Archive for February, 2009
Fab Freebie: Cool Shades
Ready for more free stuff? Do I even need to ask?
This week’s giveaway comes from Shades of Light, a local specialty lighting and decor store whose wide selection of products have been featured everywhere from Cottage Living to Coastal Living and even on decor8. And if you live here in Richmond, you’ve probably driven by their location on Broad St. across from Willow Lawn. We actually bumped into them most recently at a local blogging event, where we learned that they’ve started an Inspired Spaces blog which features expert insights on lighting your home, as well as great before & after pictures of their design projects.
Shades of Light offers a wide selection of styles (vintage, classic, contemporary, etc) across a wide variety of items (lamps, chandeliers, pendants, rugs, mirrors and even furniture) which you can browse in their store, online and by catalog. But this week we’re giving away their exclusive natural-meets-elegant bamboo table lamp to one lucky winner, who will get to choose between the silver one and the black one pictured below.
To enter the contest just comment on this post with the words “LIGHT ME UP” by Wednesday, February 25th at 8pm EST. While you’re at it tell us what else makes you light up with excitement (chocolate? weekends? chihuahuas?). This prize is available to residents of the lower 48 United States and, as usual, there’s only one entry per e-mail address allowed. One winner will be selected using random.org and announced later in the week. Good luck…
If you’re looking for more info about our giveaways you can find it here. All images courtesy of Shades of Light.
The Ceramic Animal Club
It looks like I’m not the only one with a penchant for white ceramic animals. I just cracked open my new copy of Thom Filicia Style (I highly recommend it by the way- so inspiring!) and noticed a bit of a theme…
Thom loves ceramic animals too. In fact, I spotted at least 14 different varieties (!) throughout the gorgeously designed pages of his book. That’s gotta be a record or something.
And of course we can’t forget the famous Nate Berkus ceramic rhino (possibly this $3480 version right here)…
…that inspired my recent Valentine’s Day rhino from zgallerie (for just a bit less):
We picked up this handsome pooch for just $29 at HomeGoods last March (around $436 cheaper than this almost identical version from Perch). It was love at first sight.
And two years ago we snagged this white iron bull for $25 at a flea market in North Carolina. He even gets festive Christmas ornament earrings every December. If that’s not love I don’t know what is.
Maybe we should start a Facebook group. Or host a ceramic animal meet and greet. Oh my goodness, how weird would that be? At least we don’t have names for them. So what about you guys? Is there anything that you love to collect? From milk glass to Disney paraphernalia, we wanna know what you happily hoard.
Click here for another ceramic animal that really gets my heart pumping. Too bad he’s $525. Images courtesy of Thom Filicia Style and Nate Berkus.
Reader Redesign: Bathroom Brilliance
When we laid eyes on this major bathroom makeover we almost couldn’t believe it was the same space. Anneliese sent us these pictures in response to our toilet paper post a while back, and we have to say that not only do we love her makeover but we love her TP storage as well. Here’s her letter:
This is a combo email to show you the before/after we did in our not-so-fabulous master bathroom and also how we store the TP. My fiancé and I live in a seen-better-days adobe in Albuquerque. The first project we tackled was the bizarre master bathroom, which featured 60s floor tile, a monstrous vanity cabinet, a mauve toilet, and a 28” high bathtub that I had to use a step-stool to get into.
The finished project featured a slate-esque porcelain floor tile, matte subway wall tile, an antique spice cabinet as a medicine cabinet, and the prettiest gray-blue-green paint. Oh, and a bright orange floor mat that was the result of a showdown between my fiancé and I on the third hour of a massive IKEA run. It’s our bit of quirk. As you can see, we’re big fans of honest display in the bathroom- no having to find the mysterious replacement rolls when we run out! Thanks for all your posts on the trials and tribulations of having a beautiful, functional space on a budget! -Anneliese
From the wire TP basket and the rich slate-like flooring to the abundance of white and the deep wood accents (that shower curtain rod!) this is one fabulous bathroom. Thanks so much for the pics guys! It’s amazing what a dated and dingy bathroom can become with a little elbow grease and a lot of imagination.
Don’t Let The Bed Bugs Bite
I owe you fair warning that this post might give you the willies. It’s a horror story from my renter days that I wanted to share in hopes that it may help someone experiencing something similar.
When I made my post-graduation move to New York City in June 2004, I rented a two-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Queens with a college roommate. It was less than nice, but my roomie and I were just happy to find a place with big bedrooms with cheap rent. All in all, it seemed like the perfect place to cram with my seen-better-days IKEA furniture, “decorate” with cheap posters and kick off life as an adult. Little did I know I’d actually end up living like this:
But let’s start at the beginning. I randomly woke up in the middle of one August night and headed to the kitchen for some water. I turned on the light and immediately noticed a small, brown bug sitting on my shoulder. As I turned my head to flick it away I saw several more crawling down my back. Naturally, I got some major heebie-jeebies and ripped my shirt off so fast you would’ve thought it was on fire.
I darted back to my room, figuring I’d accidentally left my window cracked and let some flies or gnats creep in. When I turned on the light I saw two things: (1) closed windows and (2) several dozen bugs swarming my bed and the surrounding walls. Gross, gross, gross.
I started to kill the ones I could catch, but quickly realized they were appearing faster than I could squash them. I turned to my next best defense: the Internet. Some quick Googling revealed that I had a bed bug infestation (I know what you’re thinking – those things are real?!)
Bed bugs are very real. They’re small (pencil eraser sized) flat insects that are nocturnal and feed on warm-blooded creatures, which certainly explains their love of sleeping humans. It’s rare that you catch them in action like I did, so most people detect an infestation from the bites they find on their skin. Both my roommate and I had lots of those (she even had one on her eyelid) but made the common mistake of assuming they were just mosquito bites. You can also look for stains on your bedding: both their droppings (small black dots usually at the edges of your mattress) and blood stains (when you roll over and “pop” one that just drank). Gross, I know.
So how did we get bed bugs? They’ve been making a resurgence in the US lately, especially in big, transient cities like New York. Despite popular belief, an infestation isn’t an indication of filth, but rather a a result of increased international travel (frequently found in hotels, bed bugs come home on your suitcases and clothes) and decreased use of DDT in pesticides (assuming they were mostly gone, people stopped making chemicals to kill them). How they made it to our apartment? No one really knows- except that our wall-to-wall carpet surely didn’t help.
Unfortunately, bed bugs are notoriously hard to get rid of. We were told it often requires multiple applications of a pesticide to ensure the problem is gone. Our (somewhat shady) landlord was too cheap to call a professional, so he hired a friend to spray our place with some mystery chemical in all the cracks and crevices around our apartment (this involved dismantling all of our IKEA furniture- bed bugs love dowel holes!).
In addition to the pesticide treatment (which I will admit wasn’t very green at all- but we were getting eaten by bugs at night and our landlord wore the pants), my roommate and I had to take several steps to help ensure that we quarantined any of the bugs that miraculously escaped the chemical treatment. This involved washing all fabrics in hot water (keep in mind this meant lugging ALL of our clothes, sheets, and towels two blocks to a laundromat) and then storing them in plastic for 2 months. Bed bugs apparently have trouble walking on slick surfaces like plastic or metal, so keeping everything in trash bags helped keep them from stowing away anywhere new. So that’s why my closet looked like this for 8 weeks:
And since the bugs could still be living deep inside our mattresses, we were advised to buy plastic mattress covers (with zippers!) and leave them on until we could afford new beds. And since checking for bite marks in the morning was the the only way to tell if the problem was solved, we had several unsettling nights where we basically “sacrificed” our bodies to be sucked on for the sake of seeing if they were gone. Here’s a pic of me before bed one night on my sheet-less, plastic-covered bed. Despite it being summer, I covered myself in as much clothing as possible to limit my bite count. Oh, and that annoyed look is 100% intentional too.
After a couple of weeks of biteless nights, we officially declared ourselves in the clear. In the end, it had been about a 12 week ordeal. I’m usually not one to freak out about bugs, but these suckers (literally) caused an insane amount of distress – from arguing with our landlord over who was responsible for treatment to eventually replacing every piece of furniture I owned (not ’til I moved out, mind you). I truly wouldn’t wish bed bugs on anyone.
But bed bugs aren’t the end of the world. If you find yourself infested, do your research, rely on professionals and brace yourself for a few weeks of uncomfortable living. Hopefully in the 4+ years since my ordeal their treatment methods have improved. The best treatment for bed bugs is obviously prevention. When traveling, check hotel mattresses for stains and keep your suitcase off the floor. At home, keep your carpets vacuumed and if you think you’re at risk for an infestation (lots of globetrotting guests, for instance) think about coating the feet of your bed in Vaseline or sitting them in a tin can so the bugs can’t travel from the floor to the mattress (bed bugs can’t fly, so as long as things are slippery they won’t be able to bridge that gap).
Hopefully this long post hasn’t put you to sleep. But if it did, I’ll hope you slept tight and didn’t let the… well, you know the rest.
Learn more about bed bugs here and here. Images courtesy of Pestec and American Classic Online.
Reader Redesign: A Smokin’ New Kitchen
Jessica accomplished a major kitchen makeover in under 10K- and that’s no easy feat when you’re gutting the place and replacing everything from the appliances to the cabinets and counters. Here’s her letter:
I love your blog! My husband and I purchased our first home this past June and did a lot of work on it to get it ready to live in. I just wanted to share some pictures of our kitchen redo! We got the house in the middle of June and moved in the end of July. We gutted the kitchen and redid it floor to ceiling in about a month and a half. We redid the floors, scraped the popcorn ceilings and retextured, installed new cabinets and countertops, got new appliances, painted, etc. A whole overhaul. Oh, and I was about eight months pregnant when we bought the house! It was pretty crazy! Luckily we have lots of handy family members and friends who came together to help us finish the house before our daughter arrived. We did the whole kitchen for under $10,000- I’m not sure of the exact total… we were just glad to get in the house! I just wanted to, well, show off a bit! Thanks, and keep up the good work! – Jessica
Thanks so much for the gorge makeover pics Jessica! We can’t believe that you totally transformed the heart of your new home in a month and a half and on a budget… all while eight months pregnant! My hero.
