Spring Improvements

The homefront has been quiet lately.  The sun has lured us outside and our projects are languishing.  That said, we did manage to make two furnishing improvements that are driving me out of my damn mind with fabulousness.

One: the hall.  Otherwise known as the Portal of the Jagged Hole or the Part of the Wall that I Kicked in With Thighs of Steel, the hallway here has uneven flooring that desperately needs to be covered with a rug. 

For about a year we've been making do with a white Ikea rug folded in half.  The pros of this plan were that when company was coming you could fold the dirty outside to the inside and pretend like the rug was always white!  Sneaky.  The cons were that pretty soon none of the four sides of the rug was white.  Example:

Oh classy.  So then there was a moment of divine intervention.  My wonderful and talented friend Miss Anna is actually a professional rug designer.  I know, right?  My friends are really cool.  So there came this amazing day where her rugs were featured on Joss and Main.  A friend of mine had her designs on Joss and Main!  Eek!  I was already a member, so I ogled the goodies, ran over to show the husband and we managed to agree on one in the space of five minutes.  Done!  We didn't even measure it and yet behold the awesomeness:

OK, you can still see a tiny smidge of ugly floor but SO. MUCH. BETTER.  (Again, with the new title for this blog.)  The rug is a wonderful navy tone with a palette of blues and greys and it fits so perfectly I can hardly stand it.  SO much better than the cotton folded ghettoness that previously lived here.  So thanks to Miss Anna for saving the hallway.

In the kitchen, we had lived with a dire assortment of mismatched chairs for too long.  Two red Ikea chairs (red being my least favorite color, awesome) were plunked in there with two hideous oak monstrosities that had unspeakable atrocities perpetrated on them by the renovation.  Although it certainly wasn't the chairs' fault that someone stood on them to paint/stain/gut a small animal, it certainly didn't make them more attractive.  Case in point:

Ugh.  (Actually, the oak ones look fairly clean in this photo.  Shortly thereafter I think every chemical in the foreground was spilled on them and it was downhill from there.)

I've been trolling Craigslist for the perfect thing and finally a slightly odd option came up, a bunch of folding wooden chairs from 1941.  But I liked the lines and the mechanical engineer in me loved the mechanism.  The other chief engineer agreed so we brought them home:

Whee!  I love how they're lower backed so they don't take up as much visual room, but most of all I love that they match and they aren't red.  Whee!  It's the little things in life.  Individually they look like this:

They have an amazing four-bar linkage action (nerd alert!), so they fold into an amazingly slim package:

They were made by the American Seating Company, which is still in business in Grand Rapids.  Made in 1941, right at the beginning of wartime, they could have been for a church basement or for a super secret Army headquarters, who knows? 

And the industrial engineeringy hardware makes me happy.

OK, so not as exciting as a total makeover, but still.  You wanna come over and pretend like we're taking an Army briefing?  Give me a call!

Spring! Easter! Pastels! YAY!

Y'all, this post really can speak mostly for itself.  First it was spring!

From our window:

In our backyard:

At the lake:

Then, it was Easter.  The Easter Bunny came to our house and brought me a Hello Kitty Easter basket filled with champagne and chocolate.  (Smart bunny.)  Somehow he also invited in a flock of chenille chicks...

The chicks clearly ran rampant over the kitchen, and had a particularly good time with the un-dyed eggs ready for brunch. 

Once the chicks were suitably evicted from the edibles, we threw an amazing Easter brunch outside. 

 

Wherein some really amazing pastels were worn:

 

Spring, pastels, bunnies, and brunch.  All my favorite things.  Perhaps I should just rename this post YAY! 

Reason #497

So many reasons to love this house.  Reason #497 circles around the objects contained in our house, many of which are vintage hand-me-downs.  They improve our quotidian lives with their grace and beauty.

Case in point:

These are silver teaspoons from some long-lost relative of my husband's.  Each one is no more than three or four inches long.  Monogrammed, elegant, tiny, light.  Beautiful.  Reason #497 to be grateful.

Book Nookie

Somehow, using a diminutive on the word "nook" made sense in my head.  I now realize that it makes our tiny and adorable new book nook sound slightly naughty.  That's ok, it'll always be book nookie to me.

Being married to a carpenter is sometimes totally magical.  You come home one day and new things have materialized in your life!  (Don't get me wrong, being married to a carpenter can totally suck when you just want to get something DONE, and homeboy is being a perfectionist.)  But sometimes it. is. awesome.  This past week was one of those times.  Wanna see what he just knocked together in his spare time?

Gah!  Adorable built-in style bookshelf.  See how he brought the trim around on the bottom?  So luscious!  This is in the nook (nookie, nookette?) on one side of our bedroom.  Full nook view looks like this:

Love it!  With the chaise in the mix:

That corner of our bedroom is looking better every day.

Fred made this bookshelf specially to hold our children's books collection.  Yes, I realize we haven't actually procreated yet.  But we both have a soft spot in our hearts for the formative literature of our childhoods.  Put those well-loved tomes together with a bunch of books inherited from Fred's wonderful grandmother, and suddenly you can fill a bookshelf.  Want to see some of the vintage gems?

Yeah, that's right, we inherited a bunch of Black Stallion books.  "The Black Stallion's Sulky Colt?"  Yes, I know you're jealous, and yes, you can borrow it.  The other side looks like this:

Vintage Anne of Green Gables?  Love it!  I was ecstatic to see some Frances Hodgson Burnett books in the hand-me-down box, they were always my favorite when I was a little girl and these copies are lovely, lovely bookery, circa 1918.  

The window in the nook looks directly out onto our flowering cherry tree, so I immediately wanted a good spot to sit in there.  Although we're still working on the perfect cushion solution, we used an extra couch cushion and a few others we had lying around to make a little nest.

Wanna check out the view?

Beautiful!  So there you have it, the brand new book nookie.  Doesn't it just make you want to curl up and read?  Pretty sure I'm about to have some good quality time just the cherry blossoms, Anne of Green Gables, and me.  

Guest Room Fantabulousness

We've been making some progress on some of those horrible places where clutter just seems to lurk.  And fester.  And make babies.  Doesn't it sometimes seem like the clutter just magically multiplies while you aren't looking?  Hate that.  One of those spots in our house was the guest room, which is a convenient dumping ground for pretty much everything.  While the closet was being re-drywalled, all the contents had been hurled on the bed.  The husband made an amazing bookshelf, but books and tchotchkes were snuggling in unorganized illicit bliss.  Crap would be dumped in there, only to be discovered as totally useless, should-have-been-in-the-garbage-already, a whole year later.  Black hole. Anyway, fast forward to today!

Is it time for my favorite thing in the world??  A before and after?  YES PLEASE!  This was the corner of the guest room as you walk in before:

And after!

When we first moved in it looked like this:

I noted at the time that I was going for "cozy reading nook" but that I didn't quite think that I had achieved it.  Yeah.  I was right.  However, now thanks to some rearranging and a wonderful, fantabulous, I-can't-believe-it-fits antique chaise, I think we're there!

This chaise came to us from my friends Mathew and Aviva who are just as wonderful and fantabulous as their furniture.  They relocated to San Francisco and couldn't take this sexy beast of a fainting couch with them, so she came to live with us.  She needs a little help in the buttons and tufting department, but nothing I can't handle!  The bookshelf got a little organizing:

My friend Christyne (of Styne-Tine Dream Team fame) came over and helped me hang some art, and poof!  The decorating fairy has been here.

The little "side table" for the chaise isn't really a side table at all.  It's a clever reusage of three things that I love but that were hard to store and not pulling their weight as everyday members of our household:

The top layer is a vintage toleware breakfast tray, turquoise blue with white and pink dogwood flowers on it.  (SO me.  It's the furnishings equivalent of my favorite sweater.)  But it's a little hard to store and had been floating around looking for a permanent home.  The brown thing is a fantastic vintage travel bar.  (Yes you heard me right, TRAVEL BAR.  I know it's blowing your mind.  It has tiny metal cups and bar equipment and room for three bottles of your favorite spirit.  It's the Don Draper of travel-ware.  )  Given to us as a wedding gift from my friend Camille, the same one who gave me the paper lady placecards in my last post.  Thank god that girl likes to vintage shop and then give gifts, otherwise our house would be boring! The bottom layer is a gorgeous aluminum suitcase.  Is it vintage?  You bet your socks.  After trying a million ways to get the tray to balance on top of the travel bar while it was upright, I got smart and went "shopping" in the rest of the house.  The metal suitcase was being neglected in the living room and BAM, decorating magic.  I'm excited.  The other side of the room got some love too.

During drywall, this was the before:

Oy vey.  And after!

SO. MUCH. BETTER.  In fact, I think perhaps I should re-title this blog "So Much Better".  Because I wind up using those words every dang post.  I suppose that's how it goes with houses that need this much love.  Shall we look at that before/after again?

Before:

Awkward and too small art, piles of crap on the floor, stuff strewn across every surface, books askew.  Ugh!  And now:

Gah!  I can hardly handle it.  This makes me happier than Bundt cake.  And Easter.  PUT TOGETHER.

I'm working on what they call "styling".  "Styling" is the art of setting up gorgeous and interesting vignettes in your house, so that every way you look your eye doesn't get bored or assaulted by tackiness.  I think we mostly stay away from tackiness (if you can look past the makeshift curtains and beer posters), but I'm a styling rookie.  I had a couple of tries on the bookshelf:

A carved soapstone egg from my friend Miss Anna and an Alhambra pop-up scene, liven up the seven volumes of Bronte, don't you think?  What kind of 30-year-olds own seven volumes of Bronte?  Well, my manfriend's wonderful maternal grandmother lived in a big house in Boston stuffed with books.  She passed away last year just as we were setting up this house.  So many wonderful things came from her house to ours, including seven volumes of Bronte, nine volumes of Austen, 42 volumes of Kipling...you get the idea.  We can't bear to part with any of these, even if we probably won't get around to reading 42 volumes of Kipling.  Ever.  But they do make our house look very distinguished (once we get them off the floor, that is.)  My grandmother-in-law gave birth to six children, and so we inherited many wonderful children's books:

Check out that gem on the right!  It's entitled "Little Folks of Feather and Fur, and Others of Neither".  The "neither" being human children.  So sweet.

Another mini vignette features a vintage photograph of Fred's paternal grandmother on her wedding day.  Given to me at my wedding shower by Fred's mother, on the same day that my mother gave me the vase on the right.  In the back are some vintage love letter postcards.  Love, vintage, vintage love!  Cute, cute, cute.  Anyway, that's basically all we got in the guest room.  In the living room, we've done some spring sprucing up too.  We actually finished the wall!  Painted and everything!  Check it out!  BEFORE:

And after!

OK, it will be vastly improved by the addition of some art and appropriately sized furniture, but at least everything has been painted.  (A sigh of relief goes up from all my friends, as my craziness level drops by half...)  The room is looking cheerful and spring-ified all the way around:

So yay for spring cleaning and spring decor!  YAY!  What's your favorite part of spring cleaning??  Do tell!