Various projects on my list

I've got an unending list of small projects for the house. So fun! It's like my own personal playground in there. Here's a sampling.

See that clear acrylic table in front of the couch in my office area? It's part of a set of 3 cheap nesting tables I got on eBay. I picked them because I liked how they didn't look bulky and I can rearrange them all the time. The problem: I keep running into them because they're clear and I'm a klutz. So I plan to draw some sort of design on them with a white Sharpie paint pen.


It could look cool, right? Here's an example of something related: the Timber Table from Gus Modern. (Photo from Gus.)


Next. A confession: I created an art forgery. I had a Rifle Paper calendar sitting around and decided that something flowery and patterned just like that would be precisely the thing to add to our patterned dining room. Except no Rifle prints come in 2 ft by 3 ft, so I painted one. Er, as artists like to say, "it's an homage to" Anna Bond? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?

I don't know what came over me since I don't even LIKE really flowery things that much. The room made me do it. I'm having second thoughts and maybe I'll put something else there. Not flowery. More modern. Either that, or this canvas needs a frame. On the to-do list: solve this problem.




And then I have this parrot fabric. I'm thinking it could go on the folding chairs we'll pull up to the table when we have extra guests. I could spray paint the frames and reupholster the seats; people can sit on the parrots. OR I could decoupage them onto a tray and set a vase of greenery on those birds.

Those are three projects from my list of 500.

Painting the dresser

I've finally gotten around to painting the Craigslist mid-century Drexel Touraine dresser for the dining room. It looked like this before:


I primed it with Zinsser Cover-Stain oil based primer and then tried out Sherwin Williams ProClassic Waterbased Acrylic-Alkyd Enamel. It's one of the new "hybrid" paints that acts like oil, but is actually water based. The paint store assured me it has great leveling properties so brush strokes will disappear, but that didn't prove to be the case for me. The surface looks quite brush-strokey despite my efforts to lay it down quickly and not over-brush it. It's driving me crazy, but maybe I'll forget about it once the dresser is in place in the dining room. I tried researching online whether I could add Floetrol to a water based alkyd to help it level and gave up in confusion— and, let's be honest— laziness.

I'm moving on.

I want to spray paint the hardware.


Should I make it look brassy? Pretend this statue lady's arm is a drawer handle.


Or let's get crazy: Hot pink.


Here's a hasty Photoshop mock-up with brass.


Here's a hasty Photoshop mock-up with pink. Heck, let's paint the fancy trim around the bottom, too.


But remember, it's going to live in this room with nutty fuchsia wallpaper. A vintage lamp with a sleek brass cylinder base will sit on top.

My gut tells me it would be pink overkill. After all, a respected colleague once informed me that restraint is the second rule of design. But man, that pink is FUN. Maybe in a room that wasn't already swathed in pink.

I was going to use the original hardware, but the mocked-up rectangles are making me want something simple, modern, and less fussy. I wonder if I could find something like that.

What to do, guys?

UPDATE: I couldn't find new drawer pulls, so I tried for a brass paint job and didn't like the spray paint I used. So they're navy.

I found something in my yard

This was hiding by my front step. A crocus! It's spring!

Just kidding. I know this is a daffodil. It's one of the four plants I know. I haven't seen our yard in spring, so I'm curious what will happen. Right now it looks like a dead weed patch.

Speaking of dead, my new potted palm appears to be ailing already. I followed the Home Depot lady's instructions and let it soak up water from the bottom. After couple hours I dumped out the extra water. That was a week and a half ago. Yesterday after seeing it's looking poorly, I watered it again, this time from the top. Today it seems a little yellower yet. It's in a bright room but out of direct sunlight.


Can someone diagnose the problem? Left up to me, I'd do the plant equivalent of seeing someone with a bad cough and concluding their arm is broken. Not enough water? Too much water? Needs plant food? Root rot. More sun. Less sun. Wants to move to Florida. I don't know. Help.

New old light for the office

A recent antique store find: this mid-century ball pendant light, which now graces the office. At night from the street it looks like a big round moon in there. I love it. Plus it coordinates nicely with these awesome globe lamps in the adjoining room.


I guess some bloggers like to decorate their workspace with cute garlands and buntings. I prefer to drape electrical cords all around behind desks for a more linear, modern effect. Who's with me?


Here's the light fixture that got demoted. It's just not cool. The green finish reminds me of sponge painting, which I dislike pretty intensely. Maybe this guy can find a good home on Craigslist.

I bought the vintage pendant light for $90. Not a steal, but cheaper than new and comes with extra character. I see West Elm is selling something similar for $129, or you could shell out $285 at Rejuvenation.

I hope I don't kill it

I brought home a biggish $16 palm from Home Depot this weekend and put it in the parlor. I had hoped to find something tall that was not a palm for a good price, but all the other plants they had were much too small. IKEA and Lowes didn't have anything better, and the greenhouse I tried was closed until spring (whenever that is). This guy kind of makes a big difference in the coziness factor, doesn't it? See corner before. Alex was impressed, too.

The Home Depot lady said that after 20 years of killing plants, she has finally learned not to water them from the top, but to let the plant suck up the moisture from the bottom. Her formula is: keep the plant in the cheap plastic container it came in. Put that inside a clear plastic liner tray from the garden center or cheap disposable party bowl from the dollar store, and set both of those inside the pretty decorative outer pot. Every week or so, put water in the clear liner tray for the plant to absorb. Give it Miracle Grow once or twice a month.

We'll see. I'm starting with this guy, and then I'll branch out (har har) into some of the other plants you guys recommended in the excellent comments on this post.

Also note the cute curly fig on the table, too. Best wishes for a long life, little fella.

Update: as requested, here's the pot I put the palm in. It's from Kroger.

House plant ideas

It's starting to seem a little more spring-like outside, which turns my thoughts toward our yard that I don't know what to do with. And plants. At Lowes this weekend I bought a couple small houseplants and put this one in a pot I had. But I need more!

A smart designerly friend suggested I put a great big palm in the dining room, Downton Abbey style. It would look awesome. But I hear palm and immediately picture this.

I might take her suggestion for a philodendron instead. And a pencil plant for the office. Love it. I use pencils there, so that makes sense.

Now, I understand that if you're a blogger and/or want your house to look like a magazine photo, it's required that you own a fiddle leaf fig.

Got any other suggestions for potted plants that could stand on the floor, grow really tall, don't require direct sunlight, and are hard to kill?

Scratchboard art

I haven't seen scratchboard since art class in high school. It's a fun medium— you scrape away a black ink finish to reveal the white coating underneath. This weekend I picked up a scratchboard drawing done in the 60's by local artist Louis Speigel. I did some research and it turns out he is best known for his paintings of clown faces. I do not need any of those. But I liked this fountain. Original local art! It was an impulse purchase from my favorite antique store. I'm not sure exactly where it will hang, but I'm thinking the parlor.

The subject is Cincinnati's Tyler Davidson Fountain, named "The Genius of Water," in downtown Fountain Square.

To see some terrific examples of scratchboard art, head to scratchboard.org. There are a few tutorials and fascinating videos of artists drawing, too.

We gift wrapped the dining room

The dining room wallpaper is finished. It almost killed us, but we prevailed. Remember when my plan was to do just an accent wall? After living with it for a couple weeks, we decided the rest of the room looked too stark and incomplete. So we bought more.

We painted the white ceiling light gray and added paper to the other walls. It took two Saturdays and a couple late nights after work to do the remaining three walls, because we are possibly the slowest wallpaper hangers in history. And one of us is an annoying perfectionist. This room has two windows, a fireplace, and five doors to maneuver around, with rosette blocks that stick out on the corners just to add some extra pain and suffering.


Painting the ceiling was a challenge since we didn't want to get paint on the wall that was already done. I had nightmarish visions of turning it into a Jackson Pollack mural, so we tried to tape a plastic sheet over it. The painter's tape wouldn't stick on the painted walls, however; the plastic was too heavy. Alex had a roll of plastic film from work, so we decided to try that, thinking that taping up strips would be easier since they'd be lighter. To our amazement, the stuff clung to the wall with static electricity alone. This discovery was the greatest moment in our entire project. We couldn't stop high-fiving. It was how Ben Franklin must have felt.

With a tiny brush I carefully painted the ceiling along the edge of the wallpaper, and then the rest of the painting was easy. We didn't spill a drop on the plastic. Figures.

Then came the marathon wallpaper application, and here we have it:


It's cozy and pretty and dramatic. I love it. I'm more of a minimal girl at heart, but in a Victorian house, you have to have some fun.

For Valentine's Day Alex bought me flowers that match the paper. That might seem like no big deal, but God and I both know how much he detested doing this project with me. Trust me: that gift was an amazing act of self-sacrifice.

A more modern light fixture is in the works, along with some artwork and a painted dresser. We're coming down the home stretch in here!

P.S. The paper is Sophie Conran's Balustrade in Claret. It was on sale when I bought the second batch, so if you need to have some, maybe a discount will come along.

The parlor has light!

Fiiiiinally. I ordered this light fixture from Joss and Main in September. The glass shade arrived cracked, and it took the manufacturer a couple months to send a replacement (J&M's customer service people were very responsive and helpful; it was the manufacturer's issue). Also the fixture was listed as having sockets for six bulbs, but ours only had four. We worked on getting the base with six for a few months since that's what was advertised, but ended up being shipped a duplicate part for four bulbs. And at that point we gave up. Sunday this beauty went up on the ceiling.


Turns out four bulbs is plenty in this room and we're glad the base doesn't hold six. We'd probably have to wear sunglasses.

This sale has popped up again at Joss and Main for another 20 hours, I see, so if you find yourself needing one of these, see the deal here. The manufacturer is ELK Lighting and their name for this fixture is the Preston 6 Light Pendant.

Next we want to make over that fireplace. Give it a tile facelift and hook up some gas. We want fire! You can picture it, can't you? Let me help you via Photoshop:


We haven't looked at tile at all; we're still trying to figure out the cost of producing flames. But while we're playing in Photoshop, let's decorate some more. A plant? Bigger art, maybe? (Oops, I covered up the brass lady accidentally.) Some coffee table stuff like bloggers put on their tables for photos, and then clear off and pile their remotes and magazines back on after the picture is taken? Yes.

Faux tin tile fireplace makeover

Mission accomplished! The antique spinach dip tile on the dining room fireplace has been successfully disguised with removable panels. Apologies, Rookwood fans. But don't despair. If someday you buy this house from us, you can pull off these sheets of embossed thermoplastic and the spinach dip will be yours to enjoy. Yum.

I used Fasade backsplash sheets for this makeover, which I first saw in a rack at Home Depot. They're lightweight, easy to cut, and since this isn't a working fireplace, they're not going to melt. After gleefully hatching my plan, I contacted the manufacturer to see if they'd send complimentary tiles for this experiment in exchange for reporting on the project (success or epic fail). Score! So a huge thank you to Fasade.


Fasade panels come in different sizes for walls, ceilings, and backsplashes in a variety of finishes and designs: modern, traditional, and industrial. I chose from the traditional category to match the look of the mantel, and selected the pattern with the smallest repeat so that more than one square would show along the sides of the fireplace cover. Traditional 6 in Brushed Nickel was my pick (the left-most swatch in the Before photo and the top swatch above).


I measured the swatches and determined that each repeat is a 3" square. I made a quick diagram in Illustrator to see how many 18" x 24" backsplash sheets I'd need, color coding each panel to show where the leftover cutouts could be used. Six sheets would do the job.


Supplies included a cutting mat, utility knife, ruler (this plastic quilting one didn't slide around as much as my metal cork-backed one), tape measure, kitchen scissors for trimming off extra bits, and a Sharpie. I hung the panels with a combination of poster putty and self-adhesive foam tape.

Removal instructions on the mounting tape state that brushing rubber cement onto any left-behind goo will make it easy to rub off the sticky residue with your finger. So I'm confident these will come off without harming the tile.


Each panel is covered with a protective plastic film you remove at the end of the job. I marked my cuts on the film with a Sharpie, and after the film peeled off, no markings showed on the final panels. For each cut, I scored the panel by sliding a utility knife along a ruler a couple times. No need to cut all the way through— just bend the panel back and forth along the score and it will snap apart.


The fireplace required a ridiculous number of cuts in the floor panels to get them to fit around the mantel pillars. I drew a diagram on paper for those and labeled the length and placement of each of the dozen-or-so cuts needed for each piece. They ended up too snug in a couple spots so I trimmed off bits with a scissors until the panels fit.


Tedious but worth it.




Once all the pieces were cut to size, I peeled off the protective films and stuck the panels to the tile. In a couple spots the old tile was sunken in, so I built up those areas with poster putty. I put small pieces of foam adhesive tape in the corners of each panel and one or two along the seams. Fasade panels are designed to overlap one another at the edges, so I made sure to apply the panels in the right order.


So much better! (Hey look, there's the head.) Next project: more wallpaper. Why stop with just an accent wall? We're going to cover the whole room. It's going to be crazy and wonderful. Or crazy and terrible, which is a distinct possibility, but we're going for it. If you think this is a bad idea, don't tell me. I'm sure I've already had every thought that has just flitted through your mind, and then I squelched them in my enthusiasm for making a room that is unlike any dining room I've been in before.

To do: paint a dresser

I don't think I've mentioned this project on my growing to-do list: painting a mid-century Drexel Touraine french provincial dresser I got on Craigslist. It's in wonderful condition and just needs a coat of paint to freshen it up. Then it will hold things that belong in a dining room, like tablecloths and screwdrivers and batteries.

If you'd told me a year ago that I was going to put something of this style in my house, I'd have laughed at you. But I didn't bank on having a fireplace in my dining room that looks like this. We fell in love with the house and it has been bossing us around ever since.


I think I'm going to paint it all white to downplay the dresserliness of it and make it more modern. Only the accent wall has fuschia wallpaper; the other walls are white, so adding some white over here seems like a good idea to tie things together. See some examples of similar dressers painted white that I collected on Pinterest.


This is sort of where we're headed— a Photoshop collage of ideas I made several weeks ago. (Visualize that fireplace with faux tin tile instead of the gray stuff I pasted on. This mockup was before I hatched the plan of a removable skin for the antique tile.)

A brief office tour

I don't think I've shown pictures of my office yet, so here's a quick look. It's on the second floor above the parlor, so it's much brighter than the downstairs rooms. Thank goodness— if I had to work in the gloom of the living room or dining room, I'd probably design nothing but gray logos in my state of depression.

The floor is a lighter finish than downstairs and the whole space is sunnier. The fireplace behind our desks was removed at some point, which makes it much easier to put tables there (though the chimney juts out, which is a bit challenging).

It's filled with the same stuff we had in our Chicago place. Spray painted file cabinet, the boxes we made to put our monitors on, the Steelcase chairs I reupholstered, and various orange stuff I either painted, purchased, or was given.


Here's a new addition: Vara orange doors for the IKEA Besta cabinet we've owned for years. I bought the doors yesterday and put them on, and they hide all the ugly clutter that used to be visible under the window. Fantastic!


I've got a bunch of job files I need to access easily, so I figure if they have to show, they should be my favorite color. (Boxes of 100 colored file folders are available at Amazon.)

You'll notice there's a tiny room adjoining the office, accessed by double pocket doors on the office side and another door heading out into the hallway to the right of the couch. (The office also connects to our bedroom with double pocket doors, so I can roll out of bed in my PJs and plop down at my computer after a very short commute.)


Alex has dubbed this room the "Designer Lounge," which sounds very glamorous. It's like I'm Don Draper, and perhaps I need to have a glass of whiskey and lie down for a moment to mull over a particularly snarly creative problem. Like what to put on the walls, for example.

I'm sure what caught your eye and made you gasp with delight, however, were the two 70's table lamps. Are they not awesome? A recent find.


If it's round and lights up, I automatically love it, and here are not one but TWELVE total orbs of glowing beauty. Don't let the high ceilings fool you. Each lamp is over three feet tall, so they are not petite. There is no overhead light socket in this room, so whatever lamps we add have to work hard at dispelling the gloom. Twelve bulbs will do it!

Fireplace tile cover-up plan

I've had a brilliant idea. You might recall the spinach dip tile on my dining room fireplace. Beloved by antique Rookwood fans, despised by yours truly. I can't bring myself to rip it out, so my plan is to hide it in a temporary fashion. I considered decals, wood panels, and all sorts of inelegant options.


Then I stumbled on Fasade panels at Home Depot one day after abandoning Alex in the insulation aisle. (He was engrossed, which was mystifying, since it's the most boring aisle in the entire store.) My wandering led me to these thermoplastic panels modeled after vintage tin ceiling tiles. They're lightweight and seem easy to cut. There were only a couple options in a rack in the store, but I looked online and found lots more designs and finishes. I contacted the manufacturer for samples, and these arrived today.


Excuse the nasty looking photo with flash, which doesn't do the finishes justice. I'm narrowing it down, and then I'm gonna give this fireplace a facelift. (Please note this is not a working fireplace, so you needn't fear I'll end up with a melted puddle of tile.) I'm so excited! I'll let you know how it turns out.