Arrangeable wall

The wall where the TV hangs is a tricky one to hang art on - sort of a visual waste of space.  I was inspired by this post at Lovely Life and decided that something like it would be a perfect solution to display coffee table books and album covers - or just about anything.  It's sort of an ever changing wall that you curate.  It really completes the space, don't you think?

Thanks to our friends Daniel and Pat at Autumn Workshop we have our very own Arrangeable Wall.

Bathroom talk

This post took too loooong, but better late than never!  I was resisting posting this here partly because I felt weird about posting photos of my bathroom.  Who wants to see another person's bathroom?  I thought.  It would make sense if I was showing you a super fancy room with a vanity and a claw footed tub... but that's not the case here.  Could it be that you can tell the most about someone by seeing their bathroom?  What would my bathroom tell you about me?  Well, in any case it does feel quite intimate.

The reason I am showing you is because we had our bathroom cabinet [and other fixtures] made by our friend Daniel Goers of Autumn Workshop, who did a brilliant job.  It's amazing what a little paint and updating shelving can do to a space.  So here it is, my personal space.

 AFTER | BEFORE

 AFTER | BEFORE

The best part of this room is the natural light from the sky window.

the Apartment Vol. 2

This weekend I learned a very embarrassing lesson.  Somethings should not be "Done Yourself".  There are somethings that should be left alone... for instance ugly jumbled up cable wires outside of your building.  Are they connected or are they not connected?  In attempts to clean up the entrance side of our building, Mr. Z and I were over zealous and ended up cutting one of our neighbors' internet/phone/cable tv...  Yikes!  Luckily, our neighbors were very cool and calm about the situation, but we still felt terrible.  We all know what a pain it is to call the cable company, set up an appointment, and wait for the guy to show up between a time frame of 5 or so hours... that is if you get an appointment within 2 weeks of your call.  Hopefully that will not be the case.  To help lessen the blow, I got them a bottle of wine.  Oh man... I'm still cringing from it.

So, on to more things that are safely done yourself...

I love the way chalkboard looks so why not make a whole wall a chalkboard?  It makes it really convenient to write your to-do's and warms up the space a bit.  The only thing is that the stuff stinks so you have to have a lot of fans and ventilation while you are painting.  I wanted the wall to be magnetic as well, so I applied a magnetic primer.  However, I found that the magnetic primer makes the wall a little too course for a writing surface.  So if I were to do it again, I would only use the chalkboard paint.

A little trauma happened while we were painting... Loki one of our cats got into the chalkboard paint and his paw was black for weeks... so if you have animals, you probably want to shut them out of the room you are painting.  This stuff has a tar-like consistency.

the Apartment Vol.1

It has taken some time, but our apartment is finally coming together.  The first completed area was the living room/dining room/sewing room.  We are still waiting for our sectional, so I'm just going to show you the dining/sewing area.  It doesn't look like we did a lot of work to change the space... but it feels like we did a lot of work.  Here are the before photos...

There were pretty sizable gaps between the floor and the foot of the molding, so we tore them out and replaced them with new ones.

I love the amount of light we get and the details of an older building.  I usually go for grey or white walls, so this time I went for aqua, but chose a grey color as well to balance.  I say "I" but Mr. Z of course had a lot to say about the colors as well ;-P.  I think the painting was the hardest part.  It was never ending because we repainted all of the molding too!

Happy Friday!  I'll post more of our apartment and DIY renovations soon... once I think it's presentable.