learned while putting these together:

Get a taller bowl! Mine is a little short and squat, which made it hard to get in enough rock and soil and still have enough height for the plants! It worked, but a lot of the terrariums I’ve seen are in the taller containers that have a base. I can see how that works better!

Remember you have to stick your hand in there! Again, the neck of my bowl is pretty small. I like how it looks, but it was a PAIN arranging everything one handed! I saw one post recommending to arrange with a spoon if necessary, so I suppose it’s all about the look you want to end up with versus the annoyance of putting it together, but I didn’t even think about how big the neck of the bowl was when I bought it!

Think about the layers. I initially put in WAY too many rocks, charcoal and soil. The plants stuck up too high and it didn’t look nice. I had to take everything out and it was a mess. The charcoal is in little teeny pieces and flew around everywhere, getting on basset hound feet and by extension the beige sofas. Don’t over fill, stand back and see how the layers are looking.

Don’t worry! I planted mine about two weeks ago and thought for sure the little succulents would immediately die. They didn’t. Apparently succulents like it a bit drier, so I leave the cover off, but they look great! It sort of reminds me of having a fish in a fishbowl. It’s my plant fishbowl! (speaking of useless, decorative pets…)

I realized  that I have not shown off my home office! And this was the FIRST room that we put together, since I work from home. Of course, since it’s a home office, it’s, you know. Functional. By day I work in marketing/communications, which means a lot of monitors and magazines to organize. Sigh, as much as I yearned for it, I really couldn’t pull off anything close to my dream office. Like the one below. I believe this is (was?) the home office of Brook Gianetti, designer and blog author at Velvet & Linen.

I really, really wanted to go for the more elegant stand-alone desk, backed with a larger storage piece. The problem with a standalone desk is a SERIOUS lack of continuous desk space, as well as a nightly requirement to completely clean up OR leave the office looking very untidy. Speaking of untidy, one of the challenges with designing my home office was the layout of the space. I commandeered the room on the 1st floor that was originally intended to be the formal dining room. It’s one of the first rooms visible when entering the house, completely open to the main foyer and an incredibly odd shape, with a clipped corner and three giant, open doorways.

Why don’t you just come on into the house!?

Once through the door, the stairs to the second floor are directly ahead with a little alcove to the right that has a console table with little bits of this and that. Perhaps we’ll take a closer look at that tomorrow…

Turn to the right, and there’s the office!

If we back up a bit, you can see the front door on the right…

I was really happy to get an office with such great light! Of course, the problem with that light is that one whole wall is out of commission for furniture. That, plus the open area on the other side of the room made it super hard to figure out where to put things!

The desk was the most important piece to find. I wanted something with lots of storage, and really wanted a hutch to give it some presence – this room has REALLY high ceilings! I wanted something cute, slightly country, and preferably white. Oh, and L-shaped. Turns out, this is REALLY HARD TO FIND!! Most functional office furniture (i.e. – drawers for hanging files, L-shaped configurations) are very dark and either SUPER masculine and traditional or…. super masculine and contemporary. There are some nice options at Pottery Barn and Ballard Designs, but the price tag is higher than I wanted to go. I wanted to outfit the office for $1,000 or less, including a new larger monitor, which left me with around $750 for the desk. I already own the Liatorp desk from Ikea, which is exactly what I wanted, looks-wise, but it’s not L-shaped and the storage is a bit funky for a working office-desk (no side drawers, just doors and shelves.)

I ended up ordering the this desk from Bush Furniture. This PLUS the matching two drawer lateral file was just under $800 with tax, so it sort of fit in the budget! It’s  ’antique’ white, which looks VERY creamy in real life. Thank god for the dark wood floors, right? The catalog photos look much, much more white, but I knew from reading reviews what I was getting. I also test-drove the black version at Office Depot (Office Max?)

The back of the desk is technically ‘finished’, so it looked alright having the return face outward, but I really wasn’t thrilled with the finishing on the desk – very boxy and uninteresting. So I piled a bunch of baskets (goodwill and World Market) in front of it to make it a bit cuter!

The hutch has some little cubbies that aren’t QUITE deep enough to stack paper in. Instead I stacked some of the books I tend to use a lot. The blue book on the top of the stack is a copy of Elements of Style from what has to be the 70′s. The cover is blue, plasticy and iridescent! The baskets are from World Market and one has cords and things and the other has my label maker and tape – too bulky for the drawers. The big basket on top has product samples. The other two cubbies are homes for my Kindle and a place to put receipts for expense reports, etc.

Here is the BEST part of the whole desk… a little hidey hole to put my stuff in at night! Makes clearing the desk top MUCH easier! You can see my hutch-now-media-library set at an angle in the background.

And here’s the view into the family room while I’m working. It’s really nice – I can see all the way through the house to the pool in the back yard!

Along the other side of the room is my grandmother’s china hutch, now pressed into service as office supply and magazine storage. I also have a little sidechair and my lateral file. This was a strange wall. I didn’t want to leave it bare, but didn’t really want to line furniture up along it either! Originally I tried the hutch in the corner NOT angled – with it’s back against the short wall. I made the whole space feel very dead and cold. By angling it, I made it much more inviting when you look into the room from the foyer.

Here’s a slightly different angle, showing the lateral file as well. And just a teeny corner of a dog bed for Lucy, who usually insists on sleeping under my desk on my feet. I’m going to roll over her tail for sure one of these days!

The little green chair is part of a set we bought with the farm-table-now-cutting-table through craigslist. I LOVE the color! The map was in our hallway in Minneapolis, and was a super-exciting antique shop find – it’s a plat map of Fairbault, Minnesota, that I got for twenty bucks and stuck in a frame I already had and just aged up a bit. The pillow is, um, from, um, I think I got it at Hancock Fabric! The lantern is new, from Home Goods. I love the (albeit fake) patina.

As part of my job I do a lot of ad buys and design the ads. I also try to keep up on reading the industry magazines. So I have a LOT of magazines to keep track of. Thank god for the cheap, white Ikea files.

A few more reference books and one CD box for CDs and the other for the little things that collect over time… business cards, light bulbs for trade show booths….

The office is nearly finished. I only have two mini-projects. One is to take the drapes down (they’re white ones that I had from Ikea, the ones the seller left behind were AWFUL old-lady beige-and-sheers. Ugh.) But the draper rod is BENT and it drives me nuts because it doesn’t look level and is very obvious from the street. I will likely need Mr. Bug’s brute strength to help out with that one. I also want to make a slipcover for the office chair, which is black fabric. I don’t really mind how it looks, but it collects Lucy fur like it’s been sent her by God to do so. I am slathering that dog down with Nair one of these days…

Oh! And what’s to the left of the doorway when you come in? Glad you asked… The builder-intended formal living space, destined to be Mr. Bug’s poker room that will double as a larger dining room when needed. But right now, it’s the 1st floor staging area.’ Say hello to all of my junk! Isn’t moving fun?

Now you see why there is no sewing getting done. I swear to god people, when I lie in bed at night, I can hear all these boxes teasing me… especially that tall guy in the middle…

{Looking in from the family room}

While I DID reuse a lot of the things from the sewing room in Snug Bug Minneapolis, there were a few more considerations with the Texas iteration of this room. Mainly, it is in the clear sightline from the family room AND immediately upon coming in through the front door. Due to that, I not only needed SUPER ORGANIZATION, but I wanted the furnishings to be a bit cuter and furniture-like. In this sewing space, form totally cut in line ahead of function.

I SCOURED the googles for inspiration. Unfortunately, just searching for ‘sewing rooms’ yields a lot of photos of great spaces, but ones that are (properly) tucked away into basements and extra bedrooms – rooms with doors that allow for a more disheveled look than I wanted to see. I found that searching for sewing ‘studios’ rather than sewing ‘rooms’ upped the notch a bit. Also, by widening/finetuning the search I found some better images – I looked for ‘scrapbooking’, ‘quilt’ and just general ‘craft’ rooms as well as sewing rooms. Looking at the workrooms and studios of interior designers and architects is also a great source of inspiration. Here are my favorites – you can see most of what I liked on my Pinterest page ‘Workspaces‘ – although these image pertain to my home office as well!

{Heather Bailey's sewing studio}

I’ve been in LOVE with the photos from Heather Bailey’s studio for a while – that green work table just kills me! For those of you familiar with her, doesn’t her space look just like her fabrics? Bright, cheery, warm and totally cool? Even though I wanted a more neutral palette for my space (well, Mr. Bug wanted more neutrals…) I really like the way she uses nice solid furniture pieces. Alas, my final room is still mostly Ikea and other flat packed, white laminate usual suspects. But a girl can dream, right?

{Atlanta Homes | Barbara Westbrook's office}

Holy cow! I LOVED this studio featured in Atlanta Homes & Lifestyle. It’s the workspace of interior designer Barbara Westbrook, so there’s more Macs and less sewing machines, but the simple white shelving filled with lots of natural tones and texture from the baskets is exactly what I wanted (and someday, perhaps nice lighting above my cutting table?) No cats, though. Totally go check out the original post – it’s an entire cottage of design studio awesomeness!

{Sew Many Ways}

Now HERE is a sewing space, right? This room is much more what mine will eventually look like, I think, once the clutter builds back up. The post is PACKED with really clever ideas for organizing and storing! Also, a great tip on how to add height to your craigslist farm table-now-cutting table!

{Anna Maria Horner's sewing space}

Like Heather Bailey’s space, Anna Maria Horner’s studio is colorful, warm and gorgeous with lots of built ins and and real, live furniture. I grabbed a quick link to a post on her blog for these pictures, but I KNOW I’ve seen more pictures out there in the googles. Again, I love the color so much! Those chairs!

{Thinking Out Loud}

I love the look and the organization of this space from the blog Thinking Out Loud. Of course, the cute little cubbies don’t lend themselves to storing the yardage of garment sewists, but it’s still adorable! I think her green cubbies are an antique, but the Sarah closet system from Ballard Designs is very similar. Of course, that would be WAY out of reach from my sewing room budget, but still…

{One Little Word}

One more I really liked! This craftroom from One Little Word is warm, cluttered AND soothing. I would be terrified of so much open (non box/basket contained) storage – mine would just look like a giant messy jumble! But she totally pulls it off! I love the clothesline of fabric above the computer and would like to do something like that for when I’m plotting full season wardrobes in one color palette!

OK, now that I’ve shown you the GREAT rooms, I’ll show you mine (hmmm… my order leaves something to be desired!!) I showed you the view from our family room above – that’s sort of across the back of the house. There’s also a set of french doors that are oriented towards the front of the house. Here’s that view…

Nice coffe cup, huh? My new cutting table is a craigslist find. It’s a great 6×3′ solid wood number from William Sonoma. I put it up on bed risers for now, although I’d like to evenutally get finials for a nicer look. I WILL be making little muslin aprons or something like that to cover up the ugly black plastic! The giant trunk underneath is a rummage sale find of Mr. Bug’s that we had a hard time putting into use, but it’s perfect for batting and such! I also upgraded to the 70 x 70″ Expedite from Ikea. I had the 54 x 54″ one in my old sewing space – it’s now in Mr. Bug’s office. I love how all the Ikea stuff ‘fits’ together! I use a LOT of magazine files and they fit perfectly in these! I also splurged on the seagrass baskets for organizing – they match the seagrass rug from Pottery Barn we got to protect our new wood floors!

Here’s the corner with my ratty old bed for Lucy armchair. I’d like to make a quick slipcover for that monster! The sewing space has a fireplace, which seems VERY decadent to me! It’s gas, so I expect I’ll actually use it in the winter. Mr. Bug and I may also add another TV to the house for above this mantle – it will be viewable from the adjoining room which he is going to outfit for poker playing.

Here you can see the door to the family room (on the left) and a bit of the door to the ‘poker room’ (on the right.) Since I dismantled my large white cutting table, I reused two of Closet Maid cube units that had been the base. I stacked them on one side of the doorway – they’re attached to each other with metal brackets. On my to-do list is to make a little muslin skirt to hide the bottom half of the shelving unit so it can get a little messy and match the Ikea Billy bookcase on the other side of the french doors. The canvas inserts are from Target (as are the cube units) and I like the way they look. I will say, though, that while these units serve a purpose and are the right scale for my needs, I really don’t recommend them. They are so very, very cheap and junky!

Here’s that Billy bookcase, along with some rather dramatic lighting – all the pictures were taken at the same time of day, but this corner was all atmospheric! The long sewing table was in the Minneapolis sewing space and will be getting a skirt made from a paint dropcloth to cover up the ugly metal legs, cords and wire Antonius storage units. You can just see in the upper right had corner one of the antique shop finds I nabbed just before leaving Minneapolis!

Check ‘em out! They’re rather oversized advertisements for mens’ suits! Sorry for the glare, but this one shows some different styles and interior details…

And here are two dapper young men showing off two of the most popular styles. You can’t see it in the photo, but there’s a woman in a carriage in the background TOTALLY checking them out. Me? I’m not so much into mustaches or canes. Times change, I suppose. But could there BE any better artwork for a sewing room that’s trying to not be TOO girly out of respect for the man of the house??

Hope you enjoyed the tour!

Now… a word about my pantry, my house in general and the real estate market in Dallas. It’s crazy pants, y’all. As most of you longer timey readers will know, I came from Minneapolis which is certainly not the most pricey housing market in the land. That being said, we lived in the city and bought our house in 2008, so paid what I considered a decent-slash-TON-of money for a 900 square foot 50′s ranch with an unfinished basement, teeny yard, 2 bedrooms/1 bath with a tuckunder garage. While we lived there, we made it nicer going the DIY, Ikea and occasional hired gun route, but it was just a 50′s ranch with a lot of Ikea, Home Depot slate and Lumber Liquidators hardwoods on the floor.

SO when we started house-hunting in Dallas, my head nearly exploded. Houses down here are GIANT, and cheap according to my internal home-value meter. Of course we were looking in the suburbs versus the city, so of the houses were of the more giant variety. Our particular suburb wasn’t even in existence until the 60′s from what I understand and almost all of the homes we looked at were built in the early 90′s or 00′s. Compare that to our previous ranch, built in the 50′s and positively the youngest kid on the block in Mpls, where most of the homes around us were Tudors built in the 30′s.

So…. what’s with all the background info? Merely me trying to help you understand why I was a bit disappointed with the pantry in our new house. Here’s a photo I snapped while it still had the seller’s dry goods in it…

Not a walk in. I was disappointed. I KNOW that seems awfully snobby, especially coming from a teeny dollhouse where my ‘pantry’ was the Ikea pine shelving that Mr. Bug installed in the basement, but a LOT of the houses we looked at had walk in pantries and I had visions of this dancing in my head…

Unpacking in Texas got off to a rocky start due to my obsessive need to organize. It was slow going. Finally, being driven insane by the boxes everywhere and general chaos, I relented and just started shoving things in their eventual homes, without organizing or making it pretty. Last week the laundry room got its mini-makeover, so this week it was pantry time! Here it is in its current basket-loving state…

Hello white basket farm! Of course, I’m plotting to eventually come back and make it SUPER pretty inside. Like every single other person who even GLANCES at home design blogs (what’s the proper term for that kind of blogging BTW??) I fell hard for this pantry with its grey walls, stenciling, antique wooden boxes and cute trim on the front of the shelves.

{source}

No matter, that will have to be stage THREE (1 being ‘just getting unpacked’ and 2 being ‘ORGANIZE!!’) Stage three will be the ‘make it super pretty’ stage.

So. Regarding the organization part. In my last kitchen I had a small cupboard area that I used as a pantry. In that system I kept all my opened packages of food (pasta, snacks, etc) as well as the unopened items needed for that week’s menu in the kitchen pantry area. ‘Backstock’ went to the Ikea shelves in the basement, which we took to calling ‘Super Target.’ I realized once I started organizing in the new house that I needed a similar system, which sort of bummed me out, because I had visions of a pantry full of artfully arranged stacks of canned goods dancing in my head.

After moving things around a bit, this is what I came up with: cannisters, snacks, partially used goods and cookbooks went into the pantry. I have a separate cupboard for unopened things and partial bags of canister goods (flour, sugar, etc.) Spices, small baking packages and oils/vinegar all have separate homes. Don’t worry, I took photos…

First of all, the canisters. I prefer to put most things into a canister. They look nicer and are easier to scoop from! The bulk of my canisters are frosted glass Ikea ones. They aren’t my favorite style, but Mr. Bug and I got them at one of those crazy early morning sales where you have to go and shoulder your way in, so they were all $1 a piece and when we were setting up our old kitchen we needed a LOT of them at once! The rest of the canisters are the more sweet kind with the wire clasp closure (also from Ikea), along with a few extra large glass-topped ones from Target (for bread flours) and an odd assortment of new clear canning jars and the older blue glass Bell jars.

I went nuts with the labels this time around. I started with a template I found through this post on My Sweet Savannah. There wasn’t a label for everything in my pantry, though, so I just grabbed the background from a label I liked, removed the existing words and then downloaded two different fonts with an old school style to make my own. For font dweebs (like me) they are Birmingham and Bellerose, both downloaded from dafont.com. If any of your happen to have my taste in fonts and the EXACT SAME ITEMS in YOUR pantries, here s a PDF of the labels… I warn you, this is not the nicest artwork out there, and the ‘cutting’ lines are not super helpful (especially if you try to use a paper cutter) but I managed to make them work… I put them on with packing tape so they’d be easy to clean and water repellant.

I used a lot of baskets from my stash while organizing. I managed to find (mostly) white baskets. There was one golden brown one that I had to include. It annoyed me because it so OBVIOUSLY didn’t belong on the shelves, so I watered down some Annie Sloan Old White chalk paint and white washed it. That’s it below in the lower left hand corner. I also have a brown Longaberger banana basket that I keep onions and garlic in but I didn’t have the heart to whitewash that one.

In the top of the photo you can see the giant white ‘snack’ basket. A nice catchall for bags and boxes of snack foods. My almonds and popcorn are also on the snack shelf, along with a few other items. The next shelf down has a white basket of beverages and the whitewashed basket with general pantry items. Another white cube-basket (not pictured) holds opened boxes – Uncle Bens rice, pasta – that sort of thing.

You can also see the hanging labels in this picture – I bought those in the office supply area at Target and make labels with my label maker. They work especially well on baskets and cloth organizing cubes (I attach with a safety pin) – anything that isn’t easy to slap a label on!

I had the baskets below on hand and they’re perfect for paper and plastic bags – paper on the left, plastic on the right. We call the basket on the right the snake charmer basket. They didn’t get the white wash treatment – since there’s two of them and they’re sitting on the floor, they didn’t look so obviously mismatched!

A view from across the room… the door to the left of the pantry is the laundry room.

And now for all my other little hidey holes. First up is the unopened pantry items and canister ‘backstock’…

I had the riser for the cans – it’s getting a little dinged up and I really want to swap out for more attractive bamboo risers, but since it’s still perfectly serviceable, I controlled my urges and re-enlisted it!

On either side of the cooktop and hood I organized baking supplies and a lot of my oils, vinegars and spices.

Baking items are on the left side. There are a few things in this area that I would like to get canisters for and move into the pantry (corn meal, etc.) It isn’t super logical that I’ve broken up my opened containers between the baking shelf and the pantry area, except I’ve ALWAYS organized these items separately from regular cooking supplies. I think my mother did the same thing!

On the other side of the stove I organized oils, vinegars, salts, larger spice jars, coffee-making supplies (coffee maker/sink are close by) and on the very top shelf is a box with backstock for my spice jars.

I organized my spice jars in one of the drawers of the kitchen island so they’re easy to grab while I”m cooking. Here’s a slightly goofy photo to give you perspective.

I had to buy all new spice jars (again, Ikea.) My previous ones matched the frosted glass canisters – they were sort of tall and skinny and kept falling down in the drawer! These are shorter and fatter so more stable – super bonus? They’re bigger! Yay! I hate having all those little half filled spice jars in my back stock!

They’re all labeled and alphabetized. I had two different cartridges of label tape – one clear, one white. It’s driving me nuts that the labels don’t all match and I’ll probably swap out eventually. Because that’s how I roll!

Next up? Who can say? Although I am closing in on having a functioning sewing space! Holla!

And, turns out, sanding furniture.

So… a few years ago we bought new sofas from Ikea, upgrading from a very beat up old beige leather number and giant green pillow back loveseat to the white slipcovered sofa and loveseat from Ikea. Right now we have the more pricey beige slipcovers on the sofas, although I prefer the look of the white ones, the beige hides Lucy slobber a bit better. After we brought in the white sofas I scoured secondhand and antique shops for side tables. Everything that I brought home got the black spraypaint treatment.

Here’s a shot with two of the tables in their black sprayed glory.

I liked the tables well enough, but they showed off every bit of white Lucy fur that came drifting through the air and our new place is much lighter and brighter than the Minneapolis house. I initially thought that I’d just paint the tables white to brighten them up, but then I remembered the sanded down dining table I’d recently seen on My Sweet Savannah…

{My Sweet Savannah}

I loved the traces of black paint, but really, I hate sanding. I know I have a electric palm sander somewhere, but we haven’t really gotten to unpacking all the tools yet. Lucky for me, the sandpaper had been unpacked, so I went and grabbed some 100 grit paper and tried an experimental rub on the table. Turns out spray paint is more than willing to be sanded off. I sanded off an on over the course of a few days. I started with the little half-moon table that was last spotted impersonating a sofa table…

Here it is stripped down…

Mmmmm… much better.

I left a lot of the black paint in the nooks and crannies, especially on the legs – here’s a slightly blurry photo…

I almost left the legs completely black for a more farmhouse look.

I used 100 grit sandpaper for most of the job. The hardest part was making sure I’d sanded every side of the stupid cross braces on the bottom. I kept washing off the sanding dust and bringing it inside to wax, then I’d realize I’d missed a spot. I was distracted because in addition to sanding I was acting as a IT tech for my mother as she struggled to install Skype on her computer. Great googly moogly.

I eventually got all the paint sanded off as well as the original stain – this piece was stained a fairly deep shade of brown when I brought it home. After I managed to get ALL the black paint off I washed it and sort of felt it up to make sure the surface was smooth. Then I treated it with some Annie Sloan clear wax – which is supposed to be used on painted furniture, but I figured it was better than nothing.

I applied the wax with an old paintbrush we had in our stash. I sort of slathered it on, then rubbed it off right away with a hand towel. It has the consistency of butter at room temperature and is sort of stinky, although the smell went away by the next morning. I let the wax dry overnight, then rubbed it again with a clean cloth. The wax deepened the wood tone a bit and gave it a ‘finished’ feel.

Another shot of the cute little leg.

This shot shows the color a bit better. It also shows off one of my very pressing concerns right now. Pink chairs. I bought them with the thought of making slipcovers or painting/reupholstering them. But they are totally growing on me! So… pink chairs… yay  or nay? If I do anything to them, my current inclination is to reupholster with a natural/light color fabric and lighten up the wood or whitewash it – not full on paint.

The table has now been relocated to the other end of the sofa. It was just hanging out behind the loveseat before because I didn’t really have a place for it. But we FINALLY unpacked our bedroom the other day and I needed a little table to snuggle in between two wing chairs, so there was a bit of side table merry go round happening.

Next up is the sanding of the other side table. I’m sort of dreading it because not only did I spraypaint that sucker black, but it had already been painted white before I bought it. I am going to need LOTS of patience and advil to get down to the bare wood. Especially if my electric sander remains on the MIA list…

This space was a bit of a challenge. Our Minneapolis laundry area was in the basement, with tons of room for Ikea storage. The new space is just big enough for our washer and dryer, so it was all about editing to fit everything in that we needed. In fact, storage in general is turning into a bit of an issue, something I did NOT expect with as much room as we have! We’re used to the whole basement to stash things in, so even though we have so many more ROOMS we actually have a lot less storage space.

The laundry room is right off the kitchen, which I like. Mr. Bug is head washerman in our house, and in Minneapolis he’d be in the basement FOREVER, folding, sorting and monitoring the temperature of the dryer. I missed him. With the laundry room so close I can keep track of him while he engages in his obsessive laundry practices.

We were also happy that the laundry room has this charming little window. Last night after I finished organizing and showed Mr. B where everything was, he asked for a cute little curtain to go in the cute little window. One curtain, burlap, coming right up. With a nice little topiary for the window sill!

We also splurged and bought a new laundry basket from Target. A basket-looking one, although it’s actually some sort of resin or plastic. I looked at real wood baskets, but they were so much more expensive and I was a bit concerned about damp clothes damaging the wicker or sharp wicker basket parts snagging the clothes. This laundry basket replaces the well used plastic one that Mr. Bug tearfully left behind in Minneapolis. It served him well for many years and it was a difficult parting…

There was one built in shelf, SORELY in need of a paint job! I really wanted to do that first, but we’ve agreed to just get everything unpacked first, and then come back for the little updates in the second pass. From left to right we have two clear plastic tubs from Ikea, stacked. Top one has vacuum bags and attachments, bottom one is lightbulbs. The white basket is full of new/unused/clean supplies for cleaning, like rags, sponges, etc. There’s a few bottles of vinegar and Windex, then a white Ikea box with floor cleaning supplies and one bin of general cleaning supplies – Pine Sol and Goo Gone. Finally there’s a magazine file with all the user manuals for our appliances.

I don’t know if it’s really visible in the photos, but everything is labeled with my P-Touch labelmaker. I have a nice box of hanging labels that I use on baskets and things that I don’t want to stick the label to – in the lower right corner of the picture above you can see the basket’s label.

Mr. Bug had this little 2 shelf bookcase when we moved in together. It’s older, but solid wood and I painted it white last year. Top shelf is laundry soap, bottom shelf Dryel and dryer sheets. Our dusters are tucked back in the corner and found a teeny wastebasket in our piles of stuff that actually fit really well. The white basket is for dirty hand towels and such from the kitchen, as the rest of our hampers are on the 2nd floor in our bedroom. I was super excited to find THREE of these white baskets at Ikea in the As-Is section! $7.50 each!

Items that are left for the second pass of the laundry room are painting the shelf and the pole… MAYBE painting the walls? Hooks behind the door for the dusters, aprons and Mr. Bug’s wet swimming trunks, a nice little rug or mat and possibly a 2nd laundry basket. Oh, the luxuries of two laundry baskets…

There you go! Tour over… Here’s the view from the laundry room, looking out through the kitchen and past that to the entryway, stairs to the 2nd floor and beyond that, the formal living room which in the new Bug abode will be the formal dining masquerading as a poker room…

Today I’m all on about our television. When we moved into our last house four years ago we splurged and bought a 40″ LCD TV. (Sidenote: I cannot BELIEVE how much TV prices have dropped in the last four years!!) The TV was fine, we got an espresso veneer TV stand from Target, plopped the TV on top and commenced with watching as much NCIS as possible. I love me some old people TV, after all. The only real problem we had with the TV was that it only had 2 HMDI ports and we really needed 3, so we were forced to watch DVDs on old school video/audio connection – you know the kind with 3 separate plugs? Eventually we ended up cancelling cable all together in favor of a lower monthly bill and Netflix on demand. I missed Abby and the gang at NCIS, but the whole TV thing was FINE. I didn’t think about it much at all, except that I hated how dusty the cords  got.

Cue to the new house. One of the cool things about the house is that it has two fireplaces and one is in the family room where we planned to put the TV. The previous owners had their TV mounted above the fireplace and I hoped that they might leave the mounting brackets when they moved out so we could just put our TV right in. In fact, we sold our TV stand before we left Minneapolis because we agreed that we really wanted it above the fireplace instead of right next to it.

Lucky us, the sellers did, indeed, leave the mounting bracket.

They also left us those awful white shelves in the nook to the right of the fireplace. And now we get to the point of this post… peripherals. Since flatscreen TVs have become so popular, I’ve really liked the super-uncluttered look of wall mounting. But where to put the cable box, DVD player and ever important Roku box? I really dislike the look of a half-used media table, sitting off to the side with no real purpose other than to hold DVD players and such. All that wasted space, what with not holding the TV. And when you throw a fireplace into the mix it makes it even worse. It’s just so…. awkward. What is the point of that elegant TV mounting if one still ends up with the exact same media stand off to the right, partially decomissioned, but still pressed into service to hold the lowly non-mounted supporting cast?

My problem was also compounded by the difficulties for my symmetry-loving pea brain in deciding what to do with the shelving on one side and the doorway on the other. That doorway leads to my new sewing room. My preference would be for either doorways or storage on either side. This is how the previous owners laid out their furniture:

I didn’t care for walkway left on the left side, or how it made the room oddly empty and yet tipping over to the right. I also wasn’t a fan of blocking those lovely, tall windows with big bulky sofas. I played in my 3D software, trying to come up with a furniture layout that worked for me, and it finally came to me that I didn’t HAVE to make access to the sewing room my #1 priority! Right now this is how I have the room…

Note the lovely broom handle, just visible through the doorway into the sewing room…

Also! You can see that I removed the awful shelves. Seriously, people, I almost refused to look at the house because I thought the shelves looked so bad! Here’s a closeup…

They’re actually three separate shelving units that are white melamine with ‘brushed stainless’ supports. I just think they are so bizarre, from the odd choice of style with the rather rustic fireplace to the spacing – see how the little gap between the middle and lower unit is used for the peripherals? I was so not into that.

I thought of putting a sideboard or dresser in the space – something with character that could hold the cable box and hopefully hide it out of sight in some way, but that put me back in the spot of having an orphaned media stand, taking up space that should rightfully have been reclaimed when the TV was mounted on the wall.

I found this photo on Cote de Texas! The nook space and fireplace reminded me of our new layout and I am a huge fan of hidey hole spots!

{Cote de Texas/Dana Wolter}

While I’m not usually a huge fan of drapery unless it’s actually attached to a window, I even liked it in this case to soften up the edges and downplay the jagged arch of my room. Plus, I could install portieres on BOTH sides of the fireplace to balance out the space and add a bit more sound-muffling fabric – the giant room with tile floor echoes like a gymnasium! Here’s a rendering of what I’m thinking…

As longer time readers might now, I have a MacGyver-like need to reuse, thrift or fabricate my home furnishings. As much as I love Pottery Barn, it’s much more fun to struggle for furniture solutions, right? I wandered around the house, measuring and plotting. Eventually I realized that one of the sections from the ‘built in’ windowseat in Minneapolis fits the nook perfectly! The bonus? I already have the cushion made!

Here’s the windowseat in the Minneapolis house. It already looks so odd to me! Did I really live there?

Unfortunately either the cable box grew after I measured it, or I am incapable of using a measuring tape. I removed the shelves (HEAVY!!), leaving giant, unsightly holes in our hard-to-repair knockdown walls. I took apart the windowseat section to cut a hole in the back for the cords to pass through. I bolted the burlap-wrapped top piece to the bench and reattached the legs, moved into place, unhooked all the cables, passed through the hole I’d cut and then… the cable box didn’t fit. I needed 15 inches and only had 14 and a half. I think I’d measured the depth of the cable box rather than the width.

Grr. Here’s how it looks now.

It’s hard to see, but for the Ikea-philes out there, this is a Billy bookcase – the one that’s meant to go on TOP of doorways as a bridge. We added the plastic feet from the Ikea kitchen section that are meant for kitchen cabinets – you have to actually go to the Kitchen section and order from someone there. The plastic feet are awesome because they are meant to work with toekicks (also bought in the kitchen section) that come with easy to use plastic mounting rings and matching iron-on veneer. The toekicks are easy to cut to size with a handsaw and finish with the veneer, making it really easy to make it look built in. Since the shelves are only 11 inches deep we added a slightly wider (15″) piece of burlap-wrapped MDF to the top so Lucy would have enough room to laze about like a walrus.

Unfortunately, this solution is not walrus-friendly – see how the cable box has to sit on top (on the left?) We’re in a holding pattern. Here’s the current options…

Option #1: Do some more engineering. I COULD take the whole thing apart, drill new holes and move the center supports to make enough space for the cable box. Apart from being YET another project, this might be the best solution. I’d planned on making a slipcover for the entire unit to hide away the clutter and to eradicate the espresso finish from my sight. I’m SO over expresso finish, aren’t all y’all? My main concern with this option is that these bookcases aren’t really meant for such overengineering and I’m concerned the resulting piece will be wobbly.

Option #2: Find a bench that DOES fit. I’ve looked a bit and the problem is that most entry-type benches that have storage places where we can put DVDs and perpherals aren’t meant for media so the cubbies are all narrow, similar to our current situation. Also, most would need pass-through holes cut in the back and that’s not super easy to do.

Option #3: Back to some sort of media cabinet. This is Mr. Bug’s favorite option – he’s not a lover of secret hidey hole nooks like me! We’re in agreement, though, that if we DO put a cabinet in the spot, we’d like something that’s more of a sideboard or dresser nature rather than a forlorn media cabinet sidekick. I’d like something of this nature. But I would like it to cost about $750 less than the Pottery Barn pricetag of $999. And potentially less green.

{Pottery Barn | Ellsworth Entertainment Buffet}

Oh, who’m I kidding? I love green.

So. Where do YOU guys put your cable box? Especially if you’ve got your TV stuck to the wall?

Oh the problems of technology.

Also, I snapped a photo of my sewing room. It’s TRASHED, people! Ugh. Moving stinks. Check out my lovely new cutting table! A craigslist find that rules the world. It’s currently sitting on bed risers to get it to the right height, but someday the plan is to attach some fencing finials to the legs for a nicer look. In the meantime I plan to hide the ugly bed risers by just piling all of my supplies on the floor…

ANYway… today I have a little update on my continuing battle with house-related OCD (oh, who’m I kidding. I’m happy to throw my OCD any which way, not just at the house.) Upshot is, I refinished my salad bowl and I’m so overly pleased with myself that I’m likely driving Mr. Bug insane… “Hey, Dan, wanna see my salad bowl? Wanna touch it? Do you like the color? Want to hold it? Should we have salad for dinner tonight???”

You get the picture.

So here’s the bowl in question:

This was a wedding gift from a dear friend. I’d always wanted a giant, wood salad bowl and getting to register for one was one of the reasons I relented and registered for wedding gifts at all. I had a hard time with the concept of telling people what to buy us. As much as I loved the idea of artfully tossed salads in my fancy wood bowl, I have to admit it’s barely been used. There’s only two of us, after all. The scale of the bowl is a bit off for two-person dinners!

The bowl lived in the lazy susan in our old kitchen, but usually ended up stacked under my wok, which I actually DO use a couple times a week. When I pulled it out of the moving box and unwrapped it, I was so dissapointed to see how much it had gotten beat up from  playing mattress for a wok.

I piled the bowl on the ‘donate’ pile and went back to unpacking. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it… I mean, it was a WEDDING gift. And I love salad. And wooden things.

I checked out the details on the crate and barrel site. No information on what to do if the bowl looked like beavers had been chewing on it. Only notes were that it’s made of Mango wood with a walnut stain. I tried rubbing mineral oil on the scratches to see if it helped, but it didn’t. I finally raided the painting supplies for some sandpaper and went after it with a 100 grit piece of paper.

I was amazed by the results! The stain came RIGHT OFF!!

Granted, it created a crazy, fine grey dust that probably gave me lung cancer, but it was AMAZING (also amazing, my new stove was delivered a week ago and it still has papers taped to it.)

Here’s how it looked after I sanded the inside.

After I finished the inside, I flipped it over and did the outside. I toyed with the idea of leaving a strip of stain near the lip of the bowl, but decided to go simple, and just removed everything.

Once I finished sanding with the 100 grit, and brushed off with a paper town and then went over with a 220 grit.

Then it got a nice bath with warm water and dishsoap.

Then I put it out to bask in the sun like a lizard. And dry off. Speaking of lizards, there are GECKOS in my yard!! They are freaky fast, people!

While my salad bowl sunbathed, I searched the interwebs for ideas on ‘finishing’ the bowl. A lot of the sites I looked at said to just leave without any further coating. I wasn’t a fan of that because the wood seemed really dry and I was concerned it would crack. In general, the options seemed to be tung oil, mineral oil or some sort of food-type oil like olive oil. There’s also special butcher block oil that I actually have and probably could have used, but I decided after reading everything to go with mineral oil. My bottle of butcher block oil didn’t list the actual contents, olive oil seemed likely to go rancid at some point and I just happened to have an unopened bottle of mineral oil in my stash.

I bought the mineral oil originally to polish my stainless steel appliances, but in the end pretty much just let Lucy polish ‘em with her tongue. The mineral oil made the bowl really made the wood pretty – darker and richer.

Done! I’m SO glad I figured out a way to reclaim my salad bowl. Now. Perhaps I should start unpacking….

A few other things I’ve been up to…

I managed to organize my spice drawer. My old spice bottles kept falling down in the new space, so I swapped out for these short, fat ones from Ikea. They’re way cuter than my previous spice jars, which were ALSO from Ikea, but had frosted glass and a mean, modern vibe.

They’re alphabetized. And there’s a label maker still smoking from doing its duty.

In VERY exciting news, Mr. Bug and I decided to replace the carpets on the first floor with hardwoods floors, so that was done last week. Here’s a not-very interesting before and after, notable only because I’m standing INSIDE my sewing room! Yay! I was a bit concerned about haveing carpets in my sewing room – all those teeny thread bits and pins hiding out!

Yay!

And with that, I’m off!

P.S. I’m so enthralled with the effectiveness of sandpaper that I’m linking up!

Since I can’t even say for sure if my sewing machines even made it onto the moving truck, I thought I’d commit the blogging no-no of reblogging. My own photos. For those of you who follow me on Twitter or Instagram, this’ll be repeat.

We’ll start at the closing. It went well. We closed on the Texas house first, then we closed on selling the Minnesota house. I was totally sad by the time we headed out – the couple who bought our house seemed super cool and they would have been great neighbors. Except, of course, that’d mean all 4 of us would be living in our teeny-tiny house. (Awkward… she sang to herself in a lilting tone…)

Goodby Edina Realty!

It was super odd riding off into the, um, south? With Mr. Bug, Lucy the hound and all the liquids that the movers wouldn’t take packed into our teeny car. We felt super untethered and willing to engage in a little cross country pillaging. A couple of modern day car-pirates, bent on destruction and personal gain.

But alas, Mr. Bug and I were in too much of a hurry for hijinks on the interstate. We had movers on the way and appliance deliveries scheduled. Also, we’re like old people on car trips. We can make it, oh, about 45 minutes before we have to stop for snacks, restroom breaks and manic searches for wifi to check facebook and work emails. (Sprint 3G + Iowa = SUCKY!!)

Iowa was first. We had so much stuff in our car Lucy was crammed into half the back seat. She was a total drama queen about the whole situation, sleeping in impossibly uncomfortable positions that she concocted just to make me feel bad.

We stopped at a rest stop near Ames, Iowa. It had really cool windows. As I held my phone up above my head, trying to figure out how to get the  artsy angle that I always see on cooler blogs than mine, the rest stop attendant told me my phone was ‘real neat.’ I was a little surprised and suspicious, immediately assuming he was an Android user somehow intent on taking a shot at my iPhone. I have too many opinionated Android users in my life. I honestly think the attendant may have just liked that I have a white phone rather than the usual black.

OK. I give. What’s the secret to photographing the cool angles of architecture. Someone spill. Please?

After Iowa was Missouri, which turned out to be super pretty. At least, I have a vague memory of pretty. The bear started to get carsick partway through and I was understandably distracted. Here we are at the Kum and Go in who-knows-where Missouri. What’s not pictured is me ‘surreptitiously’ stuffing a giant, yak-covered dog bed into a teeny-tiny gas station trash can. I had to remove the cover of the trash can with my bare hands to get it to fit and let me just say it was WAY less gross touching the dog-yak-bed than the trash can lid.

And here you thought this was a sewing blog.

Obviously, I have the cool photo angle for Sonic down pat.

Friday night after a ‘grueling’ 6 hours in the car, Mr. Bug and I checked into our hotel. We usually stay at Red Roof Inns when we travel with Lucy – usually the rooms are pretty decent, with a nice amount of pillows and pretty clean. That was not the case in Kansas City. Let’s never speak of this again.

As anyone who made it through the marvels of elementary school is undoutecely aware of, Kansas City is not actually in Kansas. At least not all of it. I expected to wake up in the morning to have the GPS send us off down I35 the rest of the way to Texas, but I was wrong. The GPS had other plans. We followed her lead and headed straight down through Missouri to Oklahoma. It was a very, VERY pretty drive, marred only by the crushing disappointment of having my first armadillo sighting  be of a not-so-recently deceased armadillo at the side of the road.

The photo above was snapped as we crossed the state line into Oklahoma. I’m afraid my car-pictures do not do justice to the beauty of Oklahoma. Trust me.

Finally after two days on the road, one sick basset, a growing love affair between Mr. Bug and the our new voice activated GPS and one sighting of a clumsy cowboy (complete with horse) while gobbling ice cream outside the A&W in  Atoka, Oklahoma, we made it to Texas.

Bright and early the next morning we arrived at the house, armed with a neurotic hound and Starbucks.

Home sweet home. The big arched window in the front is my new home office. Holla!

Eventually the movers showed up. I immediately understood why Mr. Bug had been so adamant regarding parking in front of the house. And the two houses on either side.

The move in went smoothly, albeit with multiple texts to friends and coworkers in which we attempted to determine the proper etiquette for tipping movers (we bought them lunch, got them bottles of water and gave them a couple of twenties apiece…)

In an effort to relieve stress, I made sure to set up the outside patio area as soon as I could wrestle the the wicker out of the semi. Mr. Bug and Lucy are testing out the new digs.

Mr. Bug and hound had a hard time finding a place to settle inside the house. I wasn’t a huge fan of this arrangement…

I don’t blame them. The house is a giant mess. I honestly do NOT understand how our belongings managed to triple in size to effectively fill up our new house!

Over the weekend we had people in and out of the house in a steady stream. We had a few new appliances delivered, a couple of guys in to give us estimates on replacing the basset hound unfriendly taupe carpet with houndlicious hardwoods, and a few of the neighbor kids made up for their disappointment in our not bringing any new kids to the block by hanging in the backyard with the lazy hound dog. She can charm anyone.

After a crazy weekend of meeting people and assembling desk furniture I was ready for day 1 of working from home. Here’s my new desk. I’m waiting to get my webcam for my work computer – once that arrives, my personal laptop will not be ‘coming’ to work with me.

OK folks. I saved the best for last. Our new house has a pool in the backyard and the previous owners left us a clever, giant rubber duck that’s meant to hold chlorine tablets in it, float around and made everything, you know, chlorinated? ANYWAY, Lucy the Hound HATES THE DUCK. It drives her nuts. Yesterday she had a nice little showdown with it, complete with play bows, backwards scampering, ferocious barking and ridiculous ear flapping. Here she is eyeing up the enemy.

Whew. So that’s what I’ve been up to over the last few days. I gotta tell  you, this is the first move in ages where I didn’t take off enough time to completely unpack before returning to work and it’s KILLING ME! Ah well.

For all y’all who’ve sent emails, etc, thanks for the thoughts and sorry I’ve not responded – ESPECIALLY those of you down this way! Keep ‘em coming! I’ll be unpacked soon and ready for some Texas playdates!!