Archive | June, 2011

Things I love (v1)

29 Jun

Some people have asked me lately where I get inspiration, so I decided to write a post on things I like.  This is basically a laundry list of all the things that fill me with stuff-lust. Besides my obvious personal history with mid-century homes (told here), my first taste of the mid-century drug came from Orla Kiely.

Those who know me well know that I am a recovering Orla addict. I have had an Orla problem and was in desperate need of a 12-step program. (Kate Spade in the late 90s was my gateway drug to Orla. When I find something l love, I am as loyal as spaniel.  That is, until I love something else.) While some of you might not recognize the name, I’ll bet you’d recognize her iconic stem pattern that was her entre into the design world. I love family members that feed this addiction by sending me Orla pencils and notebooks, her latest product extension. (Thank you, Michelle!)

Then she had her fabulously successful line of home products at Target, launching her and her mid-century sensibility into the mainstream. I personally own the pear kitchen canisters and they have pretty much driven my kitchen color decisions. I also buy a new Orla bag every season because her I am completely hooked on her pattern evolution. I usually get them from her ‘Etc.’ collection, which is less expensive and more practical for someone who throws her bag everywhere and spills stuff on and in it like me. I love how cheerful and unexpected the patterns and colors are. Carrying my Orla bag just makes for a good day.

She also makes products with her trademark stem and other patterns for the home:  wallpaper, mugs, towels.  I have a dream of wallpapering one wall of my kitchen in the classic stem pattern, but at $90 a pop for a 33 ft. roll. I may need to give that more thought.

As you can see, while I can gush about my love for Orla all day long, I also like to spread the love around.  Orla was my jumping off point and will always have a special place in my heart. My cousin Michelle, mentioned above as the Orla-addiction feeder, also shares with me the cool mid-century blogs she comes across. Michelle is the only person I know more obsessed with design and cooking blogs than I am and I know that when I get an email from her, it will have a good nugget. The last one she sent me was a blog that featured other mid-century inspired fabrics and patterns: June Craft. How sunny are those fabrics? How cute are those dresses? Almost makes me want to have another little one, but I may have to settle for bribing the older girls to wear those dresses.

Etsy is also a great resource for MCM-inspired products both handmade and vintage. I particularly like their paper prints in MCM style from the Retro Modern Living Shop. (Her blog can also be found here.) And yesterday in the mail, I received an awesome poster from the ReStyle shop on Etsy from, you guessed it, Michelle. I can’t wait to frame this and put it on an image wall next to the soon-to-be-framed fragment of Peanuts wallpaper from Ainsley’s bedroom.

I realize I am going on and on and on because the inspiration out there is almost limitless.  (There may have to be a v2 of this post.) But a few more before I go…

I love color and like considering the MCM options for it. So Design Seeds is one of my favorite spots to go when tackling color questions. The green and orange kitchen is still high on the list of wants and I love this awesome color palette based on a clementine. So much more inspiring than the color strips at the paint shop, yeah? Explore this site based on theme, season, color. Just explore when you have a LOT of time on your hands.

And the final time-suckage inspirational website of all time: Pinterest. It’s a virtual pin-board that lets you grab all the awesomeness that I cataloged here and create a mood-board for practically anything…home, food, architecture, clothing. You name it, you can pin it. The only down-side is the wait for the invite, which is kind of a bummer because when a girl’s gotta something to pin, she’s just got to pin it.

What inspires you?

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Mission Accomplished. Sort of.

28 Jun

You know, in a George W. sort of way. Today was the day. We were going to finish the main bathroom or throw in the towel–forgive the pun. And finish it we did. Sort of. After a spat with my better half yesterday about my ‘expectations’ (sheesh!), he ended today by saying ‘when you’re right, you’re right.’ Were sweeter words ever spoken?

In truth, we were both right. After the let-down of yesterday, driving around looking for sinks, getting lost and then thwarted by the Rock and Roll marathon, Brett gently (and then not so gently) reminded me that not everything has to happen at once, that projects need to be bite-sized in order not to be overwhelming, that life has to have its place also.

Around here, I am known as the patient one. The one who lets things play out, lets them evolve, lets them simmer into deeper flavors. Except any kind of renovation, apparently.  I want it finished and I want it finished now. Something about this process turns me into a fist-pounding two year old who just heard the ice cream truck jingle. I had visions of painted walls, new sinks and faucets purchased and installed, and even in my wildest fantasies, a new floor. It was my baby step, remember? It’s one of the smallest rooms in the house! It shouldn’t take long. Knock this baby out in a weekend, right?

Wrong. I was delusional. Friends tried to tell me this. People tried to warn me. This will be a long and painful process, they said. No worries, I said. I can handle this. I’ve re-done houses before. That sentence needs to be corrected with ‘I’ve PAID people to re-do my houses before.’ I have never really dived into the labor like this. And let me tell you, from this vantage point, I am also realizing that I have never paid them enough.

So when I say mission accomplished, I mean two things: One, that we got the bathroom to a place that I feel good about, a place that I want to take a hot bath in (coming shortly).  And two, that I learned that this is a slow and meticulous process.  That projects should be bite-sized, not room-sized.  That my expectations should be based on reality, not on my excitement after finishing the last issue of Dwell. Based on those criteria, we succeeded indeed.

We started here:

Yesterday we werehere:

And today we ended up here:

I did finished removing all of the wallpaper and giving the walls the TSP rubdown (detailed here), which removed most but not all of the forty-some-odd-year-old wallpaper glue. I patched walls and sanded. I painted the cabinets a shade of gray that I think I am in love with, Benjamin Moore’s Deep Space, though it and the wall color Benjamin Moore San Antonio Gray appeared more blue in the bathroom than I expected. I even think we may get away without painting the tile countertops, as the neutral color seems to work with the grays. We even finished all the painting in time to head to the Roanoke for lunch Sunday while Hailey and Hannah went shopping with their grandparents.

I bought very cool mod cabinet knobs (10-pack $19.99 at Tar-jay) and swanky chrome light-switch plate covers ($2.49 at True Value). Add to the cart new Thomas O’Brien towels and wall hooks and floor rugs (around $100 total) and we have a new bathroom…or a reasonable facsimile thereof. We still need to put in new sinks and faucets and floors and floor trim and light fixtures, but those are projects in their own right and will happen in due time. Or so I am promised.

I feel that we are achieving the mid-century vibe without kitsch and with a head-nod to contemporary modernity. I am happy with the result. Ironically, the shower curtain that inspired the whole project no longer feels right in the room. The grays are too warm and the poppy too green. The curtain is no longer deserving of our masterpiece and I think something more steely and a cooler gray would be a better suited. A hunt for another time though. Patience.

For now, it feels finished. Or more finished. I am celebrating small victories. It was all worth it when Hailey came out of the new bathroom and said, ‘It’s even more fun to pee in there now!’

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Reduce, Reuse and…Retail?

27 Jun

We do our best. We’re one of those families, you know. We recycle, compost, buy local and organic. We try to keep our footprint small and, I would say, do a fair to middling job of it. When it’s time to buy something new, we try to see if there is a used option out there to keep the reuse wheel moving.

That’s why when it came to buy a new sink for the main bathroom, I suggested we look at a few of the architectural salvage facilities in Seattle. There are three with good reputations, two of which are in the SODO district and one in Ballard. (If you know of any others, let me know!) I opted to try to talk Brett into going to the two downtown because getting him to go to Ballard is like getting him to sit on nails. (For a variety of reasons we will not delve into here.) And to clarify, I really mean two new sinks. There is one in there already; the other is a big gaping hole. I doubted we could find one that matches perfectly.

After a rousing breakfast, we got ourselves and the twins into the car and headed across the bridge where we saw all the Rock and Roller marathoners slugging their way into the city too. (Congrats to all my friends who made it!) The Earthwise Salvage is on 4th Avenue S and is tucked back from the street behind a hot tub store. If you’ve ever wondered what the afterlife for household objects looks like, this is it. The variety alone is staggering. Hundreds upon hundreds of doors and door knobs and light switch plates and tiles and lions and tigers and bears! Oh my! We even found some cedar wood slats that match the ones on our ceiling, should we ever need those replaced.

I was reminded several times by my husband that we were there to look for two sinks and two faucets. Just sinks and faucets, Brandy. Not doors or pendant lamps or street signs. (Yes, street signs.) Or even the very cool looking doorbell chimes I found. We only saw a few bathroom items, including a submarine-yellow claw-footed tub for $650, which I fell completely mad for. At this point, I had to be reminded that our current endeavor is mid-century modern style, NOT pre-war bungalow anymore.

I did find a faucet that I liked and felt mid-century enough for our home:  A simple faucet with cross-handles in great condition for $65. But alas, there was only one. It did help me better define what I was looking for though. Beyond that, we didn’t have much luck and decided to move on to Second Use.

As we were leaving, we saw a sign that said ‘More Sinks This Way’, as if the universe were speaking directly to us. We walked around the corner to find rows upon rows of old toilets and sinks as Hailey exclaimed, ‘This is like toilet wonderland!’ And indeed, it was. The best part was the fun retro colored sinks in pink and blue and yellow. They ran about $20-50 each. We almost walked away with two matching pink sinks, but reason got the best of me. While kitschy and fun, I knew they weren’t the right ones for our bathroom.

We never made it to Second Use because we kept getting lost and Brett kept grumbling. After 20 minutes of trying to find it, we gave up and thought that maybe we should visit Home Depot to get a handle on what sinks and faucets of this ilk retail for new. The home improvement gods continued to conspire against us when we couldn’t find the downtown Home Depot either! We took this (and the very grumpy husband) as a sign and headed home.

With the help of the handy-dandy-no-grumpy-husband internet, we were able to find similar sinks and faucets online. We were looking for a basic 19” round self-rimming sink, which it turns out you can buy new for anywhere from $25 to $100 at Home Depot or Lowes. The faucet is another matter entirely. The model that is a similar but more modern verions of the one I saw at Earthwise is by Grohe at $150 each. Hmmm. That’s about $500 for sinks and faucets that we could have found at salvage for less than $200. 

Perhaps it’s worth trying again to find that other store or making the trek out to Re-Store in Ballard or even trying for Second Use again.  Better bring the GPS next time.

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In Praise of the Man Cave

23 Jun

I am a big believer that a good marriage is based on honesty, love, trust…and space. Lots and lots of space. I believe people deserve emotional space to be who they are and think what they think. But they also need physical space to retreat. I personally need a lot of alone time and subscribe to the Virginia Woolf notion that we all need a room of one’s own.

A room of my own seems like a distant dream because the never-ending call of ‘MOM!’ keeps me deep in the family fray.  I write these blogs at six in the morning because it’s the only time here that’s quiet. So the second best way for me to get my personal space is for Brett to have his in the recently popularized ‘man cave’.

Brett and I have both been married before. We both lived alone for a long period of time after our divorces. There are both benefits and challenges to a second-marriage. Marrying again has given us the opportunity to right some previous wrong moves in our first marriages .You live, you learn, you apply those learnings in hope of a better outcome. One of those learnings for me was that a man cave is a good thing indeed.

What is this man cave concept and why suddenly did it become part of the pop cultural dialogue? Wikipedia (the source of all knowledge ever plus the occasional error) defines is as ‘not a cave but rather a metaphor describing a room inside the house, such as the basement or garage or attic or office, or outside the house such as a wood shed or tool room, where “guys can do as they please” without fear of upsetting any female sensibility about house decor or design.’

I guess ‘go out to your cave’ sounds a whole lot better than ‘go out to your metaphor.’ I get it.  Men get the cave and women get the rest of the house. But I can’t help wonder when this phenomenon reached its tipping point. When did this retreat become something that was not only accepted but encouraged to a certain degree? According to Dictionary.com’s 21st Century Lexicon, the term “man cave” started being used in 1992. Wiktionary.com contends that “man cave” is a play on the term “cave man.”

Then when I started to think about it, there are all kinds of cultural references to the male ‘room of one’s own’ that had just yet to be labeled ‘man cave’. Think about it. For the obvious mid-century reference, think about Mike Brady and his study. Think about Michael Corleone’s study in The Godfather. It’s always been there, just without the label.

But man cave is the brand of the 21st century and it has spawned all kinds of brand extensions. There are websites and books (and more books) dedicated to the topic. There are contractors dedicated solely to building out your man cave, even one here in Seattle called Man Cave Builders, if you aren’t of the DIY ilk or want something a little more classy and high-end. There is even a show on the DIY Network.

Needless to say, with all this man cave momentum, we have always agreed that a man cave for Brett was a necessity. While on my own, I had grown accustomed to living without empty beer bottles or posters of Star Trek or walls of bikes all around me. Nor am I necessarily fond of loud drums or Pearl Jam. I don’t want to take those things away from him. I just don’t want them in front of me. So a space for a man cave was close to the top of our list of ‘needs’ (not wants, mind you) when we were shopping for a house. 

Brett’s last man cave was an attached one-car garage that housed said bikes, stinky bike clothes and shoes, computers and multiple monitors, workbench, tools, big electric saw type things and, for a brief period, a kegerator.  Yes, really.

But the really big TV, the electric drum kit and the gaming consoles lived in the family room, which had really just become an oozing out of the man cave into the home space. We knew we needed a bigger man cave.  And we found one.

This house has a car-port which was enclosed to be a proper garage. At the back is a room, complete with windows, ancient curtain rods and heat! Yes, heat! There had once been a major beam and wall separating the room from the carport which had been removed, for reasons we cannot fathom. The roof was being held up by temporary metal wall jacks. Brett and his parents have rebuilt the wall (still needs dry-walling, but that will be post-electrical work) and he has his new and improved man cave.  It oozes into the garage and I have no problem with that at all. He is attempting organization and even built shelving to house the plethora of stuff we need to store. (Hint to family:  We are FULL up on Christmas decorations, thank you.) In essence, he has a two room man cave out there to keep him happy for hours at a time.

So the main reason I am in support of a man cave is that, while he may have a room (or two) of his own, I end up with a whole house of my own. I wonder what Virginia would say about that.

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Meet my husband, Carl Spackler.

22 Jun

“License to kill gophers by the government of the United Nations. Man, free to kill gophers at will. To kill, you must know your enemy, and in this case my enemy is a varmint. And a varmint will never quit – ever. They’re like the Viet Cong – Varmint Cong. So you have to fall back on superior intelligence and superior firepower. And that’s all she wrote.” – Carl Spackler, Caddyshack

Most of the land around our house is wild. (Read: overgrown and unkempt until we decide what to do with it.) Brett pushed the lawnmower over the wilder patches this week to even things out and allow the girls to tromp around in the back. But let’s face it, it’s still just mowed weeds. We will conquer this problem eventually when we get to thinking more about landscaping, but for now the wildflowers and tall grass doesn’t bother me so much.

We do have a nice patch of lawn extending out from the side porch. This is my favorite porch and view. I like to sit out there with a glass of wine after work or a cup of tea before breakfast. (Those are in order of priority, of course, but at least it’s not a glass of wine before breakfast.) The vista is of the lawn and the field of tall purple foxgloves beyond it.

When we first looked at the house, we noticed a few patches of dirt on the lawn. We assumed it was from a dog because that is where the temporary dog run is located. We thought nothing of it at the time. However, over the past few weeks the lawn is turning more dirt patch than grass and we realized that we have a problem.

Now I have never seen patches like this in my life. I grew up in South Texas and I am not even sure that furry animals can live down there because of the heat. I’m sure they can but they didn’t tunnel in my neighborhood. Even if they did, I strongly doubt they could push up a mound under that thick patch of St. Augustine grass. My husband is no expert on tunneling varmints either, so we both assumed it was a mole and those were molehills. We began researching and investigating possible remedies.

Killing the rodent is a last resort and one that cannot be mentioned in front of the kids, especially one kid. Ainsley is the sensitive soul and cannot bear the idea of killing animals.This is the child who became vegetarian at the age of nine and who is deeply disturbed by our installation of an electric dog fence.  She even put on the collar and tested it on her wrist and is encouraging me to do the same. Uh…no thanks Ains.

This investigation is turning my husband in Carl Spackler.  The appropriate word is becoming obsession.  Without the option of killing the rodent for now, Brett is trying a mixture of pureed garlic and hot water and pouring it in the new mounds at night. This seemed to be working for a few days, but two new mounds appeared this morning. You should have seen the look on his face when I told him. I need to get him one of those hats Bill Murray wore as he wages his war.

Even more appropriately, I have learned that it is not a mole, but a gopher. (Hide the explosives!) Apparently, moles leave behind evidence of their tunnels, creating a pattern of lines on the lawn. Gophers just leave mounds that are turns in their underground tunnels. Also, getting rid of gophers is requires different methods than getting rid of moles. For moles, I have read everything from castor oil and water to high frequency sound generators to stuffing human hair into the tunnels. (Yuck!)

Gophers are altogether different culprits. They like vegetation and will often tunnel and eat your plants and bulbs from the root. We don’t notice this yet because we have no new plantings around the yard nor any vegetation that we pay much attention to right now.  And there are only two ways to get rid of them: kill them or repel them. A lot of sites I investigated said to learn to coexist with them. I will happily coexist with them. My lawn will not. I did also learn that the top four methods LEAST recommended for gopher elimination are: drowning them, blowing them up, gassing them and gumming them. That’s right, blocking their intestines with chewing gum. Some people have a lot of time on their hands. I would have thought that Molly and Baker’s presence as predators would have scared them away but apparently they already have Molly and Baker’s number.

For gophers, rodenticide is recommended.  Jenn, who has the same issue, told me yesterday that they sell it in gummy bear forms at True Value. I worry about kids and dogs though. I worry about me. What if I give the gophers the gummy bear vitamins and the kids the gopher poison! Trapping is another method and that one I will definitely have to leave to Brett because I can’t imagine dealing with a dead gopher. (See where Ainsley got it from?) There is another natural method for gophers which involves castor oil, Tabasco and peppermint oil that may be worth trying before poison or trapping. Also, mothballs. That may work as well.

We will not be shooting them, as one site suggested. ‘Just as effective as a trap and more fun.’ Perhaps there are gophers in Texas.

P.S. Brett aka Carl just came into the house singing that old camp song ‘Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts’.  Yum.

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