What kind of kisser are you?

Wait, no – I mean, what’s your interior design style?  It’s a 5-minute picture-based quiz (“Which of these rooms feels like home to you?”  “Which of these chairs could you work most efficiently in?”), and pretty accurate, based on my results at least.
Country Modern
“The country-meets-modern look relies on natural materials and, very often, the immediate [...]

Read Full Post »

Industrial vs. Stupid-looking

(Astute readers will note that this is the tenth consecutive post without any pictures of, y’know, actual work we’ve done.  Those astute readers are invited to bite me.)

Our kitchen features this pair of oh-hey-look-what’s-on-sale-here-in-1996 fixtures.  While they’re certainly not offensive,  we’d really like to swap them for short pendant lights when we replace the cabinets [...]

Read Full Post »

Grandfather clock

My grandpa, Eldon, started building this mission-style clock for us before he even knew about our obsession with all things Stickley.  It’s made of locust, which is a heavy, hard wood often used for boat hulls and xylophone keys.   He’s finishing it with oil rather than stain, which should bring out the natural grain [...]

Read Full Post »

Let there be…a cliched title!

The colonial revival fixtures have to stay for the moment, but we’re slowly swapping out the fancy, fancy, frou-frou shades for simpler ones.  So far, we’ve replaced all six upstairs and five of the eleven downstairs.  The best part – all the shades were $1 at ReStore.

Read Full Post »

Cheap art

Do y’all know about Shorpy?  It’s a photo-blog of high-resolution scans of old photos – some all the way back to the Civil War.  The whole site is a great mix of homemade and professional-level stuff, plus lots of those over-focused daguerreotypes.  There are also scans of Depression-era WPA posters, which are some of my [...]

Read Full Post »

The kitchen debate rages on

Well, not so much “rages on” as “slowly simmers for another few months until the snow puts it out”.
I found these matte green tiles at Menard’s last weekend and, while they’re not the subway tiles I was hoping for, they’re the right color and over $20 less per square foot than the ones I really [...]

Read Full Post »

The table’s here!

Travis delivered our pile of lumber this afternoon – and will you look at that, he seems to have turned it into a table of some sort!
We couldn’t be happier with the whole process – from sending him our initial ideas, to stopping by his shop to see the progress, all the way to carrying [...]

Read Full Post »

2-D rug

This post on This Young House made me say, “Huh, they just bought the 3-D version of our mudroom floor.”  Unsurprisingly, theirs looks a heckuva lot more than 1-D better than ours.
Vs.

Read Full Post »

A call-out for open shelving photos

Do you have open shelving in your kitchen?  Or maybe you’ve seen some you like online?  Could I talk you into posting a picture or link to it?  I’m mostly curious to see (1) the width of the boards on the facing edge and (2) the style of brackets holding them up.  On that note, [...]

Read Full Post »

1-up!

(Who knew starting an internet meme was going to be so difficult?  And who knew that google image-searching addresses would turn up…buildings at those addresses.  I’m too rural to have a blogging license.)
Instead, I’m cross-posting this from Josie’s blog.
Forget whatever else we had planned for this weekend – we’re going to rip down all the [...]

Read Full Post »