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A Magic Carpet!!

by readmakedo on December 7, 2012 in Before and After, Decor, Design, Home, Livng Room with No comments

[Note: Sorry for the hiatus! Turns out that a month of every birthday ever + Thanksgiving = Very little free time! Lots of fun projects to share with you though. For starters...]

We are pretty pumped.

Why are we so pumped? I’ll give you another hint.

YUP. After living here for a year, we bit the bullet and bought a new rug. You know how you’re supposed to “Go big or go home”? Well what do you do if you’re trying to go big AT home? I guess you go really big. Like, 9 feet by 12 feet big. That’s pretty dang big.

“Hey weirdo, why are you so excited about a rug?” you might be asking. I have a 2 part answer for you.

1) You’ve obviously never seen Aladdin.


2) You’ve never struggled with carpet shopping.

Our old rug was one that I had came to after a series of poor choices. It was a jute, 5×7 rug from World Market that was mostly intended to be indestructible. I had purchased the jute rug to replace another rug, after I learned that black dog hair + white shag rug = THE WORST DECISION YOU COULD EVER MAKE. I bought the jute rug as a sign of resignation. I had given up the dream that I could ever own anything beautiful, sighing softly to my two black dogs and saying “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

When we moved into our new house, I decided to put the jute rug in the highest traffic area, since I knew it would see a lot of Schipperke wrastlin’ (for adorable footage of my dogs wrestling and being BFF’s, you’d better click here). I also put it there, because I simply had no better place to put it.

The main problem with the rug was that it was too small for the room. I’ve talked about before how the biggest problem with our living room is it’s one big long hallway. In some ways, having your living room right next to your dining room is fun, but in other ways sometimes you feel like you’re just hanging out in your dining room. And that’s weird, right?

“Hey living room, how you living?”
“Oh hey there dining room.”

I googled lots of random phrases in the past like “How to make your living room not so lame” or “How to deal with living in a bowling alley”, and found a lot of great advice about how to deal with making a non-room feel like a room (especially this article from Houzz, super helpful). And that answer 90% of the time had to do with establishing a sense of place with the right size rug. (The other 10% had to do with finding furniture that broke up the flow of the room, which we did by buying our new sofa with a chaise).

In order to get a rug to truly “fit” a room, it should be large enough to extend under all or most of the furniture in the room. Uh, unless we lived in a 5×7 room, our poor little jute rug wasn’t going to do that. Sorry, bro. So we looked and looked, and finally found this 9×12 beauty on Overstock.com for about half of what a normally priced rug would cost. AFFORDABLE!

So after I dragged a 97 lb rug into my house all by myself (LIKE A BOSS), we unrolled that bad boy, lifted up all the furniture (it was a lot a lot a lot of work), and got it in there.

JERRGGGGGGGGG. That was the noise I made while we positioned everything. Seriously, do you realize how hard it is to move a rug this big????

After I caught my breath, I managed to put everything back and then that’s when some angels came down from on high and sang to me as a heavenly choir. They were all:

HALLELUJAH.

HALLELUJAH.

HALLELUJAH. HALLELUJAH. HA—LE—-LU—-JAAHHHH.

We had a party last weekend too (that you will hear about in the future), and people totally were all hanging out by the fireplace in the living room, dogs were chilling on the floor, it was a comfortable place to be. Also, does this rug look familiar to you? That’s because we totally have its friend rug in the office!

BOOM. Check out that Moroccan motif throughout our house!!

LET’S RECAP why this rug is so awesome!

1. It makes the room feel more like a real room, and not like a bowling alley.

2. I can go sock-free on it and still have cozy toezies.

3. It’s super beautiful.

4. Potentially magical qualities.

5. It visually creates a flow between the living room, dining room and office, while still separating each space.

So that’s why I’m so excited about a rug. Now go forth, and be excited about rugs too.

Work with What You Got

by readmakedo on August 28, 2012 in Before and After, Decor, Home, Landscaping with No comments

Or: Love the One Your With?

As you all know, our patio was brought to it’s glorious fruition last week. I am still really pumped about it, you have no idea how awesome it feels to be able to walk outside and walk around in my backyard without tripping over re-bar, or getting a weird pebble in my shoe.

So now that the patio is done, it’s time to (Step one) figure out furnishings, and (Step two) start getting stuff planted!

We already had a few furnishings from my old patio. We had our boneyard of old wrought iron furnishings in the side yard (a.k.a world’s largest spider habitat)….

freaking. terrifying.

…and this bench from Cost Plus, pictured here in my old backyard.

Yeah I was outside painting one day. My old backyard was awesome like that.

 

I previously had re-painted and spruced up some select pieces from our backyard, and mixed those in with some unpainted, mismatched chairs we had (you can also see them all in the photo above).

[Side note: See those unplanted Oleander trees in the waay back of the yard? We've got a big plan for those! But that will have to wait for another post.]

Next, I found a home for my lovely bench along a previously very blank wall.

“I ain’t going over there.” – Skipper

Lookin’ good, bench!

Now we just have to take care of that creepy tree branch that continues to encroach upon our walking space in our yard. At first, we felt like it was a welcome, quirky addition to our space, but it is no longer welcome. Apparently, spiders are not limited to living in our side yard only, and I’ve had too many spider + my mouth close calls (I thought the only way you could swallow a spider on accident was in your sleep? Isn’t that the agreement we have with spiders? No? Ok then).

So we’ve still got a ways to go on our backyard, but it’s nice to see it coming together even more. Now I’m just crossing my fingers for an Indian Summer in October so I can have a pool party for my friend Carrie‘s visit.

 

PATIO PARTYTIME

by readmakedo on August 21, 2012 in Decor, Home, Uncategorized with 4 Comments

Perhaps my ALL CAPS title for this post conveys that I AM REALLY EXCITED.

At long last, after 9+ months of waiting, our patio is DONE.

OMG, TEARS. Give me a moment.

We went from this….

To this….

CAN I GET AN AMEN???

Yeah. To recap, we tore out the original patio within a few months of living here. We were able to throw one party with the old patio (Jason’s 28th birthday party, to be exact), and then it was removed. Now we are ready to party again in time for Jason’s 29th birthday next month! So yeah, it’s been a long project.

The original patio needed to be torn out because of drainage issues, and french drains needed to be dug all around the house. Then winter hit, and we decided to take a break from the patio until the Spring.

We original thought (and perhaps jinxed ourselves) “Oh it will be done in the end of May…” but then we realized there was an opportunity to fix some aging pool pipes. Then a month later, we realized we should take the opportunity to lay new electrical for the pool.  Then we realized we should address how we were going to re-attach the patio cover that already was installed on the house (uhh, we’re still working on that). By the end of July, the patio cement was poured, but then the brick needed to be laid, fitted and mortared.

Well now almost a year later, we have the most awesome backyard I could have ever hoped for. We are so pumped about it. So let me show you around!

Our cement patio/pool deck now flows beautifully with our all-brick patio.

It is was definitely worth the wait. And we still have a little bit of Summer left to enjoy it!

I’M MORE PUMPED THAN THESE POOL TOYS! Well, see ya poolside!

(P.S. Shamu was a wedding gift from my beloved friend Heather. I’d say that earns her an invite to a pool party, ASAP.)

 

 

 

 

Stephanie’s Vintage Tea Birthday

by readmakedo on August 2, 2012 in Baking, Entertaining, Home with No comments

Tuesday’s post featured my current favorite cake recipe: The Chocolate Coconut Dream Cake. So where did I take my most recent cake? To my beloved friend Stephanie’s birthday party!

Stephanie rang in the big 2-4 with the classiest tea party I had ever seen. She made the obligatory tiny sandwiches (goat cheese & cucumber, and salmon & cream cheese), raspberry tartlets, homemade sangria (putting the PARTY into tea party!), and my personal favorite: MINI PIES.

My favorite thing about the Mini-pies (aside from the fact that I got my own pie all to myself, and a mini-pie has way more crust than a normal slice of pie. YESSSSS) is that she was able to make tons of different flavors really easily. There were blackberry apricot, pluot & berry, pear, the list goes on.

Other friends contributed homemade scones, decorations, and flowers. It was truly a very classy party. The decorations were adorable vintage tea and cake stands, vintage china, and of course, a good helping of lace and crochet everywhere.

Why don’t people throw more tea parties? I want to start a book club now, where we don’t actually read books but we really just eat crumpets and put lemon curd on everything. Stephanie, your domestic prowess inspires me–now pinkies up, let’s throw another tea party soon!

Want to throw a tea party of your own? Share your awesome tea party ideas below in the comments!

 

Less is More!

by readmakedo on July 26, 2012 in Design, Home with 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about porches lately, since I’ve been working on a few fun projects to spruce ours up. A few years ago, I fell in love with Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, mostly because they are basically ALL porch (srsly, if you want to throw a party, you gotta throw it outside), but also because of what they represent. They are about learning to love the things you have, and making sure you live simply. After all, you have to live simply in less than 100 square feet!

The lovely Mary from marybrightside.com shared with me a short documentary titled “Living Tiny” with me. (Coincidentally, it is co-directed by her very talented husband, fimmaker Paul Donatelli, and also Paul Meyers.)

Check out the short here!

I love the short film, and the Tiny House movement in general. It helps me personally take a moment and think about how I can aspire to live with less: Less waste, less want for things, and a greater appreciation for what I do have.

Some people have made some really beautiful design decisions with their tiny homes. Some of the houses pictured below are by Tumbleweed, some of them aren’t. I just wanted to show how creative people were!

 

Source: theberry.com via Kate on Pinterest

Chair Faire

by readmakedo on July 19, 2012 in Decor, Design, Home, Livng Room with 3 Comments

There is probably nothing better than a statement chair. If there were a chair expo, or as I would call it, a “Chair Faire” I would be first in line, laminated pass, ready for all 3 days. We recently took the plunge and committed to buying a new sofa for our living room (we are consigning/selling our current Ethan Allen one, comment below if you are interested!), which has me thinking a LOT about what kind of chair would be the perfect compliment to it. While these chairs are out of my budget, it gives me great ideas for potential to look for in the future.

So, admission free, here’s your ticket to the Chair Faire.

 1. Louis XIV would be jealous. (From The Bella Cottage) The gold leafing and antique woodwork on this chair are insane. What I love about it though is that the details and opulence are balanced out with a soft, understated white upholstery. Classy.

2 & 3. Pretty & Prettier in Pink. (No. 2 from pbteen  and No. 3 From Furbish Studio) The pink stripes are a fresh take on grandma’s dining room set, but the ultra-modern string print on chair #3 takes this look to a whole new level.

4. Cross My Heart… (Painted Bias Armchair From Anthropologie) …and hope to die over this chair. The gold leafing is like nothing I have ever seen, I am mesmerized by it.

5.  Paisley Please! (Suzani Print Button Back Armchair from Graham and Green – UK) YOU GUYS. I AM SWEATING. I AM SWEATING OVER THIS CHAIR. AND THE OTTOMAN? WHAAAAAAAAAAT?!! Yes. Yes please, I will take them all, thank you <3

6. Double Trouble. (Unknown origin, via decorpad) Maybe it’s because my second favorite movie is the Shining, but there is something really special about two of a kind! Wait, that wasn’t the point of those twins in the Shining? Wait they were DEAD? Whoa totally missed the point of that movie. ANYWAYS, I love a good pairing and these two are just too cute. I’d want to keep them forever, and ever, and ever.

Got a favorite dream chair? Share it in the comments! Let’s get this chair faire going. 

The Hot Seat!

by readmakedo on July 17, 2012 in Before and After, DIY, Home, Uncategorized with 4 Comments

Last week, I shared with you my dream for revamping our wrought iron furniture on a budget. I wanted to reclaim my chairs from spider habitat to something actually useable and not terrifying to sit on.

I was able to fix up two of the chairs and I am so stoked on them. Take a look!

Yes, you are only seeing one chair. The other was actually drying: it needed one more coat of paint so I decided to let it sit and rest while this one glorious chair got the spotlight.

It was really easy and only took less than an hour really, but with big breaks in between. I went to Michael’s and picked up this amazing spray paint by Montana Gold called “Poison”….eegh I don’t know about that color name, but the pigment itself was gorgeous!

So here’s what the chairs looked like originally:

Sad. Nasty. Gross.

I already had some sandpaper, Rustoleum Primer for metal surfaces, and clear Rustoleum Enamel coat, to prevent the furniture from rusting more over time.

I sanded off as much of the existing rust and loose paint from the chairs as I could. Then, I cleaned them with some Comet and let let them dry.

Already looking more fresh!

Next, I sprayed them all over (underneath too, the seats were really rusty!) with the primer to prevent any further rusting, and nay more from forming. After I let them dry for about an hour, I went back out with my green spray paint and put my first coat on.

The key with spray painting is you have to have light strokes, always keeping your can of paint moving. If you keep painting in a single area for too long, the paint piles up and can drip. Sad :(

One more green coat + some drying later, I was able then to seal them with a clear Rustoleum Enamel coat. This is especially important for the paint I purchased, which is not necessarily an “outdoor paint” but is an artist’s acrylic. I won’t worry too much about that over time though. Acrylic paint is plastic based, so it is extremely durable in many different applications.

That’s about it! A really easy + inexpensive project, for really major results. I can’t wait to use them! Now if you’ll excuse me, that magazine & grapefruit soda pictured have my name on them.

Wrought Iron REVAMP

by readmakedo on July 12, 2012 in Decor, Design, DIY, Home, Uncategorized with No comments

So our patio is almost done, and that has me itching to figure out what we’re going to do in terms of furnishings. Lucky for me, World Market is having an insane sale (everything shown here is under $50 bones!!). Unlucky for me, I don’t have endless funds. You’ve seen our pool, it isn’t filled with money all Scrooge McDuck style, it’s filled with nasty questionably chlorinated water!

Nevertheless, check out this spread I’ve come up with for furnishing our backyard on the cheapie:

See those two wrought iron pieces that are owned? Well they don’t look so cute right now.

I give you, “The Boneyard”.

This is where apparently vintage wrought iron goes to die. I’ve somehow amassed waaay more wrought iron furniture than is necessary for any one human to own, and I’m finally coming to terms with the fact that I’m going to need to let some of it go. It’s not very comfortable (who would have thought that bent metal isn’t comfortable!), and due to it’s lack of comfort it gets ignored and becomes basically the craziest spider habitat you’ve ever seen.

So, time to pick out the good pieces and see what we’ve got to work with:

We’ve got several great table options (I pulled this side-table out, the bigger one might be more appropriate for our final space, but it was definitely home to some freaky spiders. Only one kind of freaky spider is worth it to me, and those ones ain’t it.)

So that whole “tattered rusty” thing is not a good look. So first things first, I’m going to need to sand these bad boys down, prime them, then spray paint the bejeezus out of them. But what color to pick?

I love the idea of a real teal-y blue, like think maybe Tiffany Blue, or maybe carry my lime green theme through to the outdoors. Also, who doesn’t love a nice sunny yellow?

Dang, check out how funkarella that side table would look with a new coat of paint. Double dang, I think I just invented a new word.

All in all, I’m excited about the possibilities. I love working with things that we already have and sprucing them up. Got any other awesome backyard finds for me? Other great paint color ideas? Holla at me in the comments! <3

Color and Style Inspiration for the House!

by readmakedo on June 28, 2012 in Design, Home with 1 Comment

Ever since I moved into my current home, I started planning for what my long term vision for the house would be. We knew we needed to undertake some big projects immediately (i.e., revamping the patio, adding new windows), determining how the house would actually LOOK became a big question mark.

When we originally were house-hunting, it made me even MORE aware of how many different house styles there are out there: My previous home was a 1940s glamazon Bungalow, we looked at a gorgeous old mission-style home that needed a ton of work, and we even saw a few ultra-modern flipped houses. Still, nothing quite felt like home until I saw the house we ended up with: A charming, comfortable 1960′s California Rancher, that wasn’t overly modern, but also not overly traditional either. The house wasn’t perfect, but somehow it just spoke to me.

So what is the inspiration for our current home?

California Living.

For starters, I wanted to let the ease of California-living be something that really stood out. The house has an enormous (9′ deep!!!) pool, which was not on our wish-list…still, the pool is a central focal point of the house. We are lucky to live in an area that we can use our patio about 8 months out of the year, and we wanted to maximize the use of outdoor space, and have a very natural flow between the inside and the outside. I’m a HUGE fan of Eichler homes and they are a beautiful source of inspiration for how to have a nice flow between indoor and outdoor living spaces.

Source: sfgate.com via Kate on Pinterest

 

 Green

The one thing that our landscaping is definitely not lacking is a ton of greenery. Our backyard has a hillside, which is covered in bright green ivy. While ivy is not necessarily my favorite plant, there is something really beautiful about the hue it reflects when the sun hits it in the morning. It is always very bright, and brings a lime green tint to the back rooms of the house. I tried to pull in accents of this lime green and really go with it.

Hence our Lime Green front door:

Our Lime Green Dog Beds


and some lime accessories throughout the house.

Calm Colors

You can’t have all that lime green and not balance it out somewhat! Key Lime Pies are only good because there’s just a TEENY bit of Lime in them, and the rest is all eggs and milk. That would be a nasty pie if it were all lime. Geez, my mouth hurts just thinking about it.

I’m a big fan of “Greige”, but I’m very aware of the fact that there needs to be a balance between Greige, other neutral colors, and other colors and textures to break things up, so it doesn’t just become a sea of foggy gray. That would be too sad!

Source: sfgate.com via Kate on Pinterest

Source: decorpad.com via Elisha on Pinterest

Source: decorpad.com via Kate on Pinterest

 

 

So, all in all if I were to sum it up with a color palette, it would be this:

What about you, where do you go to look for inspiration for your home? Do you just have certain things that you always gravitate towards? Do you make it up as you go along?

Read more about where to find awesome inspiration for your own space, check out these links:

http://www.housebeautiful.com/decorating/colors/design-blogs-color-inspiration#slide-1

 http://www.hgtv.com/decorating/best-places-to-find-color-inspiration/index.html

 http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/1027652

 

Pool Party Countdown

by readmakedo on June 21, 2012 in Home, Landscaping with 2 Comments

IT’S THE FINAL COUNT-DOWN!

After months and months and months (since OCTOBER!) our patio is starting to look like more than just dirt. We had to tear out our patio shortly after moving in, in order to take care of some drainage issues before winter set in.

Since then, it’s pretty much sat dormant, taunting us and our inability to clean the pool, or go swimming, or walk through the yard without tracking mud into the house. Until recently!

“Can I go swimming yet? JUST KIDDING I HATE WATER.” – Skipper

That’s right, we have a partial patio! And the makings of the rest of the patio!

Allow me to show you around.

Admittedly, I can’t take credit for any of the construction that’s going on. I’ve left that to professionals, because I wouldn’t know how to mortar my way out of a paper bag (actually, that sounds like a recipe for mortaring yourself into a paper bag…). Still, I’m really excited with how this project is shaping up, and for those of you who have been dying to come over and use the pool I thought it would be nice to share pictures.

We had the largest, and most involved portion of the patio done first–the brick deck. Previously, there was a rotting wood deck that looked more like a pirate plank out here. When you walked on it, the wood would sway and bounce, which wasn’t the most reassuring feeling. You can see that the brick deck ends slightly short from where the cement portion of the deck will end. This was for two reasons:

a) We wanted to break up the brick area, so it doesn’t seem like a brick-overload (Also, bricks are really expensive!) and…

b) We’re not super sure what our pool reno plans are going to be in the future. If for some reason we don’t re-do our current pool, we could easily install a spa elsewhere. Of course, we wouldn’t want to just rip up brand-new cement to put a spa in. That would waste time + $$$. If we did want to put a spa there, it is a straight shot down the lawn to our pool equipment, so we would need to do minimal digging. Easy peasy!

So, we’re planning on leaving a small portion at the end of the brick patio unpaved, and covering it with slate, flagstone, or maybe some cement molds and filling in the gaps with grass and moss.

Like so:

Source: patio-ideas.org via Kate on Pinterest

 

It makes the transition from patio to grass a little bit more natural-feeling as well.

We’re trying to decide between these different materials. I’ve always been partial to cement pavers, but a part of me loves the idea of having some slate out there with moss growing in between it.

This is what the patio looks like from the house. Try to ignore the BBQ and tons of patio furniture stacked in the side yard.

The framed out section of the deck is going to be cement, with courses of brick running every few feet. Dividing the patio into sections like this is beneficial for a few reasons:

a) It’s prettier this way. It makes the deck more visually appealing, so it isn’t just all cement. It brings the brick theme-through, and adds dimensionality to the overall design.

b) Structural reasons. The sections allow for the patio not to crack. Since all ground inevitably shifts (plant roots can shift things, temperature changes, and just settling over time), you need to break up a solid structure like this patio so there isn’t pressure build up.

c) Removing panels. Life happens. Pool equipment breaks (fingers crossed ours doesn’t), electrical work needs to be replaced, Archaeologists inform you there’s some Dino DNA under one portion of your patio, etc. Sometimes, parts of your patio need to be removed. And it is INFINITELY more convenient to have to pull out one portion of the patio, rather than starting all over from scratch (As someone who has lived with a torn up patio for about 8 months, I can tell you it isn’t fun).

So that’s the word on our current patio situation. As soon as it is done, I’m going to get myself some sort of chaise lounge or Adirondack chair and park it out there with a magazine and a limeade until I look like this lady:

(FACT: To find this image I googled “Too Tan Lady”. I love you Googz.)

Grab your water-wings, I’ll see you poolside! <3

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