Archive for May, 2009
Reader Redesign: Ugh to Uh.Mazing
When Alexis sent her fabulous kitchen makeover pics our way we could barely contain ourselves. Here’s her letter:
I love your blog and read it daily. My husband and I bought our house a year ago and are working our way to redoing just about every space. You guys are a huge inspiration. I wanted to share our kitchen before and after… we’re currently working on the adjoining family room where the fireplace is, but we aren’t quite there yet! Dark wood cabinets, knobs and chair rail molding really made the kitchen feel much smaller than it is. The photo I sent is not even a true “before” since we had already taken down the maroon wallpaper which made it even darker. Although we painted the cabinets, replaced the appliances, added a backsplash, and got new counters, one of my favorite parts of the makeover was really affordable. I bought those cork squares you used inside your kitchen cabinet and hot glued them to the old laminate to create a custom cork board in the desk area. Great to keep all those lists off the desk and still see my to-do’s and invites as reminders! Here’s a quick source list for your curious readers:
Paint: walls are Butter from Restoration Hardware while cabinets are semi-gloss White by Benjamin Moore, hardware: the knobs and pulls are also from RH (I was working there at the time and got a sweet discount!), flooring: we replaced all the various flooring on the first floor (carpet, vinyl, oak) with vertical bamboo, appliances: new stainless steel appliances by Kenmore, countertops: Silestone from Home Depot and butcher block on the island, backsplash: cheap white subway tiles over counters, pendant: West Elm (we cut the cord to hard-wire it).
Hope you enjoy the transformation at least a 1/4 as much as I enjoy your site. -Alexis
Enjoy it? We live for it! Here’s the ugh-inducing before:
And here’s the ooh la la after:
Is that not appetizing and amazing? Great job Alexis! We love your light and modern kitchen transformation (especially that crafty pinboard project and the lovely lamp over the dining table). What about you guys? Let’s play a little game I like to call Pick Your Favorite Part.
Teresa’s Design Dilemma
Teresa’s living room is primed for a major makeover. Here’s her letter:
Hi Youngsters! I need help with my living room that opens to the kitchen. I’d like both spaces to feel cohesive. I like casual, modern and airy style- basically your living room and den!!! Everything in my living room can go, but I’d like to keep the ceiling fan (they don’t call it Hotlanta for nothing). In the kitchen, we’re keeping the white tile backsplash but the cabinets can be painted (and the current countertops and floor will also be going during the course of our kitchen update so, please disregard them when choosing a color scheme). The tan wall paint in the living room can stay or go. Personally, I like neutrals, blues and greens, but I’m really open to whatever will make the space look light and airy. The room also needs to be multifunctional (we need a dining area, seating area and if humanly possible, an office area with a bit of storage for a few books and files). Please excuse the condition of our home (we’re currently adding more cabinets to the kitchen and have had to move our small office set up and other random furniture into my no longer recognizable living room). Oh and we are trying to avoid the major sticker shock of totally redoing the living room from the rooter to the tooter. I know this one must be quite the challenge… thanks for your creative genius and we look forward to what you come up with! -Teresa
This space is chock full of potential. Here’s the plan:
And now for the mood board breakdown.
Read the rest of this entry »
Planting An Edible Garden
John and I love food. A lot. In fact we both took a “how-compatible-are-you” test back when we started dating and we both listed eating as one of our favorite hobbies. So it’s no surprise that we finally got around to converting a formerly bushy bed in our backyard into an herb, vegetable & fruit garden for chowing down on fresh and organic produce all summer and into fall.
We cleared the bushes out (although we kept a little rose bush in the corner) and planted some organic lettuce seeds (along with a $9 raspberry bush from Lowe’s) back in March. And then a little peony plant surprised us by popping up in the back of the garden out of nowhere. Bonus! The next step was hitting up our local farmer’s market (South Of The James Farmer’s Market here in Richmond) for some delicious veggies and herbs. The vendors are always amazing, as are their wares. Check out these cheerful buckets of blooms…
… and these gorgeous radishes all purple and plentiful…
In fact the fruit and veggies were so enticing that we couldn’t return home without snagging a big box of fresh strawberries and a bag of arugula. But we also came home with eight new plants for our garden. For just $10 (!!!) we grabbed: one cherry tomato plant, one golden tomato plant, two basil plants, one zinnia, one parsley plant, one swiss chard and one oregano plant. Along with our existing rose bush, our new raspberry bush, our surprise peony and our newly sprouting lettuce, we knew those eight additions would be a great start to growing our own fresh eats out back.
But we also knew that we needed to add some lush and lovely evergreens to keep the space from looking sad and bare in the winter months once the herbs and veggies disappear. We swung through Lowe’s and picked up two Winter Gem Boxwoods (for $14.98 each) and one Cypress King’s Gold (for $14.98) to add color, structure and year-round interest. Then we returned home and laid everything out to come up with a loose idea of our layout.
With a rough idea of the plant placement under our belts, it was time for some quick soil amending. Although you can do this extremely thoroughly with a rototiller (they can be rented from Lowe’s and Home Depot), since it was such a small area we decided to rough up the soil with a shovel. Yeah it took a bit of elbow grease but we were able to dig about 8″ into the soil and get it ready for some pretty delicious organic nutrients (free courtesy of our backyard compost bin).
Not only did we add a good amount of compost to our roughed up dirt, we also threw down some nutrient rich topsoil just to be sure that our little sprouts would continue to, well, sprout. Then we raked everything together and turned the soil for a while until it looked blended and ready for planting.
There are many different formulas when it comes to amending soil (depending on whether you have sandy or clay conditions to start with, etc), but we have found that compost is really the magic touch to any garden- you just can’t go wrong adding some organic, nutrient-rich compost.
Then it was time to plant everything (we tossed a bit more compost into each hole), and afterwords we mulched the whole garden to keep weeds at bay and help everything stay moist. Here’s Burger stealing our new garden’s thunder. He’s such a camera hog. As you can see, the three evergreens provide structure and fullness that will last throughout the year while our rose bush (back left), raspberry bush (back middle) and peony (back right) will add eye candy and mouth candy too.
We also have a cherry tomato plant (in front of the rose bush), some swiss chard (in front of our boxwood) a zinnia (between the boxwood and the cypress), two basil plants (on either side of the cypress), and some parsley (to the right of the cypress). And of course there’s another tomato plant, some lettuce that we planted in March sprouting up and some oregano on the other side of the boxwood on the right (not pictured).
Here’s a close-up of the gorgeously colorful swiss chard and our surprise peony that’s ready to pop.
We love our little garden and we already have big plans to spruce things up even more (adding some pretty trellises for our raspberry and tomatoes to climb, power washing the brick, bringing in more herbs and veggies if we’re successful with our first attempts, etc).
But for now we’re taking pleasure in the simple things. Fresh basil…
… pretty red blooms…
… and raspberries that should be appearing soon.
We also love that we can actually see the garden from our sunroom. Now there’s no excuse not to eat our yeilds! Here’s a shot from above (I was standing on the daybed) just for one more vantage point.
And now for the budget breakdown. Eight herbs/veggies ($10) + three evergreens ($44.94) + mulch/top soil ($5) = $59.94. Not too shabby, right?
So what about you guys? Do you grow anything edible? Any plans for a container garden or even some windowsill herbs in your future? Tell us all about your planting to-do list.
Fab Freebie: Addicted To Silk
***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries***
This week’s giveaway is très magnifique. Why? Because it’s coming your way from Paris, France. And because it’s beautiful, of course.
Home Addict creates beautiful textiles for your home using pure silk, ancient weaving techniques and fair trade practices. While each piece is designed in Paris, they’re all hand-made in South East Asia over several days using the intricate ikat technique. The results are luxurious items for your home like table runners, room dividers, throws and wall hangings. And we’re excited to announce that Home Addict has offered up one of the colorful wall hangings shown on this page (valued from $120+) to one lucky reader. And if you don’t have the perfect wall for it, the beautiful silk fabric would look just as great reincarnated as a few pillows, a runner, or even a new seat cushion!
To enter just comment on this post with the words “I’M ADDICTED” by Wednesday, May 20th at 8pm EST. And, for fun, why not tell us what else you’re addicted to – peanut M&Ms? gossip magazines? going a bit above the speed limit? (no need to admit anything more illegal than that, mind you). Only one entry per e-mail address is permitted as usual, and one lucky winner will be chosen using random.org and announced later in the week. Oh and the good news is that this is a worldwide contest- so they’ll ship to every corner of the globe! Good luck…
Get the full scoop on our freebies in our Giveaway FAQs. Images courtesy of Home Addict.
If At First You Don’t Succeed, Make Lanterns Out Of Bulb Covers
A few of you actually called us on something that we said a while back for our BHG & Home Depot sponsored porch makeover project. In the early stages we mentioned that we were planning to whip up some twine mobiles among a slew of other projects but there was nothing of the sort in the big reveal. Of course we were allowed to change gears mid stream, but you can imagine how thrown we were when our little twine mobile project was a total bust and were back to the drawing board for a way to add a bit of ambiance to the corner of the porch. Sure things worked out in the end, but here’s the long circuitous route that we took to create those hanging candle holders that we used to gussy up our front porch:
A while back John and I had seen a really cool idea in ReadyMade magazine about using string, a balloon and fabric stiffener to create a one of a kind hanging light fixture. So when we were trolling Home Depot for something that we could hang to create interest on our porch, as soon as we laid eyes on some jute twine we decided there had to be a way to make some great woven mobiles using the same basic method. Sure twine is heavier than string and Home Depot didn’t happen to sell fabric stiffener (all of our tools, materials, and furnishings had to come directly from Home Depot so we couldn’t hit up a craft store for any supplies), but we were certain there was a way that we could make those twine mobiles work.
We decided to switch out the suggested “fabric stiffener” for indoor/outdoor urethane (in clear gloss) which we reasoned would stiffen the twine after we wrapped it around a balloon to create a nice round shape. We figured that it would harden to create a pretty strong shell around our mobiles so they would keep their globe-like shape and could happily live outdoors through rain or snow. First John blew up a balloon and tied the end of the twine to the end of it. Then we submerged the twine in urethane and wrapped it around the balloon to create an awesome woven orb.
It was definitely a messy job, but doing it outside over a huge piece of cardboard made it go pretty quickly and before we knew it we had a good thing going on.
Within about thirty minutes, we had three different sized twine mobiles hanging to dry in the garage. All we would have to do is pop those balloons after the twine stiffened up for a foolproof trio of textural mobiles to add interest and fun to our little porch project.
Or so we thought…
Yes, that’s me holding our beloved twine creations. And yes, they look like something a giant cat might cough up. Before we left town to celebrate Easter with the fam they were hanging happily in the garage, but somehow in the time that we were gone they experienced technical difficulties that caused them to collapse prematurely. We have a few theories about why this happened (#1: the urethane was so corrosive that it actually ate through the balloons causing them to pop before the twine had adequately dried therefore resulting in the demise of the orb shape, #2: the twine is just too heavy for the urethane to support in that globe-like shape, #3: light cover lanterns were our destiny so the universe intervened to sabotage our first project). Whichever was the case we were sure sorry when we came home to this sad state of affairs.
So it was back to Home Depot to totally redeem ourselves. Or fail miserably under pressure.
Our first thought was that we could save our twine mobiles (first stage of grief: denial) by sticking something round inside of them to stretch ‘em back out into their old globe-like shape. So when we happened across these cheap-o bulb covers in the lighting department (just $4.99 a pop) we decided to snag three of them and give ‘em a whirl. We intentionally went with the thickest ribbed glass we could find so they wouldn’t be too delicate for the great outdoors, and as soon as we loaded them into the car our conversation shifted from trying to save the hairballs, er twine mobiles, to making little hanging candle holders with our new discoveries. So we stormed back into Home Depot to grab some thin wire for stringing up our light covers.
But how did we get our bulb covers to hang? A little trial and error taught us that securing a ring of wire tightly around the neck of the glass cover was step one. We used our needle nosed pliers to cut the wire with about an inch of extra wire on each side. Then we twisted both ends around each other to create a strong, tight bond, so there was now a ring of wire that rested firmly beneath the lip of the glass (using our needle nosed pliers to tighten things certainly came in handy). Then we cut a super long piece of wire to create the “handle” that we’d use to hang our candle holders from the cup hooks that we installed in the ceiling. We secured this extra long piece of wire by looping it under the existing wire ring around the neck and twisting about an inch of wire on each side around the ring and itself to secure it in place. We had about a half inch of extra wire on each side so you can see how we tucked it tightly around the lip of the glass cover at a right angle, which seemed to help the handle from sliding around the ring (each side stayed more securely in place across from the other after we added this modification).
In short: a ring of wire around the neck of the glass bulb cover was the foundation that the loop of wire for hanging could be twisted around so the whole shebang could be strung up with a cute pillar candle inside. Each lantern took about five minutes to make and ours have been hanging happily on the front porch through rain and even a tornado warning for the past month.
In the end of course we love the added ambiance that our trio of candle-lit accents bring to the front porch project (all for just $20!), so although we’re sad that our little twine mobiles were a bust, we’re happy to say that the second time really was the charm for this project.
So how about you guys? Have you used anything unexpected (from the hardware store or even the grocery store) to amp up your home decor? Do tell.
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