Archive for March, 2011
Finials (They Stay) & Art (Might Go)
Remember when we took Ed The Bed’s top rails off and mentioned needing some finials to finish things off? That’s where a finial fashion show comes in. Yup, I’m nerdy like that. I ran out to Home Depot and Lowe’s where I bought these four options and I gave them all a spin on Ed to see which ones we liked best. Here’s the spread:
The long wood “finials” on the top right were actually chair legs from Lowe’s, but I just wanted to see if something long and lean was the way to go. And you know we like to use “weird” things as other things. So legs as finials wasn’t that much of a stretch for us. Unfortunately once John suggested that they resembled “man parts” I just couldn’t get past it. What can I say, the idea of sleeping under four willies gave me the willies. So they were instantly eliminated before even partaking in the fashion show fun.
But here are the other three options in place atop one of Ed’s posts. The first option was a set of round finials from Home Depot that were actually meant for curtains rods, but the attached screws at the base of each one slipped right into the predrilled holes in the top of Ed’s posts.
They definitely could work (especially if we painted them white to match Ed), but I thought the basic round ball sort of looked like the top of a banister. You know, kinda “builder.” So although it mimicked the shape of our big dandelion-esque light and most definitely wouldn’t “not work,” we weren’t 100% over the moon about them either. Just because they felt like we got banister tops from the home improvement store and tried to play them off as four-poster finials.
These ornate curtain finials (also from HD) felt very heavy, formal, and almost pineapple-ish:
The reason we picked these up to begin with (since you might think they would never work with the modern lines of Ed the Bed) was because we plan to bring in a curvy antique-ish dresser to play off of the more modern chandelier. So we wanted to see if the clean lines of the bed would actually work with something a little formal on top. Of course the dark color threw us off, but painted white we actually thought they’d work. Especially because they sort of tied into the shape of our mirror above the sink in the background too.
These last curtain finials (also from HD) are kind of the compromise between the builder basic round ones and the super ornate formal ones:
And they were already white (although not a perfect match) so it helped us visualize how they’d work without much effort. We liked how they still had round orbs within them (which subtly mimicked the light fixture) but they also had a semi-old-ish vibe going on, so they would tie Ed into a curvy and ornate leggy dresser if we ever get a hold of one of those (we’ve been stalking Craigslist like crazy).
When we stepped back, we knew we had a winner. They just felt the best to us after studying them all in person for a while and weighing our options. Here they are from afar:
It’s like they were made for Ed. Psst- Remember we’re contemplating a bedside lamp & night stand upgrade, we’re just working with those for now since we have ‘em. So we packed up the other finials and back to the store they went. Thankfully I was able to slip one finial out of the top of the packaging without cutting or unstapling anything, which means I could slide each one back in and return them in perfect condition. In fact I remembered to take the picture of them in their packaging after putting each finial back in, so you can see how “mint” they looked. Yes, I’m actually proud of ridiculously random things like that.
Oh but actually adhering the finials was another little challenge. They each had screws that slid right into the predrilled hole on the top of each of Ed’s posts, but the hole was a smidge too wide for the screw (so they teetered ever so slightly if the post was jostled). And getting the screw out of the finials and replacing it with something thicker that might have fit Ed’s holes seemed like it might take a while. So being the impatient girl that I am, I decided we should try using a ball of poster putty to squeeze the screw through and beef things up, thereby creating a sticky-gum-like effect to hopefully hold things more securaly.
And holy cow it worked. The finials didn’t waver back and forth anymore, they were stuck in place for good. Except not really for good, which is good. If we ever change our minds, since poster putty is easily un-stuck, it’ll just take a few firm pulls on each finial to remove them without any permanent damage to Ed or the finials themselves.
So there you have it. The easiest and most reversible Ikea Hack ever. Haha. Oh wait- and yes, we still have to paint the finials to match Ed because they’re not exactly the same tone of white, so I’ll just bring home a bunch of paint swatches to see which one looks most like the paint on the posts and then I’ll just get a test pot of it for a few bucks and paint the finials for a more seamless look.
Wait, did you think that was the end of the post? Well… (cue the confetti)… we still have some art to discuss. We gave the ram and two thrift store finds a spin above our bed (I know not everyone would want to wake up under a ceramic ram head but it’s totally my idea of a good time). But – sad face – we’re thinking they’re probably too dinky for that spot.
Maybe once we add all the missing furniture and other art into the room they’ll feel a bit less teensy, but for now we’re not sold. But I like waking up under a ram so they’re still hanging there. We’re thinking about some giant canvas art or something for that spot down the road. Who knows where we’ll end up though.
Oh and here’s one of my favorite corners of the room that we realize hasn’t been pictured in a while.
How sweet does that chair and those curtains look through those finial topped posts? I love gazing at it sleepily in the morning. When I’m not smiling up at my ram friend of course.
Wait, did you think that was the end of this post? Well… (cue the second confetti explosion)… we have one more little treat for ya. It’s Burger starring in a movie that we like to call “Dude, I’m Going Back To Bed.” Remember we mentioned that he uses the bench that we move out of the room for photos (since it totally doesn’t work design-wise, but it’s functional for the pup, so it stays just for him until we get a longer & lighter one)? Well here he is using it to get all up in our bed’s area:
Ah, life is good when you’re Burger.
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Another Round Mirror
Just can’t get enough of them these days. I think it’s because of all the rectangles and squares that abound (from windows, doors, and beams, to things like beds, cribs, and fireplaces with right angles galore). It’s just nice to add some curves to break up the square-fest.
We got this guy at Hobby Lobby on sale (they were offering 50% off all wall hanging items, yesssss) for $65 – down from $130. Not bad for an ornate 30″ oil-rubbed bronze beauty, right?
We know it looks a smidge small for that big expanse of wall (see first pic), but once we hang curtains high and wide on the giant picture window – and scooch the mirror over a bit afterwards – it’ll hopefully be perfect.
Not sure if we’ll paint it down the line or leave it oil-rubbed bronze. Once we hang curtains we’ll make a final decision since the room is definitely still in progress and adding in some oil-rubbed bronze curtain rods might be a game changer. Can you handle the suspense? Haha. Although something fun like deep plum might be sweet. Or even white to tie in with the white frames over Karl – especially since this similar mirror (except for the fact that it’s $495 and the links are more oblong than circular) is pretty gorgeous in glossy white.
Sometimes I Go Crazy
And I demo stuff without really thinking too hard about what I’ll do after the demo dust clears. See, for some reason when I stopped and stared at all those crazy towel racks in our hall bathroom for the five hundredth time…
… I decided it was time to get the hammer and take a stand. Because who really needs that many towel bars? And who decided to put that one on the left so crazy off-centered below the window so it would protrude halfway out of the shower curtain? Especially when there’s room for a cute little hand towel ring on the un-tiled wall next to the sink near the doorway.
Can you tell that wonky half-under-the-window towel bar especially bugged me? Yeah I took it personally. So I took a minute to inspect the towel rods and decided that the ones in the shower weren’t that bad since they’d be hidden by a shower curtain 99.9% of the time (once we actually hung one). And I noticed that they all seemed to be adhered on top of the tile instead of inset in it (meaning if I could carefully chisel them off I might be able to save the tile under them for a completely seamless look). So I decided to say goodbye to that annoying off-centered bar under the window first. You know, since he was my least favorite towel bar in the history of the universe.
I very carefully chiseled it ever so softly with a flat head screwdriver and a hammer. Tap… tap…
… crap. The bar holders came off pretty easily. But they weren’t stuck on top of the tile like I hoped. They were inset. Boo. So I was left with two highly visible boo-boos that looked a little something like this:
Cue the nausea. John didn’t even know what I was up to (surprise). I was banking on a “look what I did – doesn’t it look better?” reveal. You know, as opposed to an “oops I ruined the original 60′s tile that we definitely planned to work with” reveal.
But as I stood there picturing baked potatoes (an insane anti nausea method that I honed during 100 straight days of morning sickness while prego with Clara) I assured myself that we could probably semi easily hunt down two replacement tiles and just Dremmel out those ruined ones for a pretty flawless repair. But the longer I stared at my mistake, the more I realized there was a much easier fix. At least for one of the holes. Let’s rewind a little. Look closely at the window. Do you notice anything odd about it?
Why was there trim around the sides and the top, but not along the bottom? If we added some simple white wood trim down there it would probably look a heackova lot more balanced and it would cover one of my two glaringly obvious tile gaffes. We had also been meaning to hang the shower rod up near the ceiling with another one of our favorite super long 95″ waffle shower curtains, which would end up draping right in front of the other tile hole (yes, “tile hole” is a technical term) and completely obscuring it whether it was open or closed (since we push it towards the window when open, so it would still hide my dirty little tile secret in the open position as well as the closed one). Although it’s not a forever solution like adding trim, it’s definitely a will-do-until-we-find-a-matching-tile-later solution.
So I sheepishly padded down the hall wearing my best oops-I-went-crazy expression (humming “Oops I Did It Again” for effect) and requested some help adding “a tiny bit of trim and re-hanging the shower rod at ceiling height” so I could string up our new 95″ curtain (we ordered it from amazon.com a while back but hadn’t hung it yet). John was the man. He was pretty quiet (a sure sign that he wasn’t exactly ecstatic) but he didn’t give me the stink eye or anything. Instead he got to work fixing my mess while I stood in the background holding the baby and flattering him with stupidity like “you look great in that hat” and “nobody hangs trim like you, babe.” I managed to even get a little smirk with that last one. As for what John specifically did, first he removed the tiny piece of faux trim that looked sort of like shoe molding under the windowsill by prying it out with a flat head screwdriver (a mini crowbar would also work).
Then he cut a piece of trim that we already had in our scrap pile by looking at other windows in the house and mimicking the shape (straight down on each side with a small 45 degree diagonal bottom corner cut which he made using a miter box). He attached it with small finish nails which he hammered in at an angle towards the sill, using a small metal nail punch (which drives the nails in while keeping the trim from getting dented by the hammer).
About twenty minutes and zero bucks later any evidence of my moment of madness was completely unidentifiable. And we were left with this (I even painted the new trim piece with leftover trim paint that I found in the basement thanks to the previous owners):
Oh yeah, and if you wonder why this next picture is so white, John took it. And he remembered to white balance first. See, sometimes when I’m going crazy and demoing something I forget to white balance before taking pics. I contend that this is an honest mistake. I mean in a state of demo mania, you can hardly be expected to remember how to use the complicated camera, can you? Anyway, the shower curtain and tile is pure white (along with the walls, the sink, the toilet, etc) so this shot’s coloring is the most true to life:
I know it seems like a stretch to act like my big tile “incident” was a good thing. And I might be in complete denial. But I think the window looks a lot better with that trim on the bottom, so that will definitely stay for life. And of course the whole “hide the other tile hole with a shower curtain” isn’t ideal, but once we hunt down a replacement tile it’ll be fixed for realsies. Best of all, our bathroom no longer has that crazy off centered towel bar that annoyed me from the hallway every single time I walked by. And I ask you, who the heck would want their hand towel grazing the toiler paper dispenser anyway?
I rest my case. Hooray crazy.
Psst- Wanna know what that silver nozzle next to the toilet tank is? Check this out.
Psssst- Clara is officially less than two months away from her first birthday. Crazytown. Which means we’re starting to think about how we’ll plan her cute little DIY b-day party. We’re spilling a few of our just-starting-out ideas (and sniffing around for not-your-first-birthday-rodeo advice) over on BabyCenter today, so feel free to drop in and sound off.
Fab Freebie: Initial Impressions
***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – get a discount and see who won below!***
Everyone can score 10% off a purchase from Initial Presents with code YHL10 through March. And our two random winners of $75 gift credits are…Angela (who’s ARS initials sound like a pirate talking ’bout its booty) and Cecilia (who’s CRS initials are pretty run of the mill).
You probably know by now that we’ve pretty much never met a monogram that we didn’t like (I know that’s a weird thing for a dude to say, but I like letters and typefaces, sue me). So if you dig that particular brand of classic personalization as much as we do, then you’ll have no trouble burning through the $75 you could win from Initial Presents this week. They’re all about letting you customize their products – from cutting boards and wine glasses to clothing and jewelry. And two of you are gonna win the chance to put your mark on some of ‘em.
- PRIZE: A $75 gift credit to Initial Presents
- TO ENTER: Comment on this post with the words “MY INITIALS ARE [insert your initials]!” and…
- BONUS QUESTION: … tell us what you love (or loathe) about your initials. Do they spell something cool (or maybe something embarrassing)? Do they make for a great nickname (kids in high school used to call me JP, for instance)? Are you kinda indifferent about them? Or do you wish you could change them to something more interesting?
- GIVEAWAY CLOSES: Wednesday, March 16th at 8pm EST
- NUMBER OF WINNERS: Two
- PRIZE SHIPS: The lower 48 United States
- USUAL STUFF: One entry per e-mail address is permitted. The winners will be selected using random.org and announced on Thursday as an update to this post. That’s right, come right back here on Thursday morning for the announcement of our winners. Good luck…
Note: We weren’t paid or perk’d for hosting this giveaway, we just like rewarding our lovely readers! See our Giveaway FAQs page for more info. Pics from Initial Presents.
Come To Momma
Yes, it’s yet another rambling rug post. What can I say- our old hardwood floors give us splinters (remember this episode when I got one in the badonkadonk while painting?). And rugs are definitely great building blocks for a room – so we lean towards introducing them on the early end whenever possible. And after dragging the ol’ 5 x 8′ yellow rug back out from the guest room for Clara to play on until we got a more appropriate sized rug for large & in charge Karl the Sectional, we finally found something that made us excited enough to whip out our credit card. Yup, we ordered this amazingly textured & bright rug for our living room from The O (yes I mean Overstock – I try to support those strange marketing campaigns where brands like Radio Shack try to relabel themselves as The Shack).
It’s cushy and bold and happy-go-lucky and supersized (just like Big Karl). And it’s family friendly thanks to pure wool materials and the nice soft surface that it’ll create for crawling and sprawling out. The description actually cracks me up. Here’s part of it verbatim: “Trip out on pure, green hand-spun felted New Zealand wool.” Hilarious. We can’t wait to trip out on it. Plus the 5 star reviews about everything from how great the color is to how plush the shag texture is had me at hello (each tuft is apparently as thick as a crayon or a stalk of celery- yes please).
At $424.99 it’s not cheap. At all. At least by our standards. But most things that we hunted down in that large of a size (it’s 8 x 11′) in pure super-thick wool (which is always what we prefer in a casual used-all-the-time living room for reasons of softness, quality, and no nasty off-gassing) were usually in the $600-$1200 range. Like this similar shag from West Elm that’s smaller for $700. So something in the low 400′s with $2.95 shipping (can’t beat Overstock shipping) was actually pretty appealing. Especially since we recently sold our slipcovered sofa from our last living room on craigslist for $600. Our grand total for El Rug came to $427.95.
In the end we just didn’t want to spend $300 on a cheaper rug that we felt “meh” about instead of investing a bit more into something we’d – fingers crossed – love and use for a long time (the color seems like the perfect balance of brightness without being too light and stain-show-off-y). Plus we’re still embarrassingly giddy to have snagged an 8 x 10′ jute rug for the bedroom at under $250 so that sort of created a little imaginary rug credit towards this one in our heads. Psst- Weird. The O must have just raised the price. Here’s a link to the rug now on sale for $499.99, but you can see from our screengrab below that it was $424.99 when we ordered it.
Now for the cleaning plan. Because we’re so not into high maintenance rugs. A friend of mine with three kids and a (giant) dog has a similar shaggy wool rug and she swears it holds up to stains and kiddos like nobody’s business. Crumbs, dirt, and dust supposedly come out with a quick vacuum so that’s definitely doable. And apparently you can subtly trim the long hairy tufts to “lift” a stain if anything catastrophic – like grape juice – happens. And it’s seemingly impossible to detect because I’ve stared at hers in search of the trimmed parts and can’t ever find anything.
As for how we chose the size, we just used green painters tape to tape out the dimensions on the floor of our 25 x 15′ living room to make sure it worked (should’ve snapped a pic of that- boo). And as for the color choice, it just felt like our dark sectional, pewter walls, and gray beams needed a nice bright rug to take the room for Cold Gray City to a Warmer And More Fun City. But we didn’t want something too light that would show off every “oops” moment that’s sure to occur over the next decade plus (thanks to one baby, one dog, and dreams of at least one more wee one of the human kind in a few years).
Now before we get any further I must declare that we’ll probably forever miss our too-small-for-the-sectional Favorite Rug Ever In The History Of The Universe (our old Moorish Tile Rug from Pottery Barn). Gray and yellow is such a sweet combination. We looked for other yellow rugs but they all seemed too thin or too light (or too expensive, therefore too precious for use) and we feared they just wouldn’t hold up to all that impending abuse.
But Old Yeller isn’t dying or anything. Because I totally couldn’t take that. Seriously. I love that rug like family. It’ll just be found hanging out in the guest room where it’s much more appropriately sized (a 5 x 8′ rug paired with a giant sectional like Karl in a cavernous 25′ long room just isn’t the best solution). Anyway, we can’t wait to meet Señor Shag-o when he arrives. Overstock is famous for fast shipping so we hope to share pics in a jiffy (wow, even typing that made me feel like my mom, who also says things like neato and dungarees).
Anyway, now that we have our living room rug pinned down (which will tie into our $5 art) we can start thinking about curtains and lamps for the console table that we’re planning to build for behind Karl. Plenty of light & dark gray + bold color + lots of texture + some pattern sounds like a good time to us. Have you guys ordered from The O lately?
