The Floyd Shelf Bracket is a clever tool that allows you create a shelf from any flat surface by simply installing the brackets on a wall and clamping them to the material. With them, you can turn all sorts of interesting materials into shelving and switch out surfaces whenever you find something neat and new (or old).
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I am a big proponent of facing your past vices and wrongdoings, weaknesses and mental illnesses, and using them as propellants to move forward. Here are some embroidery threads that I spent months collecting, obsessing over, and re-arranging in boxes until I finally lost interest and stowed them away in storage for several years. They…
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Throughout the day, we’ve been shifting our mood by listening to this astonishing find we stumbled on at Internet Archive: the complete rehearsals for the summer ’87 tour when Bob Dylan sang with the Grateful Dead. It’s full of gems. Click here to choose what you want to hear on the Archives playlist. Or just…
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We don’t like seeing labels on things we have around the house — there’s enough advertising in our world; we don’t need it at home — so we routinely peel them off. At the kitchen sink, we fill plain, unmarked bottles with dish soap and hand soap. Even when we had two very differently-shaped bottles,…
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(Video link HERE.) A few days ago, we wrote a post asking ourselves just how we view the universe we live in: friend or foe. We’ve come to realize that there are so many dark things going on in the news and our world, not to mention our own internal fears, that viewing the universe…
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When we saw this photo of Mae West’s shoes, our mind got boggled. Were these wild sculptures meant to be stylish OR were they a strange solution to the impossibility of walking in the lower, steeply-angled silver shoe — a less fearsome, more wearable shoe added right on top? It turns out something of both:…
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On the continuing theme of the viability and ‘how-to’ of white-painted floors —sparked by a reader’s question —we asked designer Laura Handler how she painted the parquet floors of her 1950’s coop white. Here’s what she wrote:
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When contemplating a life change, what’s better: scared or sensible? How does one choose? And why? After wrestling for several grueling weeks with making a radical, lock-stock-and-barrel move, I’ve decided to stay put and work on making a meaningful internal geographic instead. In many ways this kind of psychological change is a much tougher adventure, in…
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When we’re looking to buy a fitness tracker, pair of headphones, a TV, or even a spatula, Consumer Reports and Amazon don’t always cut it. Our favorite resource these days is The Wirecutter, a site that seriously researches, vets and tests all sorts of essential items. Recently we followed their lead (well, their companion site Sweethome)…
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On design sites recently, we’ve been noticing quite a few interesting iterations of industrial storage cabinets —new and vintage—as furniture, like the classic Bisley 10-drawer steel storage cabinet, above. We’ve relied on the trusty Ikea lacquered metal Helmer drawer cabinets ($39) for years,
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A few days after we returned from suddenly “going off the grid“, we received this remarkable comment from a reader named Susan Taylor: I think it is too soon for your return, take a couple of steps back off the grid. Your communique is too full of things to be done, perhaps urgently and the…
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We returned home from Thanksgiving with friends to find this email from Sybille Palmer, a long-time reader: Let us treasure those who show up in our lives. Those who stand by our side. Perfect words.
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We find this wondrous water drumming song to be a perfect uplift; it’s from the Banks Islands, part of the northern Vanuatu in the Indian Ocean. Thirty-five seconds in and you will leap for joy. Of course we love that these women are hanging out together hip-deep in water, using IT as their instrument. And…
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For all of you scrambling (as we are) to wrap our heads around Thanksgiving, here’s our tried-and-true food traditions that lend themselves to tailoring and improvising.
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Spotted at vtvonen: a clever, long, ledge that doubles as a head board and picture/object rail. Look closely and you’ll see that it is painted wood. We’re thinking “plywood box…easy enough to put together. It covers a lot of ground, keeping the room spaceious, with lots of room to place objets. via Vosge Paris
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The other morning, we opened our favorite book of haiku to this astonishing three lines by Basho, written in the 17th century. Life in this world— a makeshift hut like Sogi’s. Such pleasure, contentment, and wonder in a simple makeshift hut made us think of ones we’ve admired…
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Inspired by Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde created a wondrous solar-powered LED bicycle path that glows luminous green in the dark. The path, which has been likened to a “river of stars, fallen down ‘Starry Night’”, is located in Brabant, the county where the painter was raised. How wonderful it would be as…
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Recently, a reader wrote us about our white painted floors: Your white floors look amazing. How are they holding up over time? I’m interested in doing the same in my house but there are lots of naysayers saying they won’t be durable enough to retain the sleek look. I love my pale floors which are…
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Sometimes we work SO hard that our health suffers with ailments like back pain or fatigue…Then we employ these tactics, and take a cue from William S. Burroughs…
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(Video link HERE.) It has been a TIME the past five months, with serious life events that have continued since June. Just as we’ve gotten our balance, another big wave hits. They say that big things happen in clusters and they have for us; we’ve been improvising like crazy, finding many unexpected answers as we…
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