Category: decorating

Garage Sale Finds

Mimi and I hit up some garage sales on Saturday morning and scored a couple of great deals. First off is this Pottery Barn kids crib set:

Isn’t it cute? It’s well made and in great shape. The bumpers were marked at $15, the crib skirt at $6 and the sheets were $1 each but while I was looking at them I overheard the owner tell her friend that they better start slashing prices. I asked her about the price of the set and she told me to make her an offer so I asked if she’d take $15 for the lot and she said yes. (I just checked and Pottery Barn sells these sets for about $170 new–score!) I especially like the embroidered accents on the skirt and bumpers.

The other thing I bought was this bolt of designer fabric.

I read a local interior designer’s blog and when I saw that she was having a tag sale on Saturday I wanted to check it out. It took Mimi and I longer than I wanted to get out of the house (as usual) and so when I arrived the sale was already pretty picked over. But then I saw this bolt of fabric and it felt like it had been set aside just for me. The colors are exactly what I was trying to find for a window treatment in our living room. There are 7 yards of fabric and I paid $30 total for it. So it wasn’t dirt cheap but it was still a good deal.

Now the big question is what type of window treatment should I do? Curtains? Valances? I really have no idea.


What do you think would look best?

Curtains for Mimi’s Room

Mimi’s room is still far from finished. Right now she’s sleeping in our portable crib until I muster up the courage to move E to a twin bed (He still takes a 2-or-3 hour nap and I’m scare that he’ll give it up once he’s out of his crib). But while the finishing touches will need to wait for a while I’m slowing putting things together. My next project will be sewing some curtains.

The last time I was out IKEA some of the fabric caught my eye. These are two of my favorites. Which ever fabric I use I want to try and do some pinch pleats along the top.


Has anyone ever used pleat tape to sew curtains? If so, any tips?

Master Bedroom

We’ve lived in our house since 2004 and up until last month our bedroom was an embarrassment. It had turned into a de facto dumping ground for worn out clothes, random toys of E’s, and piles of paperwork waiting to be filed/shredded. We didn’t even have anything on the walls. I had framed some collages by Bob Pollard that N collects and some posters but they had been leaning against the wall waiting to be hung for years.

And while I had hung up some curtains I hadn’t hemmed them and they puddled messily on the floor collecting dust. Overall, it was not a relaxing room to spend time in and I hated the idea of other people seeing it.

But no more! We’re planning on keeping the baby in our room for the first little while and so I was motivated to organize and declutter. I shredded boxes of old papers. I hemmed the curtains to get them off the floor. I got a second bookcase to get piles of books off the floor and onto shelves. And then I hung up our art for good measure.

(I made the Chinese-style lattice headboard in woodworking class about 5 years ago.)

These photos were taken at different times of day which is why the wall color looks so different. There are still several things I’d like to do to really finish our room; after I hung up our prints I realized that they had a gray/yellow theme going on which I’d like to carry over to the whole room. I’d like to paint the walls a soft gray, get some some coordinating bedding (maybe something like this), replace the outdated ceiling fan with a fun chandelier, etc… all which will have to wait until this summer at the earliest.

But at least now I like walking into the room. It makes me feel like a normal person instead of someone with a mild hoarding problem 🙂 And with the curtains hemmed and all the junk off the floor the room seems half again as large which is great.

Now on to the baby’s room!

8-bit graphics

I know that kids today have probably never played these games, but I still think these wall decals from Urban Outfitters are pretty sweet. They would be fun in a kid’s room.

If these decals have you feeling nostalgic and you have some time to kill (or you want to introduce your kids to the classics) you can play Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers online.

Be careful though–it’s addictive!

The Most Beautiful of the Skylarks

I can’t remember where I first came across it, but this Finnish wallpaper has been in the back of my mind for over 5 years. It’s call “The Most Beautiful of the Skylarks.” Isn’t that a great name?

If I had a daughter AND oodles of money (It’s $70 a roll) I would use it in her room. There’s a better picture of the pattern in a different colorway here.

I also really liked this pattern.

Flensted Mobiles

After E was born I wanted to get a mobile to hang over his crib. I thought about getting one of these Tiny Love mobiles but they seemed really huge and a little bit frightening. Babies supposedly love them, but if I was going to be spending $30-40 on a mobile I wanted one that E could enjoy for years.

I looked around online and found these mobiles by Flensted and I fell in love with them. After much agonizing I ended up getting the balloon mobile for over E’s crib and the owl mobile (owls reading books, so charming!) to hang in my office.

The mobiles are a little pricey if you consider just the raw materials involved, but they really are lovely in person. E is fascinated by his and frequently implores me (unsuccessfully) to lift him up high so he can bat at it.

Flensted also seems like a great family-run, family-friendly company. Their workers assemble the mobiles by hand in their own homes instead of in a factory. As some who works from home, I don’t mind spending a little bit more to support a company that allows other to do the same.

O Christmas Tree

Well, we didn’t make it to the mall yesterday; we didn’t make it anywhere. We ended up getting more than five inches of snow and so E and I stayed home all day.

We only just got around to putting up our Christmas tree on Saturday. But E’s been making up for lost time by enjoying it to pieces. Luckily, the only casualty so far was just a straw ornament. (Sadly, it apparently did not taste as good as it looked.)


Slowly But Surely

This summer I have two goals: to get in shape and to organize my house. So far I’m making slow progress on both. It took me about a week, but I finally finished this project:





It’s a corner bookcase for my office/sewing room. It’s made up of Billy bookshelves from IKEA: 2 narrow units and 1 wide unit that each have height extensions. They’re held together by the corner bracket that IKEA sells.

The process of covering the back of the bookshelves was the same as the bookshelf I put in our bedroom, but this project upped the ante. To begin with, there were 3 shelves and 3 height extenders, so there were 6 pieces to cover in fabric. Stretching the fabric, stapling it around the edges, and smoothing down the excess fabric with spray adhesive (lesson learned: use it outdoors, not in your dining room!) got a little old after the 4th piece. Also, I had ambiously (foolishly) chosen a print with bold horizontal and vertical lines so it was a little difficult to line up both axes to make sure they were straight. Also, attaching the height extensions to the top of the shelves was a bit of a fiasco because of the low ceiling but N. was very sweet and helpful and came up with a solution to the problem. So, it all worked out well in the end (phew!)

Now I just need to organize my books on the shelves and sort out the rest of the room. Once the rest of the room is presentable, I’ll post some pictures.