Another arty update

I think I told you that I was working on finding some art for my bathroom.  It had been quite the struggle to find something that fit this oddly-shaped, long, blank wall.

I didn't want it to be too overwhelming in terms of color or size because I worried it would make the very small space feel even more cramped.  I tossed around a bunch of ideas, from just painting that wall an accent color, to hanging 3 or 4 large nature photos, to stenciling on the wall, to having some hanging plants or something.  Originally, this was where the Loteria pictures were intended to go, but when I got them in there, the colors just seemed to be too much for the small space.

Eventually, I found these simple bird-shaped things made out of bent wood from West Elm.  I wish I could attach the photo from the website here, but it looks like they must have taken it down.  Here's what they looked like laid out on my floor after I took them out of the box.

Anyway, what I liked about them was that since it was a set of three birds that were all slightly differently shaped and were different sizes, I could space them out over the wall in any way that felt right, without worrying about being concerned about spacing and symmetry. 

My first obstacle was to figure out HOW to hang them.  The only things attached to the birds were these little gold hoops.

I took a trip to the hardware store to see if they had any brilliant ideas of what to do with them, because I was kind of stumped.  Surely they didn't intend to just use regular ugly nails to hang these on?  Unfortunately, the hardware store guy I talked was zero percent helpful.  I mean, I guess he tried, but he was suggesting I use these ugly, bulky brackets, or fishing wire or something.  I finally just decided to try my best with what I could find.  I ended up locating these tiny little finishing nails that I thought might be just unobtrusive enough to do the trick.

When it came time to hang the birds, I used my favorite technique, which works best when I'm hanging things by myself.  I made little cutouts of the birds, taped them up and started moving them around on the wall until I found an arrangement I liked.  I eventually settled on this angled arrangement. 

I basically eyeballed their placement, although I did do a little bit of measuring to make sure they were roughly centered on the wall and that the space between the birds was more or less consistent.  When I drew the cutouts, I marked dots where the nails should go, so that once they were taped to the wall, I literally just put nails in where the holes were.  Here's the first one:

This first one showed me that the finishing nails were going to work pretty well.  They're very small, and as long as I drove the nail in just far enough for the gold loop to hang on, they were perfectly sturdy and unobtrusive.  Here's what it looked like from the side.

So I kept going and once I got them all up the wall, here was the finished product.

Yay!  I really like all the wood tones in this room, and so far, I'm enjoying the birds.  The only potential downside is that from certain angles, the wall still looks kind of bare, so I'm going to see if that changes over time or if continues to nag at me.  I think it's a very fine line in here, where if you add too much in, I think it might just feel claustrophobic.

One thing I do quite like is the new view I have when I walk by the bathroom in the hallway.  I get to see this!

Cute!  So with this, I'm thinking the bathroom is done for the foreseeable future.  Feels good to check it off the list!  Let's revisit the before and after one last time.

A new idea for the windows

I recently fell a little further down the home improvement rabbit hole with my discovery of Houzz.com.  Dangerously fun.  I was playing around on there looking at kitchens, since that's my most exciting project to daydream about, but I didn't really have anything specific I was looking to do. 

One of the pictures I stumbled on was this one:

http://www.houzz.com/photos/7602812/Sunny-Pennsylvania-Kitchen-Update-transitional-kitchen-philadelphia

The kitchen didn't totally blow me away, but the window shades really caught my attention.  I really liked the natural texture, and I liked how light and airy they felt.  The scale of the kitchen in the photo kind of reminded me of mine, so I started thinking about how it would look in my space.  I have these white shutters on all of the windows in the main living spaces on my first floor:

It's hard to take great pictures of them because they do actually let in a fair amount of sun.  I mostly leave them closed because having them open to let in full sunlight means that they extend out from the window like 7 or 8 inches, so nothing can be too close to the wall.  They've been nice things to have the whole time I've lived here, and I've never really thought about replacing them because I couldn't think of something I liked better - until now.

With the addition of the wooden frames of the Loteria pictures, I'm now thinking it would be nice to add some more of that natural texture with some natural woven shades like the ones in the Houzz.com picture.  It would not only tie in with those, but with the fabric-covered light fixture I have over the dining table.  PLUS, the major benefit would be that the windows could then be completely open every day, letting in more light without having to sacrifice space around the wall.

I'm not quite ready to pull the trigger on it yet, and even if I was, there's approximately 1 million options to choose from, so I took the next best step today.  I ordered some free samples from Smith & Noble, which should be arriving late in the month so I can start playing around with those and see which color or fabric would look the best. 

La Loteria

Back when I went to visit my friend Alex in San Antonio in May, I picked up some great new art.  You've already met Zelda the Pig:

The other stuff I got is art based on this Mexican version of Bingo called "Loteria." 

I saw it in the same store that we found Zelda, and knew I had to get some.  There were a ton of different pictures to choose from - the question was which ones!  I originally thought I'd get them to go in my bathroom, so I was looking for something with the greens and blues in the shower curtain, so these are the ones I picked out.

These all had the colors I liked, and I also got a kick out of getting a couple that had instruments in them.  And I like frogs.  Not sure why I got the scorpion except that I really loved the yellow background.

Well, when I got them home and started playing around with them, it just didn't quite make sense in the bathroom.  It wasn't terrible, but I think with all the color it just felt a little too "fiesta" for me in there.  So I did what I always do, which was to sit around and stare at it for a while.  And this time, it was like...months.  I just couldn't make a decision - I knew I wanted to have them somewhere in the house, but couldn't figure out where the best place for them was.  Leave it to someone else to figure it out! 

My friend Ellen came over to check things out, and helpfully suggested that they might look nice against the green wall in the dining area and kitchen.  There's a big wall where this art was:

Eventually...after delaying a while longer...I finally took care of trying out Ellen's suggestion today.  My first roadblock was that 3 of the 4 pictures had the same frame and were the same size, but one (my beloved frog), was a slightly different shade of wood and slightly smaller in the frame.  Here you can see the difference:

My original plan had been to make it a 2x2 postage stamp kind of arrangement, but that clearly wouldn't work any longer if one of these things was not like the other.  I cut out some paper versions of all four of them, and played around with other arrangements on the wall.  I tried a bunch of stuff, including trying to figure out whether I could hang 3 of them together, and the last one somewhere else, but finally I stumbled on an arrangement I liked.

This one had the advantage of distracting the eye a little bit from the odd-man-out frame, and didn't draw too much attention to its different size, so I thought it was a good solution, and was a little bit more interesting to look at anyway.

So my next two projects are to spackle over some of the old nail holes in the green wall...

...and then to find a new home for the pictures that were previously there.  More on that next time!

What has two thumbs and likes to de-clutter?

As I mentioned in my last post, I did a little bit of re-organizing this week in order to free up some space for Zelda the Pig.

I had these cookbooks in a cart in the bay window area, and as you can see in the picture, it was kind of a messy situation.

Not great.  In moving the cart out in order to clear space for Zelda, I had to find a new spot for the cookbooks that were there.  I happened to have this IKEA hutch on the other side of the couch that has housed this ancient stereo ever since I moved in here 7 years ago.  (And I don't even want to know how many years before that, when it was in my parents' house!)

Cassette player - I know!  OLD!!

It got even worse recently when I started clearing out my VHS tape collection.  I had probably at least a hundred of them stored in my big white bookcase in the living room until several months ago, and then decided to clear them out of there and update my media to something *not* from the last century.  (Honestly, though, I think this was actually a 2013 New Year's resolution, so when I say "recently" that's really just to cover for my embarrassingly slow progress on this work.)

Knowing that I was most likely just going to trash most of them, I thought it would be actually helpful to not have another storage place to put them, and to just keep them kind of stacked around - you know, as a reminder to do something about them.  This approach sounds sort of weird, but it's worked for me before; if I just make myself crazy enough with a particular mess, eventually I'll be motivated enough to do something about it.

And in this case it worked!  Although clearly it took a looooooooong time.  I tried a bunch of different things to dispose of the VHS tapes.  First, I tried selling the Disney ones online through Amazon.  I sold a couple, but it actually cost me money to do it because of the high shipping costs.  So there was that.  A huge number of the commercial movies I had I donated to a nursing home run by the husband of a friend of mine.  Apparently the old folks really dig my taste in movies :)  There was a third group of tapes that were old Berg home movies - mostly dance videos - and I couldn't bear to throw those out.  And let's be honest, the world would probably be a worse place without those things floating around.  So this morning, I took action.

That's right, I got rid of ALL of it.  I took the stereo to an electronics recycling location, and dropped it off.  And the home dance movies I took to UPS to ship them off to this website which will digitize them for me and put them on DVDs.  The result is freeing up an amazing amount of space, both in and around the hutch. 

That corner feels so much more open than it did before.  I think eventually I'm going to get an iPhone or iPod dock with a CD player to put on top of the hutch, so that I can still have some kind of music-playing device with better speakers than my computer.

But for the time being, I'm just delighted to have finally been able to check a few major items off a longstanding to-do list.  Productivity rules!

Some arty updates

Since I finished the cabinets, I've had a bunch of people asking me what the next big thing I'm going to tackle is, and to be honest, I'm not sure.  There's a bunch of stuff that I'd love to do, but it all costs money, so for the time being, I've been contenting myself with some less expensive updating - mostly adding art and decluttering.

First up was finally hanging up some pretty sea glass art that I bought when I was in Barbados in February.

I know, I know - a ridiculous delay.  I have no excuses for why it took so long.  I bought it there with the express purpose of hanging it in my bathroom, which, as it turned out, worked great!  Only thing is that I didn't end up hanging it where I thought I would.  Originally I was thinking I would hang it up as part of a larger gallery wall on this big, blank wall.

But when I put it up in context, it was clear that it was just too small, and it would take way too many pieces to make a gallery-style wall work very well.  But!  On the other wall, they fit perfectly.

So I still haven't solved the problem of the big, blank wall, but I'm enjoying this little addition.

Meanwhile, on my trip to San Antonio a few weeks ago to visit my friend Alex (HI, ALEX!!), I had the pleasure of visiting the fiesta store (not sure what it's official name was).  This store, you guys, was amazing.  All kinds of insane Mexican art in fun colors.  This little cutie grabbed my eye right away.

I named her Zelda, after my new best friend (Alex's daughter), who I met in San Antonio (HI ZELDA!!!).  Both the human Zelda and I were immediately drawn to this little blue flying pig.  I dig the colors, and the recycled metal aesthetic.  Kind of like if you went to a junk heap and just happened to magically find all of the pieces that would perfectly fit together to create an adorable pig.

Zelda is now hanging out in the area near the bay windows in my living room, which used to look like this:

I had this rolling TV cart thing there, which I used to store cookbooks mostly, but it also became a repository for whatever other crap was floating around.

Not cute.  You know what IS cute, though?  This guy.

I'm enjoying having her sit here kind of near the couch where I can stare at her all the time. 

Anyway, so to return to the un-cute TV cart, I've been thinking about moving it out of that nook for a while, because it's kind of a crowded area.  Having that there, plus the ottoman and the tree, was a little much and felt kind of messy.  I would actually love to have another place to store the ottoman, because I actually don't use it all that often except when I have company and need more seating.  Haven't figured that one out yet, but I took one step in the right direction by getting rid of the TV cart and putting all the cookbooks and papers elsewhere - more on that another time.

So the end result is nice, though these pictures don't totally do it justice because of the bad lighting (sorry about that).  It feels a little more open, a little less cluttered, and a little more piggy.

Perfect.

Lightening up

Now that I finally finished up the kitchen cabinets, I can share another update that I made a month or so ago.  Why the delay?  Because I'm incredibly vain, and I've been waiting to show it until I could take some nice pictures after all the painting was done.

It's a mirror!  (I mean, obviously it's a mirror - I just meant that to convey my excitement about it.)  I decided to add it at the same time I decided to paint the cabinets, because I thought that, along with the white paint, it would help with lightening up the kitchen.  Look at all that beautiful light!

It certainly makes for a nice change from the old set-up, which looked like this:

God, it's SO BLAND!!  I can't get over how long I lived with it like that.  Okay, just one more ugly picture and then back to the prettiness.

As much as I liked that Asian-y design thing I had on the wall before, I think the scale of the mirror is so much better, and having that extra depth in the room is really nice.  Not to mention the difference I think it makes with the light.

I also like how the shape kind of ties in with the rug in the living room.

Things are looking good around here, folks. 

Kitchen cabinets: Episode 6

Hallelujah, they're done! 

It's taken three months, and I don't even know how many hours of painting, but THEY'RE DONE.  I'm very pleased with the end result. 

The goal was to lighten things up in my otherwise dark kitchen, and I'm happy because I think the white paint job really accomplished that.  The only way to really tell the difference (for those of you not actually present in the house) is to see the before and afters, so without further ado...

Remember this bland scene?

I can't get over what a fantastic change that is.  I mean, the green walls made a huge difference in terms of adding some personality, but even if you look at how it was with the green walls and the natural-wood cabinets, it still was pretty dark.

I still haven't made a final decision on leaving the two open cabinets on or off.  I like the idea aesthetically, and functionally it's been great too, to have such easy access to all the stuff in those cabinets.  Just not 100% sure yet, so I'll probably sit with it for a few more days and try it out the other way too before making a decision.  I mean, hey, it's waited this long, it can probably stand a few more days of indecision.

So there you have it.  Probably the last big renovation I'll do to the kitchen until I have enough money to tear everything out and start over.  Except for the overhead light.  And the dishwasher.  Okay, maybe spoke too soon.  Sigh...