I LOVE THIS CLOCK!!!!!!!!!

Got it at the Salvador Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain.  Coolest art museum ever.

Could NOT leave without one.  End of story.

It ain't modernism, but here is a finished room.

Well, it is about as finished as it will get while I live here, anyway.  Of the 5 small bedrooms in this house, this is one of the teeny-tiny bedrooms.  It has been a real challenge to figure out how to get ample sleeping space into these rooms and still retain some other function, given that we don't have permanent residents for any of them other than the master bedroom.  

Starting out, the room was a nearly literal blank canvas - beige carpet, off-white walls, ugly ring fluorescent ceiling light, and a nasty traverse rod with off-white curtains.  Nowhere to go but up.

Goal number one was to fit in some bookcases to house some of our increasingly anachronistic books, and still have guest(s) sleeping quarters.  And goal number two was to make it blend some modern and some traditional, since the bookcases, side cabinet and chairs are traditional-to-antique.  

I chose this dusty green paint just because it is one of my favorite colors, and I had not used it anywhere else in the house.  The exciting bargain for this room was finding these curtains at Bed Bath & Beyond on clearance for $15/panel.  These determined the rest of the color scheme, which is gold with a bit of orange.  I got the double rod and rings at

 BB&B also, and re-used sheers I had taken down from another room.

I found the daybed frame online.  It struck me as the perfect transitional style between modern and antique.  The bedspread is from Linen Source, also online.  I like the swirls - much more modern than the traditional floral patterns you usually find on this type of spread.  I had to rip off the back of the bed skirt and sew it onto the end that would usually be the pillow-end of a twin bed.  

Underneath this daybed is a trundle, so two people can sleep in this room.  People without cat allergies.

I wedged the daybed between the two crappy bookcases from Office Depot.  They look decent this way, so it is not completely apparent what pieces of shit they really are.  I am so tired of buying "assembly-needed" things that look good in the store, but when you start assembling them you realize the

 materials are only slightly better than very dense cardboard.

I pulled out some of my framed stuff from my old house, which was really traditional style, especially compared to this house.  I think they work okay here.  

This pendant 

lamp is from Lowe's, and replaces a white Chinese paper globe that was hanging on a cord.  

The mirror is one I got from a friend when I was still in high school and her family was moving 

to Taiwan.  Long ago I stripped the black paint from the frame and found this lovely paint underneath.  I touched up the gold part with some craft paint.  

 

The rest of the room is other old furniture we had on hand, including this cool clock from my in-laws.  When I need to soak up some calm, this is a good room to get some.

I am so Ashamed.....so here are some old pictures of one of my best tile murals

Who knew - I actually do have some one besides Mom who reads this blog and has been wondering (just like Mom) when I will sit down on my dead ass and write post Something - Anything.  I am so surprised and pleased that Noel cares, I am going to try to do better.  Here is the excuse I will use:  I have cut back on serious projects to focus on planning for the huge facelift project (see 2 posts back - way back to August 2008, i think).  But there is stuff i have been doing.  Here is my other excuse:  I had to get a new computer and can't find the software for downloading stuff from my camera.  Gotta figure that one out, because I have done lots of smaller stuff that does add up nicely.I thought i was going to be able to post the drawings for the facelift project, but can't open the file here at home.  So i will solve that one tomorrow and try to post those before I go away for the weekend.

In the meantime, I am going to post some old pictures of a tile mosaic I made at my previous house.  It is one of my all-time favorites, and something I hope to replicate (sort of, only better) here in my new place - just not sure yet where it will fit in.  Here is a preview of the finished product:

The installation site was a bay window with a wood sill that had been water-stained

 by overflowing plant pots.  It was a nice sunny window we installed in about 2 years earlier.  

I found these mosaic tiles at a home surplus store for about $3 each, marked down from $29.  The scrolley parts reminded me of ferns sprouting and uncurling, so I decided to use that in the design.  One of these is intact; one has the borders trimmed off.

I did a little reading before I started to find out what type of mortar to use.  Everything I read indicated that the best thing to use was good old Elmer's glue, since the substrate was plywood.  This made it easy to work in small areas, and I could draw out a shape on the wood (although I don't really work that way - I am not good at drawing or following lines).  It does mean that this should not be exposed to standing water, so I would need to wipe up spills from overwatering, but wouldn't have to worry about water stains.

The first thing I did was cut out the "sprouts" and lay them out on the sill.  I wanted to make some big ferns using the other tiles.   This was slow work, so it quickly became obvious that the easiest way to do this would be to have all the other tiles off of the mesh so i could move them around as needed.  So, I pulled all the rest of these little tiles from the mesh and sorted them all out by color.  At first i thought there were just white and green squares, but I found there were brown and gray ones, various shades of green, and several shapes.  I sorted these out into plastic leftover-food containers that I could cover and stack when I was done for the day.

After I filled up the space with the green parts of the ferns, I outlined them with the white tiles.  I decided to use some other parts of the  original mosaic tiles along the border, making a green "stripe" all the way around.  

And then I just started filling in all the spaces with the white tiles.   After a few rows, I could see that i would not have enough square pieces to make symetrical rows, so I decided to make some "swirly" patterns using the smaller pieces.

And then, it started to become obvious that i would run out of white squares before I had finished, so I decided to incorporate some of the grey ones into the background.....

I went back to the store and bought all the rest of the mosaic pieces they had, but I knew I will still run out.  So I got some Home Depot tiles that were flat stones and worked those into the corner areas.  This looked so good and really "grounded" (no pun intended) the design, I decided I would look for other tiles that would add more texture and color

.  

I think these added a LOT to the design, and made it much more interesting than it would have been with all white tiles.

It took about 2 weeks to get everything in place, dry, and ready to grout.  I 

decided to use a light  gray grout for a couple reasons.  One is so it would not look horrid if water did run out of a pot and get it dirty or stained.  Another is because I wanted a low contrast with the white sections.  Also, it looked "earthy" without being brown (and too dark).  I put some masking tape along the white window frame to make clean-up a bit easier, and mixed up the grout.  This was a pretty small area, so the grouting step was pretty fast and easy.  After it dried, I cleaned it all up and sealed it thoroughly with several coats of silicone sealer.

Here is the rest of the finished product.  The colors don't look quite as bright as they really are because I took these pictures at night.  

The new owners of the house love it as much as I still do, so that made it easier to leave!

Sorry, fan. I didn't mean to desert you.

Well, obviously i lack devotion to my blog. It has been a long time since i bothered to even open it up.....but i have done some things that merit a post or two. I will get the camera out this weekend and do so, just to show how a couple of these projects were wrapped up. But in the meantime, take a look at another blog that is hysterical. I have seen pictures that made me wonder what marketing genius was taking them and thinking they would help sell a house, but these operate on a completely different plane - - - - one that is far lower than any i have seen, yet oh-so-parallel. lovelylisting, indeed.

Pocket Door Time

I finally found a carpenter who would take on the pocket door project for the powder room/half-bath in the entryway. Just to remind you of the context, here is a picture of what I started with:

A teeney-tiny bathroom with a door that would not even open all the way - it would hit the sink and stop short of opening all the way by a few inches.

Unacceptable.

So I took out EVERYTHING - stripped it down to the subflooring, changed the light fixtures, sink, toilet, paint colors, medicine cabinet, flooring - you name it, it was removed and replaced, as you can see in the pictures here:

But that still left a new problem with the door. The old door would have been able to close, but, damn, I just didn't want to rehang it in this cool new space. The room is so small that the door would be a significant ugliness. So we bit the bullet and are paying to have a pocket door installed. It just wasn't going to be right to do anything less.

So the old door frame is gone, and i have already missed my opportunity to photograph part of the house's skeleton. The pocket door frame has been installed and the sheet rock is up, taped, mudded, sanded and ready for paint already. This guy rocks. The painter starts tomorrow, and the door will be installed before the end of the week!

I am planning to get a facelift

We went and talked with the designer who is coming up with a plan for residing and reroofing the house. Since it will get an entirely new skin, we want to add a little drama. The front of the house looks like we live in a hobbit hole at best, in the hobbit's garage at worst. The siding and roof are in bad shape, though not leaking. He has come up with a very cool entryway addition with some pretty exciting posts and beams, with a metal roof and board & batten siding. We also asked him to incorporate some stacked stone facing, and he has lots of it in more places than I had thought of, so that is a big plus. We had a bit of a problem imagining exactly what this might look like with the actual materials, so he is going to work up the design drawings a bit more with some color adjustments, and also a couple alternatives for materials. But I did some surfing and found a blog with some nice examples of these materials, so now I am starting to get it. Here are two paticularly nice pictures from that blog, with all the elements he showed us, just not in the same configurations.

Our windows don't open out like the ones below, but this is a very nice example of the types of materials and structures we will probably incorporate into the changes to the facade. He has proposed using cabling like this for the railings on the decks, which i also love.

I found a "Better Homes & Gardens" specialty magazine called "Exteriors" (they have one for every topic I can thing of) that has some other interesting variations along this same theme. After I show these to my husband and get a yes/no vote on the options, I will go back to the designer and see if we can finalize the plans.

Then we'll need to get bids.

Gulp.

Even an ancient dog can learn new tricks

Just in time for the Beijing Olympics: here is a link to a great New York Times article about home renovation in China. It has shining examples of how you can blend the very old and the new to create an incredible environment. Inspiring!