[Feint]

Check it:

Yeah, I couldn't live with the chartreuse.  So I decided to find a different color in the rug.  Here's a different shot for color-comparison purposes:  

 

See it there in the fourth band in from the outside?  

And yes, I did attach the fretwork this weekend!  Thanks for noticing.  I really like it.  Here's what it looked like sans fretwork:

So much better with the fretwork, no?  Here's a little breakdown of the my RASTS went from here:

Through here:

 

To here:

My fretwork came from myoverlays.com (highly recommend, by the way) in the mail on Monday, so I painted it chartreuse.  I was still planning on going ahead with the whole chartreuse thing, but over the course of the week it became clear to me that it was the wrong direction.   I mean, I want to be a chartreuse kind of person, but I guess I'm just not.  So I picked out the new color (this one's Black Pepper by Benjamin Moore).  I filled the pre-drilled hardware holes on the drawer fronts with wood filler, sanded them down, and painted everything.  I waited for all the components to dry thoroughly, and this afternoon I attached the fretwork with some gel superglue (SO MUCH BETTER than the regular runny kind, seriously).

On Friday I popped by T.J. Maxx because you just never know, right?  And I picked up two down-filled zippered ikat pillows for $16 each-- I figured I couldn't make 'em too much cheaper than that, so it seemed like a good deal.  Then today while I was in my office on campus this morning (yes, I was totally working in my office on a Sunday morning) I grabbed a pair of lamps I've been keeping in there-- I think matching nightstands necessitate matching lamps, and I only have one useable outlet in my office so I had no need of a matching pair there.  I bought these at Target last year, and I really like them.  I used some of our excess hardcover books (we have a lot of those floating around) to make the lamps a bit taller.

As for the RASTS, I'm done save for the hardware.  In keeping with the Hollywood Regency theme I was going for, I've ordered some faux-bamboo drawer handles which I'll paint to match the dresser.  Lots of texture for the win!

Let's go back to August 2012 for a minute:

Oof.  Now May 2013:

Much better, non?

Half-RAST

I think my RAST makeover is about 40% done, and I need some advice.  

This is when I really, really hate living so far away from my friends and family-- especially my mom and sister.  They'd be able to tell me if I'm on the right track.  My husband, while being a truly wonderful person, is profoundly design-challenged (ask me about the time, perhaps a month into our relationship, that he picked out a black plastic TV stand from Wal-Mart and tried to convince me that it was "kind of Bauhaus.") and I think my friends here might be too kind to tell me when my taste level is what Zac Posen might politely call "questionable."

I started keeping this blog (and continue to maintain it) so our East Coast and Midwest loved ones could occasionally drop in on our West Coast life, but more and more I'm aware of the blog's limitations.  My photography skills are almost as terrible as my photography equipment, and I know the pictures I take and post aren't at all representative of what I see when I look around our little house.  And while I love having my own home to renovate and decorate as I please, sometimes it really makes me miss my family.

I texted my mom the following iPhone photo of an in-progress RAST to get her opinion, only later realizing that the color in the photo is CRAZY off:

I mean, it is SO CHARTREUSE in these photos.  It looks positively neon.  And the truth is, it's really nowhere near as bright as it looks in the above photo, or in this one (taken at the same time): 

It is, like, glowing in these pictures.  It looks like it just stepped off a spaceship.  And after I texted my mom and asked for her opinion, she said, "I like the color, but I'm not sure I could live with it."  I thought, "It's not THAT bright, is it?"  And then I looked at the photos and realized that the color she saw is totally radioactive.    

I wish I could explain this, but I know less than nothing about photography.  The horrible photo that follows is somehow a much more accurate depiction of the RAST color, but everything else looks much darker than it really is, and I really need to remember to turn off my lamps before taking pictures in my bedroom:

And you don't have to tell me how awful the orange flame-stitched pillows look.  I know.  I'm on it.

Even crazier are the photos I took with our actual (ancient, crappy) camera.  Here's one:

In the iPhone photos it appears neon yellow; in the camera photos it's grasshopper green.  I took both sets at the same time, by the way.  Here's a side-by-side of the birds' eye views:

In reality it is neither this yellow nor this green.  

So this is just a long way of telling you that I need someone's opinion on the color (is it too bright?  Too light?  Not brown enough?), but I can't get it.  Because the only way to show anyone the color is via photograph.  And I can't photograph the color.

Since I'm pretty much stuck floating out here in this cold design wasteland all by myself, I guess I'll go ahead and order the fretwork.  After doing some research, I realized that it'll be much cheaper for me to order two kits from myoverlays.com than to buy all the tools I'd need to cut my own fretwork, so I'm going to admit DIY defeat and go with the premade option.  I'm debating between these two designs:

 

I'm leaning towards the second one, which means it's probably hideous because every time I offer anyone an option like this she always picks the one I wasn't favoring.  Sigh.

New. And Improved?

I pulled the trigger on the RASTs I've been wanting.  Yesterday I made the endless one-and-a-half-hour trip to the IKEA in Portland all by myself (sigh-- when you live 3000 miles from most of your friends and all of your family, you have to go to IKEA by yourself sometimes), and I almost came home with three things: two RASTs and the perfect ceiling fixture for my guest room.  Flush-mounted so tall people can walk under it without whacking their heads, not boob-shaped, no weird glass, nice textured shade, etc.  And also, it costs $30.  I didn't leave with it, though, because they wouldn't sell it to me.  Apparently it's been recalled?  Which isn't mentioned on the website.  And it was on the shelf, available for sale, in the store.  Anyway.

RASTs!  Behold them in their pre-makeover state:

They look pretty sad, no?  But they will be beautiful when I finish with them.  And I think they make the room look bigger since they're so shallow-- there's much more floor space than there was with my previous mismatched nightstands.  Here's the view from the doorway:

 

So what will I do with them?  Here's my inspiration photo (from here):

 Mine are already the proper height for the bed, so they won't be getting legs like the one in the inspiration photo, and I'm probably not going to bother adding the false drawer front to the bottom-- though I may decide to put a faux-legs-looking panel across the front at the bottom.  I haven't yet decided how to apply the fretwork; that'll take a trip to the Home Depot to see what they've got and how much it will cost me to do the work myself versus ordering pre-cut fretwork from myoverlays.com.  As for the color, check out this detail shot of my rug:

 

Hey box fan!  Anyway, if you count the bands of color on the rug from the outside in, when you get to the fifth band, you'll see the bright chartreuse-y green I'm thinking I'll use.  I'm also attracted to the slightly-less-chartruese version in the second band.  Here's another view that might help you see both options more clearly:

Of course, this will mean finding a new home for my orange flame-stitched pillows.  Right now I'm totally feeling this fabric for their replacements:

Or similar.  Or not similar at all.  I love fabric-hunting and I can't wait to see what I can find.

After I left the IKEA yesterday I couldn't help wandering into the Home Goods that's conveniently located right next door to it.  I left with two things.  First, a dining room rug:

Please pardon the fact that it's currently sitting on top of the old dining room rug.  Right now we're in a trial-run type of situation.  I like the navy, and I think it makes the dining room feel a lot younger and brighter, but it's the same size as the old rug and I really think it's just too small.  I really need a 7' square.  What do you think?  Too small?

And then I couldn't resist a navy-and-white ikat flatweave for $14.99.  It's chilling in my bathroom, where it covers a significant chunk of the pink Marmoleum floor:

Yeah, just noticed that blue painter's tape stuck to the wall above the window.  I'm a mess.  

While we're in the bathroom, see that light-blue stripe painted under the window?  I was going to paint the bathroom this weekend.  Here's another shot that shows a few more patches of what will be the color:

But this morning I decided I'm going to do something just a little more drastic than paint.  I've been fighting with the orange-peel texture ever since we moved in.  I just don't like it.  And every time I have to do anything in there, it means buying a can of orange-peel spray and trying to blend the patch.  Which never works.  So why am I going out of my way to maintain it when I could just do this instead?

Yes, that's right.  I'm going to skim-coat the walls and ceiling using the squeegee method.  And then I'm going to paint them blue.  And then I'm going to order some flooring samples.  And then and then andthenandthenandthen!  [Name that movie?  Anyone?]

Two Down

Now that we've finished the master bedroom, we're completely done with reno in two of the rooms of our nine-room (counting the hallway) house.  I thought I'd take advantage of another sunny day in Rain-land USA to take a couple of photos.  First off, here's what we saw the first time we walked through the house in June of 2012:

Nice curtains, right?

On the day we closed, we ripped out that cabinet:

 

The above photo also shows the ill-fitting yellowish blinds, weird lack of baseboards, and shiny walls.  Anyhow, within the first three weeks, we'd fully removed the cabinet and patched the walls (twice!) and changed the blinds to the white faux-wood plantation variety we've put in the rest of the house. 

This photo corresponds to the first one in the post-- it's the view from the door.  I'd estimate that this was taken in early September.  Then I painted the dresser light gray and added my favorite old Persian rug:

Then we installed baseboard and hung some art, and I bought some orange fame-stitched pillows for the bed, and at some point in there I bought some charcoal-gray velvet curtains that I subsequently returned because they were too dark.  Instead I'm currently using my old living room curtains from New Haven (tan hidden-tab blackout-lined oldies-but-still-okay-ies from Target), which I'll change out when I find exactly what I want (probably fabric to make my own, though I also have my eye on some from West Elm).  This photo also shows that we replaced the old boob light with a woven shade pendant, though I'm still not 100% sold on that, it's fine for now.  And I picked up a new duvet cover on mega-sale from Urban Outfitters last week.  So here's the view from the door as of this morning:

And here's a different view:

Still have a few decor adjustments to make, but I'd say we've come a pretty long way since August...

Ace of Baseboard

Check out these photos (taken sometime in October or November) of our bedroom.  Notice anything weird about them?

I mean, other than the cords hanging all over the place...

...and the fact that I didn't move the box fan, and that there's a giant old-school TV in there.  But other than all that stuff.  Notice anything strange?

That's right-- there aren't any baseboards in there.  You can see a faint line on the wall where they used to be, but they ain't there no more.  There aren't any in the second bedroom either.  We're guessing that at some point a previous owner installed baseboard heating (you can also see its imprint on the east wall of the master) in the bedrooms and used the woodstove to heat the living room.  (I'm not 100% sure why adding baseboard heat to one wall necessitated the removal of all the baseboards in the room, but whatever). And then the next owner did us a solid and got a furnace and put in some ductwork and removed the baseboard heaters.

Call me traditional, but I feel like a bedroom needs baseboards.  Every time I walked into the master I kind of felt like I'd caught it with its zipper down or something.  Like, I'd walked in on it getting dressed.  I don't know.  Anyhow, we replaced them on Sunday.

Here's what it looked like after we pried off the paint-splattered quarter-round:

Then we spent a truly hilarious hour cutting all of our boards to length (and to their proper 45° angles, of course).  You see, it was raining (duh) so we didn't want to go outside and use our circular saw, and that meant we had to rely on our little miter box.  Unfortunately we were unable to photograph all the insanity that ensued as we tried to 1) hold long pieces of molding level, 2) brace the miter box so it wouldn't move, 3) keep the molding pressed tightly against the back of the miter box, and 4) actually saw through the stuff-- I'm sure there's an easier way, but we prefer to make things complicated here.  Cuts done, we construction-adhesived and finish-nailed the molding to the walls.

Today I caulked all of the seams, and when the caulk cures I'll give it a nice glossy coat of trim paint.  And then I'll have better photos.  See, I'm concurrently in the middle of another project whose results I'll reveal by the end of the week, and maybe by then I'll have the wherewithal to find the actual camera instead of relying on blurry iPhone photos.  Til then, here's a crappy shot I took to text my mom in Virginia so I could show her our progress.  It's Ray nailing in the molding on the wall behind the headboard, and you can see some finished (well, except for the paint) work in the background:

Anyway, better photos to come.  And once I've painted it and picked up some new curtains and curtain hardware, the master bedroom will be finished.  At least until I decide I want to paint it again.  

And hey y'all, thanks for your endless patience with my lack of photography skills.  It IS endless, right?

Friday Morning Update

I've been feeling weird about hanging art in the bedroom ever since we removed the strange cabinet-thing and it took me a million years to get the walls patched properly.  It's like I don't want to make extraneous nail holes in my beautiful patch job.  But I woke up this morning and I decided I needed to just get something done, and so I did this:

Do excuse the natural Pacific Northwest lighting, as always.  We live in a state of perpetual twilight.  Also, the sheet-- I know it's hanging out under the scalloped edge of the quilt.  But I'm not perfect and this blog is about REAL TALK, people.  

Anyhow, what you're looking at is three of my favorite pieces of art, newly hung in the corner where the gross cabinet used to be.  Let's examine:

Over my nightstand: it's really hard to see in this photo, but this is an old portrait of King Charles II as a child.  In real life, you can see that his two spaniels (Cavalier King Charles, naturally) are at his side.  According to my grandmother, her mother purchased this in New York at some point in the twenties or thirties, but nobody really knows how old it is or where it came from.  It seems to be a reproduction, though there are dimensional brushstrokes on it.  I like it because it's kind of dark and mysterious and has some family history, but it's also a painting of a cute kid and some dogs.  Win-win.

The top painting in the gold frame on the window wall is also really special to me.  The same great-grandmother who bought Charles II's portrait was also an accomplished painter.  She painted this view of the gates of the Country Club of Virginia at some point in the fifties.  As it happens, she didn't care for the painting, and she never finished it.  If you look closely between the red-flowering tree and the left-hand brick pillar, you'll see it's blank canvas with just the rough undersketch of the fence she was going to paint there.  I'm not sure why I find its unfinished-ness so appealing.  I just do.  Plus it's a beautiful painting of a place I grew up seeing.  Win-win-win.

Finally, the bottom painting is one of my favorite things in the entire world.  It's the boathouse at my family's place on the Chesapeake Bay.  Ray and I were married on the lawn of that house, and my view during the ceremony was pretty much that exact view of the boathouse.  This painting was done years before the wedding by my friend Hunter.  In college (or maybe right after?) my best friends and I had gone to spend a weekend at the house, and Hunter, who is obviously a very talented painter, set up an easel on the dock and painted this en plein air on a Saturday morning.  It reminds me of so many things: being young and silly with my friends, my favorite place anywhere ever, my family, my home.  AND it's beautiful.  AND it was painted by one of my all-time favorite people.  Win-win-win-win.

Boy, from this angle Charles II just looks like a solid-black piece of canvas in a gold frame-- maybe he needs to be cleaned.  

Anyhow, there's more art to hang in here, plus curtains to replace and baseboards to install, but we're making progress.  Also, side note: I like those pillows on the bed MUCH better when the flame-stitching is vertical on one and horizontal on the other.  I don't know why.  Thoughts on asymmetrical throw pillows? 

Little Bit O' Progress*

Ever since we moved in nearly four months ago, our foyer has been a little bit sad.  I mean, I call it a foyer, but it's actually a 4' x 4' square right inside the door.  Anyway, it's been looking kind of downtrodden with its inappropriately tiny $2 IKEA doormat:

Womp womp.  This picture also shows one of my least-favorite things about the house, which I've mentioned before: the mismatched doorknobs.  One of these days I'll get motivated to replace all the huge shiny brass knobs (like the one on the entry door) with small old antique brass knobs (like the original 40's one on the coat closet door), but until then I'll just die a little on the inside every time I touch a monstrous 80's "update" one.  

Anyway (aside to Mrs S: ennyWAYS), on Monday I made a pilgrimage to the local Target and scored three Nate Berkus bath rugs for $5 each.  They weren't supposed to be $5, but they were mismarked and the nice Target-ers offered to sell them to me as marked.  Whee!  I also bought a larger jute-and-gray diamond patterned rug.  Ever since last month's attempt to layer one rug over another, I've been thinking I'd like to try it again on a smaller scale.  Years of working for J. Crew have left me completely unable to leave the house without a "third piece" on my body, so why shouldn't my floors get all the benefits of the layered look?  

This morning I tossed one of the Nate Berkus rugs on top of the jute one.  This photo's colors aren't great (you can't at all see the pattern on the bottom rug), but in person it looks pretty awesome:

And then I decided to throw an old mirror (its frame was black when I paid $39 for it at T.J. Maxx last year, and I painted it gold just 'cause) on the wall just to see how I liked it:

 Hey you guys!  That's me in the corner, that's me in the spotlight...

And I'm kind of feeling the overall effect.  This way we can stop on the way out the door and make sure we're presentable, and it's also reflecting one of my favorite vignettes in the house: our old bookcase with its books arranged by color.  You can sort of see it behind me in the photo above.

Another vista, this time with my halfhearted attempt at mantel decor (I really wanted a shiny reindeer to go up there with my cedar garland, but I couldn't find on anywhere, and I have some stray lights dangling on the side, yeesh):

Side note: something I DO love about this house is that it has two electrical outlets over the mantel; to plug in the Christmas lights all I had to do was take my Henri Cartier Bresson print (bought at the Benaki Museum in Greece in 2003 when I worked on an archaeological excavation in Athens) off its nail and lean it on the fireplace.  Voila!  Outlet still covered, lights plugged in.

And finally, another mini-update: several weeks ago at T.J. Maxx (this is becoming a theme) I spotted some orange flame-stitched pillows.  I tried to resist them, because I really have no good place to put two orange flame-stitched pillows, but they were so, erm, affordable that I wound up bringing them home.  They've been hanging out on my bed ever since, and while they probably won't stay forever, I have to admit I kind of like the crazy pop of color in what is otherwise a boringly neutral space:

And also, I hate using the flash on my little point-and-shoot since it makes everything look yellow as hell, so please pardon the chiaroscuro effect in the photo above.

*Aside to Mrs. S:  Little bit o' problems, little bit o' problems!

Master Sweet

Yeah, it's not a suite.  But it's sweet.  See what I did there?  Kind of like Siouxie and the Banshees.  It makes sense if you don't think about it.

I promised photos of Grammy's/Mom's/Sissy's old Persian in the bedroom.  And I also need some advice, so here are some photos I took this morning (by the way, I really need to learn to clean up all the little things on my occasional tables before I take pictures):

View from door, with Ray's watch and wedding ring on the nightstand and our can't-live-without-it box fan in the corner.

[Yep, we have a TV in the bedroom.  Incidentally, it's the same TV that my BFF Mrs. S. (over at Pirouettes & Gossamer) and I bought in 2002 for our first apartment in Ashland, VA.  We each paid $100 for it.  BEST. INVESTMENT. EVER.  The TV then moved into Mrs. S' first postcollege apartment in Richmond.  After that it moved into my dear friend Jilly's house with me, then to Charlottesville to keep me company while I was in grad school, then to New Haven and my first apartment with Ray.  Then it traveled cross-country in a POD (portable! on! demand! storage!) and lived in our rental condo for a year before moving into our house with us.  And every move has taken years off our lives since the thing weighs at least 300lbs.  So I'm quite attached to it really.  Plus if we didn't have it, we wouldn't be able to watch "The Colbert Report" every night before bed, and that is nonnegotiable.]

The rug looks pretty, non?  Here's another view of the room: 

Check it-- you can't see where the weird cabinet used to be AT ALL.  But you CAN see two things I need to change in that photo:  first, the curtains.  I bought them at World Market while I was in graduate school.  I only had one window in my room at the time, hence the two curtain panels.  Over the years we've become quite attached to them, as they darken the room like nobody's business.  Seriously, you can sleep in all day with these babies closed.  But I obviously need to buy more of them-- you can see this one's lonely mate on the other window in the first photo.

Second, the throw pillows.  All of those are really nice down pillows I bought on the super-cheap from TJ Maxx, like, half a million years ago.  I plan to make new covers for them.  And someday I will.  I'm thinking awesome olive-green and teal or golden ikats and block prints?  What say ye?

Third vista:

This picture includes the only piece of art we've managed to hang so far.  My grandmother pulled it out of a Dumpster some years back.  (Have I mentioned that my grandmother is totally awesome?  I don't know very many other ladies in their 80's who Dumpster-dive to rescue original watercolor paintings.)  

It also prominently features one of my most prized possessions: my headboard.  I rescued those tin ceiling tiles from my oldest friend Courtney's former workplace, a cool PR firm that was housed in a historic building in Richmond (check out Courtney's awesome house here).  The tiles had been taken down and were being stored on the second floor of the building, and yada yada yada, now I have two of them.  I drew a picture of the headboard I wanted, and my dad built it for me.  Because my dad can do that kind of stuff-- and also renovate bathrooms, fix cars and boats, hang drywall, do plumbing and electrical, and did I tell you about that time when I was 13 and I was swimming in the Bay and a ring slipped off my finger and my dad DRAGGED THE BOTTOM OF THE CREEK, ACCOUNTING FOR THE TIDES until he found it?  Yep, that happened.

This photo also includes a phone charger lying on the floor (how did I fail to notice that when I took the picture?), a piece of quarter-round, and our TV remote.  Awesome.

This room still needs baseboards, and we obviously need to hang the rest of the art.  But progress is progress.  

What I've learned from this post is that I have lots of sentimental objects in my bedroom, including an old television.  Anyhow, see y'all siouxn.