a quick fix & miscellany

guess who has two thumbs and is back on the blog train? this guy. this gal. you know.

and i'm back with a bang! ok, not really. i'm back with a really quick and easy project that i did like 6 months ago and just thought to share. but you know, still awesome.

if you live with another person, be they spouse, sibling or roommate, you likely frequently grapple with The Great Dishwasher Mystery: is it clean or is it dirty? nothing is more annoying than accidentally putting a dirty dish in a clean dishwasher or pulling out a dirty utensil that you thought was clean. maybe in your house you always immediately put the clean dishes away after running the dishwasher. around here, we are lazy. so this is a real problem. i got irritated about it one day over the summer and decided to stop the insanity once an for all. enter an old save-the-date magnet that was still on our fridge and a few scraps of paper:



flip it to clean when you start the dishwasher, flip it back to dirty after unloading. easy peasey.

thus begins the miscellany.

you won't believe this, but i bought a piece of furniture this weekend. a finished piece of furniture. from a store. that doesn't need any sanding or painting or updating. bizarre, right? i saw it saturday and passed it up on account of the price tag and my penchant for redoing things, but i couldn't get it out of my head. i raced back to the shop yesterday after work to scoop it up. meet the new plate rack chez stone:


the carved detail at the top gives me heart palpitations. it's going on my dining room wall. immediately. because you know what? i'm not modifying it. at all. but if in the future i tire of the distressed look, i can easily give it a fresh coat of paint. this baby will also work in a kitchen, hallway, even a kid's room in a future house. and i'm pretty sure it will always give me heart palpitations. good investment.

another fabulous find this weekend was this pair of sconces:


they are metal with a mirrored back. the pieces at the bottom fold down to hold pillar candles. gorgeous. a gift from my sweet mama. thank you mama! they are also slated to hang in the dining room, where candlelit sconces will add great ambiance.

and finally, i was right. look how cute:


anna kohler's minneapolis apartment, featured in the early spring 2010 issue of renovation style. high five, anna kohler. high five.

an appology and a makeover

dear collierville, tennessee,

i'm sorry that i stereotyped you as the suburban land of tacky mcmansions, children with "y" in the place of "e/i" in their names and kate gosslein hair. please forgive me. i did not realize how quaint and adorable your town square is

tripadvisor.com

or, more importantly, how RIDICULOUSLY AWESOME your sheffield antiques mall is


without you, i wouldn't have scored this pair of fabulously carved chairs for an absolute STEAL (those claw feet!! i die!!)



or this pair of side tables with excellent potential (how adorable are those corners and the tiny little feet?!)



all for, quite literally, less than i'd pay for a single chair (with far less character) at a retail store. these babies just need some new fabric and a little paint. i've already been to sheffield's twice this week, and i almost bought like 25 more things, no lie. obsessed. if you live around here, you need to go. immediately.

scratch that. don't go. leave everything for me.

so, collierville, i'm sorry. can we be friends?

xoxo la

p.s. you may have noticed something lurking behind the side table all majestic-like in the second to last picture up there. one of the items passed from parents to daughter in the Great Move of '09 (happening this week) was the baby grand baldwin piano on which i learned to play as a child. it arrived chez stone yesterday with great pomp and fanfare. because answer me this: who needs a dining room when you can have a Grand Piano Parlor?

certainly not us.

ok, i lied. we do. we're currently in the process of making our little den into the dining room and the guest room into the den/office. we really think it'll work out better this way. and before we move everything around, we're going to move everything out and pull up the carpet in the den/two bedrooms/hallway to refinish the hardwoods underneath. so good thing i don't mind living in chaos. NOOOOOOOOT. (flashback to 1992)

in closing, please note what i am using as an occasional table between the chairs:


my great-grandma's piano stool! i was thinking of painting it, but it already has such a great (and real) age to it. once i get a nice, neutral seagrass rug in there, i think the black will really pop.

for sale. you want?

eventually i'll post something decor/diy/project-related again...but not yet.

my parents are selling the house in which they've lived for almost 30 years. am i depressed? yes, yes i am. but let's not talk about that. let's drown our sorrows in material things, like, for example, all the FREE STUFF i'm getting as they downsize. woohoo!

and lo, you too can benefit from the move by coming to 69 st. albans fairway tomorrow morning (saturday 10/17) for their big blowout garage sale! woohoo again! they'll be selling several decades-worth of clothes, toys, holiday decorations, tools, baskets (like a gazillion), home decor, artwork, etc and so forth. everything must go, so ven comigo baby!

i don't have any pictures on this computer of the house or anything they're going to sell, but i do have a few pictures from INSIDE the house. like this one, in front of our living room mantel circa 1987, when my bangs were too short:


and this one, in front of our den mantel circa 2007, when my bangs were too long:


and this one, circa 2009 when i'd scrapped bangs altogether but still carried scars from the drunk-roommate-haircutting incident of sophomore year that is forever preserved in that heinous and cheestastic hand-holding sibling portrait on the wall:


if you look reeeeeeal hard in that last picture, you can see a basket of festive papier maché fruit resting atop the kitchen cabinet. you can't buy that, because it now lives with me, but you CAN buy some of it's antique kitchen appliance friends that were displayed atop the other cabinets, like two old steam irons, a big clay jar and a wire rug-beater. intrigued? come to my house. bring dollars. buy things.

tomorrow, then? excellent.

friday eve

is it just me, or has this week taken a gajillion years? i can't believe it's just now almost friday. perhaps it's the RAIN. it needs to stop raining, like, yesterday. or the day before that. or last week. i'm so over it. also over any desire i may have once had to live in seattle.

so it's finally almost the weekend, and i can get excited about my weekend plans. they include this: freaking accomplish something. last weekend we accomplished precisely nothing, and it was lame. i think we accomplished nothing...but i can't even remember what we didn't accomplish. this week has taken so long that i've lost all memory of the last time it was weekend. SAD.

captain fantastic certainly has grand plans for the next few days. he works in real estate. i always feel like that's a sketchy job description, but it's the best way to tell someone what he does without launching into a complicated diatribe. the pertinent piece of his real estate puzzle for this post is that he owns rental properties. this is fun for me, because i never feel bad about shopping. i come home and am all "hey babe, i ordered a sweater from j.crew today...it was on sale..." but he's all "hey babe, i bought A HOUSE." whammy.

so the most recent property he (rather, WE) bought is in need of some repairs - repainting, refinishing cabinets, retiling bathrooms - and the captain has decided that it will be more cost effective and, dare he say, fun to tackle these projects ourselves. in addition to being a money-saver, this reno will be like a less-high-end practice run for what we need to do in the house in which we actually live. we'll get to see just how long it takes to refinish kitchen cabinets and just how big of a pain in the behind it is to tile a shower before we have to live it day-in and day-out. theoretically. so look forward to hearing about that fiasco in the future.

also, i'll be thrifting with my sister-in-law this weekend, and i hope to have fun finds to share. but right now...i'm spent. so that's all she wrote.

and i wish my front porch looked like this:

one kings lane

impulse

i am the queen of cheap. i almost never buy things at full price, unless that price is really small or the thing in question is a pair of jeans. jeans are always a good investment. i'm not afraid to toss around a few c-notes, but boy you betcha i'd better get a pile of awesome in return. nothing thrills me more than a good deal. i'm going to go ahead and blame this trait on my father. the man scours grocery stores around the city all day in search of a deal for chrissakes. he's probably there right now. and there's a 95% chance you'll see him on your next trip. tell him i said, "wazzup!" he loved that commercial, and he'll think you're hilarious.

the thing that makes me different from my dad is that instead of carefully researching items and weighing my options to find the best deal, i carefully research items and then randomly end up buying something completely the opposite of what i originally wanted because it's on sale. case in point: the living room rug. what follows is a sampling of the rugs i've been drooling over for weeks now, mentally decorating my living room on top of them and cataloging the curse words i'll throw out when my dogs and/or husband ruin them with muddy feet.

there's the almost-affordable-on-overstock.com (martha stewart):

the this-will-be-destroyed-in-five-minutes-but-i-don't-care (shades of light):


the why-doesn't-it-come-in-8x10-that's-just-stupid (safavieh):


and the doesn't-match-my-couch-but-whatevs (ballard designs):


(actually none of these match my couch in its current upholstery. eh, no big.)

so after hemming and hawing over the cost of rugs and the pitfalls of light colors and old marley dog's carpet-licking compulsion, we finally made a purchase. i don't have a picture of the actual rug, because it is still rolled up, patiently waiting until we re-paint the living room before its big reveal. i also can't find a picture online, because it was on super clearance at the pottery barn outlet...a $1,600 williams sonoma home rug that we shelled out $262 to take home with us. CAN YOU BELIEVE THE DEAL. geez oh pete, we couldn't. anyhoo, it looks somewhat remotely similar to a 9x13 natural fiber version of this (minus the fringe):


LOOKS JUST LIKE MY INSPIRATION PHOTOS, HUH?

i am insane. bear with me.

here's why this is an acceptable alternative: i have been collecting inspiration photos for forever, and when i look back through them, i start to notice patterns (sometimes, literally). in case this post doesn't have enough pictures already, here are a few (whose sources i don't know..oops) from my inspiration file to illustrate my point:



and my fave...


apparently i have a thing for striped floors. and lucky me, now i get to POSSESS a striped floor, and i don't even have to whitewash my hardwoods! win-win.

in related impulse-buy news, i satisfied my trellis-pattern fetish by ordering a pair of these fab bodrum throw pillows from today's one kings lane sale for 50friggin% off, booyah!


dear gorgeous new throw pillow,

can't wait to meet you in 12-20 business days.

love,

insanely affordable new striped rug