So Blessed.

Last week I had a 6 hour training day at work. We do this a couple of times a year. Considering that I've been working at the same place since 2007, this was my 7th repeat of this same training (with minor tweaks). Needless to say, my favorite coworker and I were bored out of our minds and at some point ended up playing with our phones. That's when she stumbled upon this:

Unfortunately, I have no idea where she found it. It links to the url she sent me, but if anyone knows where it's originally from, PLEASE lemme know. I was instantly obsessed. I dragged E to Michael's that afternoon (which is like an hour-long subway ride, mind you. We're in the heart of Brooklyn and Michael's is on like 98th and Lexington in Manhattan). But... when we got there, my big plans sort of came crashing down around me when I saw how expensive the faux flowers were. Not to mention the price of wooden letters. Feeling defeated, I moped around the store for about a half an hour before stumbling on some glittery gold paper/card stock in the scrap booking department and fell in love. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but I bought three sheets.

When I got home, I decided that I was going to cut out letters from it. I debated between a bunch of words... "Home", "Hello", "Breathe", "Howdy", "Sweet", "Lucky", "Adore", etc. I even texte the options to E on multiple occasions while he was at work, but he never responded. Oh well. Eventually I decided on "Blessed"- because, really, we are. I get caught up in the kids things that we don't have, but aside from that, we really do have it good and I could really use a reminder of that.

Here's the finished product, followed by the process:

After selecting a word, I needed to figure out a font. I browsed Pinterest a couple of times before narrowing it down to two: "You Found Me" and one called "LSTK Clarendon" (bold).

 

vs.

Honestly, I normally would've gone with the 2nd option, but I was really craving a hand-written look and ended up going with the 1st. I do want to use the 2nd one for another project though....

Now, there might be a quicker, more efficient way of doing this, but this was my method. First, I blew up the font to size 450 and printed it out lengthwise on paper, like so:

Then I cut out each letter with scissors:

Next, I traced it all, backwards, onto the back of my glitter paper:

And cut it all out with an exacto knife:

Here it is looking a bit like Arabic, haha:

Once it was all cut out and flipped over, it made a lot more sense:

Then I just taped each letter in place, and voila!

 Let's just agree to ignore how badly I need a second coat of paint on those poor walls. I'm really pleased with the results though! As for that first project, should I check eBay for faux flowers? Craigslist? Anyone know of somewhere to buy fake flowers on the cheap? I want to maybe create one for the guest room...

Saying Sayonara with Some Vino

Was that multilingual enough for you? It better be... K so here's the thing. 2013 can bite me. It wasn't a great year. Needless to say, I'm stoked to get rid of it. I'm a little bit of a nut about calendar dates and anniversaries and whatnot, so I'm welcoming the proverbial "New Beginning" with open arms. 

But what's a goodbye party without a little vino? Well, my friends, we now have a brand new way to showcase all of our delicious bottles. A few months ago, I finally managed to find the Ikea VURM wine rack in the store. No, they're not so popular that they're constantly sold out. I just get overwhelmed at Ikea and can never find anything I'm looking for. No offense, Ikea. I am, however, a pro at finding a million things that I don't actually need. Oh well. 

Then came the task of figuring out where to put it. E actually asked me in the store, "Where do you plan on putting that?" and I feigned some semblance of a solid answer with vague, rambling words describing some place in between the kitchen and breakfast nook. But that's all I knew. That's because I ended up moving around a bunch of stuff to make this work. And E was a legend and took the time to carefully hang both of them up.

I'm searching high and low for the before pic. I'll add it when I find it. At any rate, here are the afters:

Puh-lease ignore the unfinished trim/door painting jobs. Never quite got around to cutting in. Guess that's what 2014 is for...

Panorama, Panorama, Everybody's Coming To Get Me.

Remember this song? From the 90's? Okay, so the original might've been about Paranoia, not Panoramas, but just go with it. K? 

Thought I'd finally give you a glance at the living room. Hence the panorama reference. Yeah, I think you get it. Sorry about the poor lighting, but I really don't like the overhead lights and it's super cozy like this in real life.

 

 As you can see, it could use some straightening up. I actually just threw a huge stack of old magazines into the recycling (see those trash bags in the hallway? Proof!).

Aside from tidying, here's my current to-do list:

• Switch the couches. I originally wanted the smaller couch on that wall because we had another end table next to it. But two end tables eventually proved to be too much furniture in a small Brooklyn apartment, so we moved one into our entryway and the lamp was relocated to the guest room nightstand. Good move. Now that we're down to one end table, I think the smaller couch would be better in front of the windows. It'll look like less furniture when you walk into the room. I think.
• Hang more things. We have 3 teardrop hanging vases from CB2 that were hanging up when the living room furniture was in another configuration. I love, love, love them but when we I rearranged the furniture for the 60th time, E made me promise to wait until I was sure I loved this set up before drilling any more holes in the walls. I want to put them next to the mirror, and hang that print between the one of the Chasidic Farbrengen (by the talented Elke Reva Sudin) and the bookcase. I think I'll keep the Ikea Stockholm bowl hanging on the wall, but maybe lower it. 
• Move the floor lamp. I actually did this tonight, right before I took the photos. The floor lamp had been in front of the Ikea bowl, but then all of our lighting was on one side of the room. I want to plug it into a different outlet so the wire isn't in front of the bookcase, but I need E to move the other bookcase in order for that to happen.
• Reorganize the bookshelves. They drive me crazy because they look so cluttered.
• Get things professionally framed. That's something I want to do all around the apartment. Some things just need to be matted, but the Elke Reva Sudin painting really needs a specially made frame because the print is an odd size. 
• Do something with the desk. A big chunk of wood chipped off in our move, so at minimum I'd like to stain that area. Or something. 
• Add something to the back of the bookshelves. My father-in-law actually made those for us as a wedding gift. I love them. They have really pretty detailing. I'd like to get some foam board and cover it with grass cloth or something along those lines. A couple of years ago I did that with a yellow silk fabric and it was nice but it was too much pattern. I want something natural.

I need E to hurry up and eat that Chanukah House. And we have a framed "last name meaning" certificate stuck behind the desk that obviously doesn't belong there. And a hot water urn on the side table that I was using to make tea. :) But otherwise, that's about it... "Short" list, huh?

Not-so-Expedit'd Process

Okay. Here's a little home decor horror story with a happy ending. A couple of years ago, my husband's friend was moving out of Brooklyn and his wife had a post that they were giving away/selling some of their stuff. One of the items was the Ikea Expedit, and I had this lightbulb moment and absolutely NEEDED it for our bedroom. We had been using two mismatched dressers up until that point, which we'd gotten for free right before our wedding. That's a crazy story too. A friend of mine had just graduated from college but was still living in the college dorm in Manhattan when she heard that the college was closing one of their dorms permanently, and therefore getting rid of all the furniture. I know. It sounds fishy but I swear that's what I was told. So she and I rented a uhaul truck and bravely drove it across the Manhattan bridge in a rainstorm to pillage this dorm. And then, somehow, the two of us lugged back two dressers, a coffee table, two floor lamps, and I *think* there was more but now I can't quite remember what it was. And for some reason I remember the uhaul guy's name was Mike and my friend managed to charm him into giving us a discount. ;)

Those two dressers served us well for about 2.5 years but as our home decor evolved, the mismatching of the dressers started to drive me insane (because I'm a crazy person) and another friend of mine got the 8-cubby Expedit for her bachelorette pad and it was awesome because she could see all of her clothes and therefore pick out an outfit before getting out of her nice warm bed in the morning. Brilliant!

I somehow convinced E to go to his friend's apartment, help him unassemble disassemble it, carry it to our building and up to our 4th floor walkup apartment (it might've taken a couple of trips) and then help me reassemble it in our bedroom. And it was awesome. For a couple of months. Until it started to look like this: 

I'd like to acknowledge that while it became a complete and utter disaster zone, things stayed categorized. My clothing was divided into cool colors (actually just green and blue), warm colors (pinks, orange, yellow and also purple), and neutrals (black, white, tan, gray). And further divided by sweaters vs regular shirts. That's 6 cubbies of classification. But it was really hard to keep it folded nicely, especially when I'd have to grab something quickly. Shimmying a single shirt out of the pile was hard, guys.

SO eventually I decided to bring back one of the dressers instead. We'd given the other one to a neighbor when she had her 3rd baby. I found a way to maximize the drawer space on Pinterest (more on that below) and decided to go for it while E was at work a few months ago.

But nothing's ever easy. I thought I was going to be able to super easily scoot the Expedit out our bedroom door and into our guest room, but no. I was wrong. Oh, was I wrong. You see, there's this little nook right outside our door, and the shelves couldn't squeeze through. So I grabbed a screwdriver and got to work taking the door off it's hinges, thinking that those couple of extra inches would help:
But guess what. They didn't. I don't know what I was thinking, or why I didn't measure:


After that, I sat on the floor and cried a little. #noshame The worst part was that I got it jammed in there so it was stuck, and I couldn't even get to the bathroom which is directly outside our bedroom door. Eventually, I  sucked it up and decided to disassemble it, which was nerve-wracking because if you've ever owned Ikea furniture before, you know that as great as it is for a while, it's not really meant to be taken apart and put back together 20x. And it's not usually a one-girl kind of job. It had taken E and me, working together, a REALLY long time to assemble that first time, so I was really shaking in my boots. But I'd already come so far!

This time, I actually gameplanned. I unscrewed the top, and then I kept the 4 cubby dividers and their shelf together each time. I left the two side pieces attached to the bottom. Then I carefully dragged that "frame" in to the guest room. I wasn't sure it'd work because of the same problem (the nook) but without the top attached I was able to maneuver it enough to successfully get it through.

You're going to have to bear with me for the next couple of photos. Just look at the shelves, not the paint, mess, etc.

This was the method to my madness: I propped the "shell" up between a stack of boxes and a chair with stuff piled on it to weigh it down.

Then, for each row, I took a couple of buckets, propped up the vertical pieces, and then laid the big horizontal shelf down and shimmied all of the little wooden pieces into place. The Ikea directions explicitly say you shouldn't do it this way, but it worked for me. 

It took awhile (actually, it took way less time than the first time we assembled it) but eventually I was able to screw the top back on and we had a success story!!

Here it is in it's final (hopefully) resting place on a different guest room wall. This poor shelving unit has been through a lot, guys. Right now it's just holding some miscellaneous books (Oh, right... I got rid of an old bookshelf that day too. It was falling apart. For real!) and a bunch of hoarded back-issues of Real Simple. I want to get canvas cubby boxes for the four top cubbies but I haven't decided on a color yet.

Ah! And if you're wondering about that folding method I was talking about, check out this post from Pinterest/Buzzfeed that I used for inspiration. So far, months later, it's holding up. It's a game-changer.
:)

Also, for reference (because these iPhone pics are a bit wonky in the color department, here's a list of our paint colors, although some of them are color matched using Behr paint):
Bedroom: Solitude AF-545 by Benjamin Moore
Guest Room: Stone 2112-40 by Benjamin Moore
Hallway: Bird's Egg 2051-60 by Benjamin Moore
Living Room: Galveston Gray AC-27 by Benjamin Moore (more on that here)
I actually have an upcoming post on this!

Jim Morrison Might Be Proud...

Still here! Haven't forgotten about this. I have a bunch of photos of projects from the past month or so that I just need to sort through and write about. And, I guess, the biggest news is that we started seeing our RE again after a year+ long break. I'll save that post for another day (/month? haha) and keep this one limited to The Doors. Or, really, the door. Our front door. I don't know if I ever posted this "before" pic (from my Instagram, haha), but this is what our hallway looked like....

I have no idea why our front door is open a crack here...

Don't get me wrong, I love this shot. That's our "Family Tree" frame wall over there. And our West Elm runner that I'm thankfully still madly in love with. Note that this was before we I painted the off-white molding white. Such a good move, btw. But we had this leftover quart of paint (Benjamin Moore's Dolphin at 75% strength- I know, it's shocking that an attempt at a custom color didn't work out... ::sarcasm::) that I'd bought while trying to find the right gray for our living room (more on that here) and it was burning a hole in my... storage closet? Long story short, I decided to paint the back of our front door. So I tested it out on the peep hole (I always feel super dirty saying that- is there another word for it??) and it stayed like that for, oh I don't know, 3 weeks? Thankfully, my husband never even noticed it or he would've realized I was up to something and tried to stop me. ;) Here's that look (let's ignore the fact that I still haven't painted that off-white trim a the top of the door):

Yep, those are shelves from a discarded book shelf still waiting to be brought down to the garbage area. 

The other day, a friend texted me a photo of her newly-painted black door, and that lit the fire under my tush. When E ran out to do a couple of errands, I whipped out the paint and a brush and went for  it. Here it is after one coat (yikes):

I was about 1/2 done with the second coat when I heard E coming up the stairs... womp womp. I  opened the door for him (chivalry ain't dead) and told him to come in very carefully. He was surprisingly a bit wary of this project, pre-completion. But once that second coat got up there and everything had dried, voila:

I'm a little obsessed. I started referring to it as "Industrial Chic" bc it kind of looks like a metal door. Which is slightly ghetto but in a cool way (just go with it). I kind of want to marry it. And just for kicks, here's a new version of that Instagram pic:

A few other discrepancies between the new and old views aside from the new door color: the entryway table and art.

I smile at the door practically every time I walk by, even from way back here. It's actually a little worrisome. I was thinking about painting all of the doors this color but I think I'm going to hold off on that now and just let this be the star of the show. Hope you like it as much as we do (because EE is sold on it now too!).

Off-the-Wall with Off-White

I'm going to start this off by confessing that we've I've painted parts of our hallway walls at least 5 different colors. It's totally embarrassing. It started with Shakespeare Tan 228 by Benjamin Moore. I thought it'd be a nice beige, but as soon as I got the first bit of paint on the wall I realized that (at least in our sunless hallway) it was way too green. It was like a puke greenish tan. It was terrible. It was my first of many paint-oopsies, and for a few minutes I was too proud to admit it was disgusting, but by the second small wall I knew we couldn't keep it. I actually just recently gave that gallon away on Craigslist. Next we moved on to Smokey Taupe 983, also by our good friend Benny. At the time, my thoughts were that it wasn't "enough of a color". Or maybe it was too cold. I'm not sure, but it didn't make it on to many walls before I gave up on it too. After that, we moved in a new direction-

-no, not those New Directions... but let's take a moment to say RIP to Corey Monteith/Finn. Judging by my fb feed, last night's tribute episode was a tear jerker.

I decided to go blue. Labrador Blue 1670 or CC-740 (I think they're they same but who knows). I loved the color anyway, but then I found out it was the color used in the Dunphy home on Modern Family. Whattup. There was no going back. We actually finished the whole hallway this time. Buuuut it was super bold and dark- not at all like the pale blue it is on the show.... Sad face.

It was around that time that Hubbs and I went on vacation to Acapulco (that's a story for another time) and fell in love with the calm blue-greens that we saw everywhere. We came back and I was on a mission to find the right one. Long story short, it was the precursor to my 50 Shades of Gray shenanigans, and we painted about 100 blue/green/aqua sample in the hallway before choosing Olympic's Sea Sprite C61-2. And then we realized that our hallway has totally different lighting in different parts of it (there's some turns and parts of it get a trickle of light from the windows in the kitchen and living room, while other chunks are tunnel-like and others just get no sunlight whatsoever), so colors look COMPLETELY DIFFERENT in each section. So while Sea Sprite had been perfect over by the living room, our entryway was super duper green.  Ruh Roh!

Here's a photo where you can see the original off-white, the current color (Bird's Egg by BM), and at least two other colors (the greenish sea sprite and darker labrador blue)... what a hot mess:

Which brings us to the point of this post, because that pic also shows what I did last night. All of the trim and everything from the chair rail down plus most of the ceilings in our apartment are off white. All of the walls were off-white too until I painted them 28x each. Off-white is far from terrible. It's not bad at all. It's just boring and kind of makes everything look dirty. NBD, really. But this is me we're talking about. The painting nut. So over the course of about 4-5 hours, I painted it all most of it white. Behr's Ultra Pure White (off the shelf) in semi-gloss, which I'd bought about 2 months ago (and then couldn't find for awhile).

To cut to the point, here are some before, during, and afters...just try to ignore the dustballs and our sad-looking hardwood floors, mmmkay?:

To the right of our front door (when coming into the apartment).

The right-hand turn once you're inside, leading to the breakfast nook (that's our pantry door) and kitchen. This is where I began painting.

The same spot, just painted white. Obviously the next step is to finally cut-in with the blue paint. A step I clearly never got around to. For the past year.

Before and after of the hallway connecting our bedroom, the bathroom, the living room, and the guest room... I'd previously painted the border, but not the inner part, below the chair rail:

This is looking toward our front door; there's usually a West Elm runner here (see the photo below). The left side is partially painted, the right side is done.

My favorite shot. :)

And there we have it. I only had a quart of paint, so I'd like to get another and do a second coat in some places. And paint the baseboard in the breakfast nook. And kitchen And do below the chair rail in the living room. Uhhh yeah we'll see if it takes me another year before any of that happens....

Once You Pop, You Can't Stop

Okay so if the suspense hasn't killed you by now, you're probably my Facebook friend and know the results of Paint Indecision 2013. We finally went for it. We picked a color. Are you ready? Remember, it was between Benjamin Moore's Dolphin AF-715 and Benjamin Moore's Galveston Gray AC-27.

And the winner was....
.
.
.
.
.
Galveston Gray (!!!):

We went with the lighter of the two choices. I wasn't sure it could hold it's own against the Benjamin Moore's Bird's Egg 2051-60 in the hallway, but it totally does. E repeatedly let me know that it was ultimately my decision, but that he thought that Dolphin would be too dark. That kicked my anxiety into high gear, and although I loved Dolphin and was leaning towards it the entire time, I just couldn't go through with it in the end. Galveston Gray is a nice, toasty gray. It's the same tone as Studio Taupe, but more gray than beige on the greige scale (Studio Taupe is the opposite- more beige than gray). For the sake of full disclosure, it's still a little bland behind the beige couches in some lights (I wish the couches "popped" more) but it's definitely better than before, and I love it with everything else in our living room. It's part of BM's "America's Colors" collection, and I'm guessing it's named after Galveston, TX, but I'm not really sure what's so greige about Texas. I'm a New England girl, remember?

Here's a sneak peek:

My warrior of a husband worked an overnight shift, went to grad school, and picked up a gallon and a quart of this bad boy from Home Depot "on his way" home for me. Okay, it's not exactly on his way. It's pretty much out of his way, actually. Which scores him even more props.

I'm not sure why, but we usually get our Benjamin Moore picks color matched to Behr paint+primer in one. I used to think it was because I liked the Behr coverage/application more, but people always seem surprised when I tell them that. So I'm piecing it together that it's actually a combination of Home Depot's hours being way more convenient (open till 10 or 11pm) than those of the smaller hardware stores that sell BM paint (which all close by 7pm) and the fact that BM "sample" sizes are like $6+ each vs getting a color matched to a Behr sample size costing $3-4. I'm sure the Behr gallon is also cheaper than the BM gallon. So that's probably why.

Then on one of his next overnight shifts, (the night before Yom Kippur actually) I hit my breaking point of not being able to handle the patchwork quilt of paint swatches on our walls (see here) and decided to just do the edging. That way it'd be easier when I decided to do the full walls... I'd just have to move all of the furniture to the middle of the room and go for it without worrying about details.

Yeah, but that didn't happen. Once you pop, you just can't stop.

Ok, this might be TMI but it happened to be really hot and humid that night, and I don't think I've EVER sweat that much in my life. Someone should make a DIY Workout video. I literally thought I was going to pass out (I'm sure it had nothing to do with the paint fumes).

Anyway, this little Brooklyn apartment living room of ours is feeling more and more "us". E walked into the room the next morning and said "It feels so much more home-y!" BOOM. Those were the exact words I was looking for. BTW Our new theme for the house is somewhere between "Urban Lumberjack" and "Urban Hobbit Hole". Yep. I've clearly given this too much a lot of thought.

I'll post some photos of the actual room tomorrow (or "soon"), but first you should know that I've been at it again with my poor poor photoshop skillz. No, it's not even photoshop. It's from "Instacollage" on my iPhone. I'm hanging my head in shame, don't worry. But this, my friends, is our current collection of paint colors in our apartment.

The guest room might get repainted with Behr's Studio Taupe at some point (we have a bunch leftover from our first living room painting experience- and I love the color, just not in the living room) but for now it's Stone, which is a gray with purple undertones. And after this super uncomfortably hot painting experience, it might be awhile before I tackle a paint job again. 

Regardless, I'm actually pretty pleased with the combination. It honestly goes together better in the photo than in real life, but we'll roll with it. And speaking of rolling, I'm out of here. Hopefully I'll get that next post up tomorrow!

Procrastination Station

Here we are, less than 20 hours until Rosh Hashanah here in NYC, and I haven't started baking. We're going to friends for all of the festive meals, but we're in charge of dessert and a green bean side (I haven't even BOUGHT the green beans!) and I have this big plan in my head to also bake cookies for all of our hosts. Deciding whether to sleep now and bake in the AM or to bake now and catch a nap tomorrow. Either way, the one thing I do have prepped is this:

I drew this guy while working an overnight the other night and I took a photo with my iPhone. Tonight I got it onto the computer, googled "photo editor" and ended up on Pixlr.com. On there I colored it in like in old school Microsoft paint (Does that still exist?? I've had an Apple since like 2003.) Slapped on a little textual Thank You note, and baddabingbaddabang, there we have it. Graphic design is clearly not my specialty, but I'm kind of impressed with myself. Unlike yesterday when I realized the rod I bought for our closet is the wrong size. Womp womp womp.

Anyway, have a great Rosh Hashana!!!

A Fine Establishment

Welllll look who decided to show up. TWO days in a row!

IDK if you happened to notice, but in the last post I started using a real camera. That's right. No iPhone there, friends. You see, my trusty Canon (see what I did there) had been MIA (zing!) for over a year. I started making photo yearbooks a few weeks ago, and I have NO IDEA what I'm going to do when I (eventually) get to 2013. It's going to be an entire yearbook of Instagrammed pictures. No joke. I'm like having anxiety over it already.

But enough about that. For awhile now (like years) I've REALLY been wanting to get one of those framed signs that people make of your last name (or kid's first name) made up of random black and white photos of letters. But those things are EXPENSIVE. I almost sucked it up and bought a Groupon for one on like 8 different occasions. But my cheapness kept getting the best of me.

So then I decided to make my own.

I even bought a nice frame for it on a trip to Ikea! And I actually found a website with free printable photos of letters AND I sorted through 100s of each letter, and narrowed it down to a few of each, and finally picked ONE of each of the 7 letters in "Sherman". I did it! But then it was like 4am and I needed to go to bed.

And then, suddenly, it was like 5+ months later. Oops. So now I don't remember what that awesome free letters website was, but I'd be willing to bet that I found it on Pinterest. :)

But tonight was the night. I found that Ikea Ribba frame and I whipped out my iPhoto album of the 7 photos that I'd already turned black and white, and I did a little bit of math and figured out that each one needed to be 2.6"x2.6" to fit (errr after a few miscalculations and wasted printouts. Math was never my specialty). I'm not sure if I'd recommend this particular frame, btw. I would have preferred it to be a bit shorter and wider so that the photos fit better but that's what you get when you do things on the fly. DO NOT tell my husband that I just admitted that I make rash decisions. Umm... Hi honey! ;)

Here's how that came out:

Next step was to pull my signature lazy person move and flip over the piece of paper inside the frame to get a white background. Except... wait for it... here's my Oh Sh*t! moment:

There were INSTRUCTIONS printed all over the back of that paper! What?! Thinking fast (also not my specialty, but this time that brain of mine *almost* pulled through), I grabbed my bag of scrap fabric and a few rolls of wrapping paper. Chaos ensued:

...Nothing worked. My vision had been for the letters to be against plain white. I actually sat down on the floor at this point, feeling defeated (and overdramatic). That's when I saw it: The pile of my husband's scrubs. At first, I was like:

But thennnn I was like: 

Because guess what color they were, and guess what I'd thrown a pair of into my designated cleaning cloth pile earlier this week (and hadn't used yet)?! That's right. WHITE. SCRUBS:

Now, of course, that added a whole ironing-and-taping step. But hey, sometimes life throws us curve balls. Look, Mom, I ironed!!! ....Yeah, it's really kind of a big deal. I honestly don't know why we even own an iron and ironing board. MAYBE for this exact moment?? ;)

 Aaaand to end a very long story almost-awkwardly quickly, here's the finished product:

Ta-daaa! I threw in a printout of "Established 2009" for a little extra kitsch and because it looked a little weird when it was just the letters centered in the frame all alone. Yeah, that "R" is a little bit higher than the rest of the letters, and therefore driving the OCD in me CRAY-ZAY, but it honestly might be another 5 months before I fix it. True story.