I kicked my closet-kitchen up a notch with a black wall
I painted my kitchen nook the other day! My mini-kitchen-in-a-nook started out looking…a little dull.
So to brighten up my kitchen and make it pop as its on space in my apartment, I painted it black. Black: new hot color for kitchens?
My super easy bathroom/bedroom contemporary update: like putting a v-neck sweater over a gnarly sweat-stained tee
When I moved into my condo, I loved everything but the horrible almond-y bathroom. SO ’70s!
I moped around feeling helpless for a while, and then I got an idea to reno my space myself — no big commitment, just my own two hands and a little bit of smarts.
The year I spent turning a trash house into a cozy wagon home
Once upon a time the Click Clack Gorilla escaped from a 9-5 job through the tunnel she had been secretly digging behind the water cooler with her stapler and has been at large in Europe ever since.
This is the story of building her tiny trash house, a little bitty wagon situated in a German wagenplatz.
What would YOU do with this historic brick building?
A friend of mine who’s a grad student in Idaho recently shared this amazing property in downtown Boville, Idaho:
GREAT HISTORIC BRICK BUILDING. STARTED OUT AS A BANK WITH A MASONIC LODGE LOCATED ON THE 2ND FLOOR. MAIN FLOOR IS SET UP AND HAS BEEN RUN AS THE ELK TAVERN FOR MANY YEARS. THERE IS AN APARTMENT IN THE BACK ON MAIN FLOOR. SECOND FLOOR HAS NOT BEEN USED FOR YEARS, MOSTLY ONE BIG ROOM WITH HIGH CEILING, FIR FLOORING, LOTS OF WINDOWS AND 2 FIREPLACES.
What would YOU do with it?
Kill your darlings: what being a writer taught me about homemaking
Kill your darlings is one of the writing terms which has become a mantra to me over the last year of homemaking.
You’ll hear in writing courses and author’s workshops across the nation: Kill your darlings. Supposedly advice from Faulkner, “kill your darlings” means letting go of your work — even when it is beautiful, hard-won work — in order to make progress in a piece of writing. That beautiful landscape description your readers will simply skip? That character you spent months developing but turns out to be unimportant to the plot? Off with their heads. On with your work.
I picked up and moved my house across town (and then I moved out)
I bought this house when I was 20 years old. I bought the home SEPARATE from the lot and I had it MOVED ACROSS TOWN. That was an experience in itself!
I worked and worked to gut and remodel it. I didn’t know what I was doing and many things were done incorrectly. When I moved in, after 2 years of working, I didn’t have trim or interior doors. My furniture was a cobbled mess of thrift store finds that I planned on SOMEDAY refinishing. And I was happy in my pile of a home!
Colleen and Sam’s completely renovated modern little Minneapolis house
This house was one of those boarded up sad-and-lonelies. When Colleen and Sam swooped in, they had a total rehab ahead of them. Good thing the house turned out so peacefully lovely!