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Over the last month or so, I’ve been documenting my morning hair. I woke up one morning, looked at myself in the mirror and found my hair to be particularly huge and out of control (I had slept on it wet the night before) – so I decided I would photograph how it looks every morning over a few weeks time. Here is what I discovered:
click and click again for humungo
My third and final installment, (I know you find this absolutely riveting), covers the changes to our bookshelves and bedroom. I’ll keep it short and sweet:
Bookshelves before….wedding.shrine.again.
Bookshelves after, bad lighting again, but the book covers are stripped (remember that conversation?), candles and flowers are added, new pictures placed annnnd I think that’s about it.
Bedroom before, very navy blue and very manly flowers on the wall 
Bedroom after, still extremely navy blue (we’re working on breaking that addiction), but new pictures and flowers make a difference! Apologies for our lamp exploding on the night stand. No one was hurt.
So all together, I’d say I had a semi-productive holiday weekend. It’s only a matter of time until I get bored again though. Look-out Memorial Day weekend, you’re my next victim!
Tags: bedroom, Bookshelves, Redecorate
On to the kitchen and what we like to call the “breakfast nook.” No huge changes here really, just a new food-appropriate mural on the kitchen wall, (no more dandelions for me!), and then some rearranging in our “breakfast nook.”
Kitchen before…a dandelion field?
Kitchen after, a bit more appropriate!
Breakfast nook before, wedding picture overload!
Breakfast nook after! Gotta keep one wedding picture I guess
Not huge changes, but fun ones for sure and they were free! Score. Final post today: bookshelves and the bedroom.
Tags: breakfast, Chalkboard wall, kitchen, Redecoration
Like I said last week, President’s Day Weekend was probably one of the most productive weekends of my life. What started with just wanting to paint the hallway wall chocolate brown, turned into a whole circus of projects. My next few posts today will highlight all the craft projects I took on over the glorious 3-day weekend. Get excited! Lets begin with what started it all…the hallway!
When we first moved in, we painted the hallway a Carolina blue color and called it a day. Over time, I started to hate the color. It was too bright and when the sun hit it, things got ugly. It just didn’t fit in with the rest of the apartment. It was time for a change. Peace out blue wall!!
And hello new project! Remember when I said I had a lot of random frames and pictures just hanging around the apartment, well here ya go.
There’s a lot of them. And they all had wedding pictures in them. Ugh. I wanted to use them, but I had to switch out those pictures stat! We arranged them into a pattern we could live with and then started plotting what photos we would replace the current pictures with. Willie was a big help, I swear it looks like he’s smiling. See, he likes to redecorate too
Holy chocolate brown wall! I actually really love the color, which is good because there’s obviously no turning back now. It’s dark but not too dark and it doesn’t overwhelm you when you walk in the apartment. A win-win! So we started putting the pictures up on the wall and we realized it was turning into a bit of an overkill, pictures everywhere, ahh!
So, our end result was just a few pictures on the wall to balance everything out. Voila! I love the giant picture of Willie in the top right. And sorry about the weird lighting, I’m working on using the manual settings on my camera. It makes the wall color read a bit differently, it’s really much more like the above picture.
And remember when I was just going to paint the hallway wall brown? Well that spilled over into the kitchen entryway and then I scored these awesome wall flower and candle vases from CB2 in SoHo for $1.50 a piece, woo!
And here’s a nice panoramic shot of before.
And after! Excuse the ugly flash. I feel like the brown just fits in so much better. I thought about continuing the paint all the way to the right by the closet as well, but I got tired and decided to call it a day. Oh yea, back in December we added a vintage print of an 1874 map of NYC above the sofa. Get one of your own at Art.com.
Total cost for this part of the makeover: $55 for paint, photos, vases and flowers. Score!
Next up: the kitchen and breakfast nook!
Tags: Apartment, Flowers, Hallway, Makeover, Paint, President's Day, Vases
After I spilled Chinese food all over the couch, I started to think about “what if I just bought a whole new couch to replace this Kung Pao catastrophe?” I can’t afford one, but a girl can dream.
I’ve decided that the next couch I buy will be tufted. I’m into tufts. Here are some favorites I found:
Dream bedroom
Dream chair
Tags: Anthropologie, couch, headboard, tufted, tufts
I’m pretty sure there is some sort of “fakery” in our neighborhood. If you’ve ever watched Weeds, you know what I’m talking about. Instead of a fake bakery though, it’s a coffee shop. A Jamaican coffee making, Bob Marley CD selling, drug dealing coffee shop. Well I think it’s a coffee shop. They have coffee packages and Jamaican music albums in the window. The place so bizarre I’m afraid to go inside. There are NEVER any customers. The only human I’ve seen inside is an older man that wears sunglasses indoors and stands at the window statue-still like he’s watching for something. I seriously thought he was a mannequin for a while because he stands in the exact same position RIGHT in the glass. It’s startling when you walk by. Our neighbors have already called the city to report the place because they’re also convinced something shady’s going down. I sure hope they reported this anonymously because drug dealers are not people you want to mess with. And there apartment number is only 1 digit different than ours. An easy mistake. So for now, we’re going to keep an eye on the place, and maybe get enough courage to go in there together and case the joint. To be continued…
Tags: drug trafficing, fakery, neighborhood watch, nob hill, San Francisco, weeds
I don’t know if it was the 3-day holiday, or the bitter cold weather that kept me from going outside, but I had one of the most productive weekends of my life. It was insane! What started with me wanting to just paint the hallway a chocolate brown and hang some pictures (see original post here) turned into an all out crazy fest of cleaning, organizing and redecorating the apartment. I’ve noticed that similar to how I like to change my hair a lot, I also like to change my living space. I don’t know if it’s because I get bored, or I second guess my original ideas, or if I just really like to get crafty, but Jeff has learned to get a little weary whenever I start a sentence with “So, I have this idea….”
It was great though! I got around to painting the hallway first thing after work on Friday and surprised Jeff when he got home, (that was actually one of those projects I didn’t tell him about beforehand. Luckily, he liked it. Whew.) And then the pictures were hung by Saturday. I’m kind of impatient when it comes to projects, I want to get them done ASAP, even if it means hammering nails into a wall into the wee hours of the morning…sorry neighbors. Seriously though, this apartment feels great now! It’s cleaned from top to bottom (a little spring cleaning come early!) and completely purged of anything that we absolutely didn’t need. I’ll be taking several big bags to Good Will this week! Multiple walls were painted, pictures were hung, furniture was removed (RIP Jeff’s college desk), and books were stripped of their jackets and reorganized on shelves. That was a fun conversation that went something like this:
Jeff: “Ummm, what are you doing?”
Karen: With a really excited smile on my face. “Taking off all of the book jackets!”
Jeff: “Um, why?”
Karen: “Because they’re prettier without them and look better on the bookshelf. Anna says so too!”
Jeff: Eyeing the 67 book jackets taking up space on our couch. “And where are you going to put them?”
Karen: “I have a place! Stop asking questions and doubting my ideas!”
Nope, I don’t have a place for them. I told you, I like to take care of projects as quickly as possible, but sometimes I don’t exactly think them through completely. I’ll figure it out though. Once this place is all spiffed up, I’ll be sure to post some pics!
Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend
Tags: Bookshelves, decorating, HGTV, Organizing, Spring Cleaning
So I’ve been working from home most of this week nursing my tummy after some nasty food poisoning, (and yes, it is food poisoning, don’t go asking questions about the p-word, don’t get crazy). The only question you can ask is, “Karen, should I get a sandwich from a deli at 9:00 at night after the meat has been sitting out all day?” To which my answer would be, “No fool!” Unless you want to end up like me, ugh. But, while I’ve been posted up on the couch with my computer, a little HGTV has been playing in the background and the wheels in my head have started to turn. I think I want to re-paint my hallway. It’s currently a light shade of blue that I’m really not that big a fan of, see below:
I’m thinking I want to paint it a nice chocolate brown. I know it’s a little dark, but there is a method to my madness. I have a TON of white picture frames just kind of laying around the apartment with no home. I would love to actually hang them on a wall somewhere and my favorite home makeover blog, Young House Love, has inspired me to do a hallway picture collage. I’m imagining something like this:
Anyone want to loan me a ceramic jackelope head?
The second picture is a bit CrAzY, but I don’t have that many picture frames. I dunno, it might be a tall task, but we’ve got a long weekend on our hands with nothing to do. Jeff kind of gave me a blank look when I told him I wanted to do this, so it looks like I’m going at this alone. If I actually go through with it, I’ll be sure to post pics!
Tags: decorating, HGTV, Home, Paint
While I already knew that I was awkward, particularly in social situations, I discovered that I have graduated to a whole other level of awkwardness. Today, I realized that I’m an awkward walker….or “WALKWARD” for short. It’s not that I realized today that I look funny when I walk. No, being pigeon toed and knock-kneed at the same time brought on that realization in Kindergarten, (“Mommy, I just want to run fast like the other kids, why do I always step on myself!?) I stuck to swing sets for most of grade school, until my inward-turned feet worked themselves out. No, it’s more so that no matter how hard I try, I really don’t think I’m ever going to be a true “city walker.” I’ve got the speed down; Jeff’s 6’5″ so I’ve spent our entire relationship trying to keep up. It’s the navigation part that I can’t seem to master. I don’t know if it’s because my motor skills never developed properly or what. But I am the absolute queen of that awkward situation when someone is walking towards you and you don’t know which side to pass them on, so you instinctively choose right and they do too, then you veer back left and they do too, then you think they’re going to veer back right so you stay left but they do too. God it sucks!
But today, I think it reached a boiling point. Walking along the sidewalk between 36th and 37th street, I managed to do the awkward bob and weave with 5 different people. 5 people in one tenth of a mile. Good God. The first 2 were innocent, 1 quick bob and a weave and we were out of each other’s way. The 3rd guy was a bit trickier because we also had to navigate through a 4 foot snow patch, but we managed to escape each other’s paths with some of our dignity still intact. Number 4 was just trying my patience by walking and texting at the same time, (I was actually just jealous of him because I can’t walk and text without falling). He wasn’t even looking at the sidewalk or at me, but still managed to match every bob and weave move that I was throwing at him. It’s like he could read my mind, (oh my God, I bobbed and weaved with Edward).
But then, there was number 5. Number 5 was a dog walker moving briskly along jamming to his iPod. And number 5 was walking 4 fluffy pomeranians that took up the entire sidewalk with their leashes and poofiness. I panicked, then forfeited. I dashed into the Starbuck’s that was like a beacon shining on the hill and my escape route away from yappy fur balls, terrifyingly tangled leashes, a jazzy walking dog walker, and more than likely fallng on my face.
Does anyone else have this kind of problem?
Tags: Bob and Weave, City, Dog Walkers, Starbucks, Walking
Last night I watched this show on the WE network called Platinum Babies. These couples spend thousands of dollars on their baby showers and nurseries. They bring in designers, party planners, stylists, personal shoppers, feng shui consultants – you name it. Obviously they have money to blow. ($40,000 on a nursery!?) It got me thinking – not about how retarded these couples were for ordering white linen sheets for their crib – but about how so many of these people’s jobs are complete and utter bullshit. $200 AN HOUR for some dude to come in and bless your nursery in feng shui harmony. Really? Hell I’ll come in, move a chair and burn some incense for $50 an hour. I’m a deal! There was even a professional baby-proofer. I had no idea this job even existed until this show. But evidently whoever this couple used, she came highly recommended and was even used by TomKat.
And don’t get me started on customized shite. Couples spend even more money if it’s something with their baby’s name on it– you paint some doodad with their nursery colors, slap on some family photos and a wooden name – $1000 in your hand. It’s unbelievable what rich people will buy. It’s like if they see that something is expensive, they need it. I bet if there was $25,ooo feng shui baby turd they’d fight over it.
That’s it. I’m going to move to Beverly Hills and making up some niche job for myself so I can charge $200 an hour. “Professional infant mani/pedi consultant.” No one steal that. You make up your own fake jobs.
This is fun, I want to think up more fake jobs.
“Sandbox Specialist”
“Baby Weave Expert”
“Plant Whisperer”
“Professional Napper”
“Dessert Consultant”
“Twilight Aficionado”
“Bloggeress Extraordinaire”
Tags: bullshit, jobs, plant whisperer, Platinum Babies, Twilight
