craigslist houseshare ad: “i have a garden growing in my shower so you have to use eco-friendly hair products. you will see worms and other insects, and you will occasionally see a spider too but they all help out the ecosystem.”
The soap dish is one of those inventions that seem destined to NOT fulfill all the requirements we need them too. Designed to keep bar soap from sitting in water, the wet residue from the soap has to end up somewhere, either on the sink/tub surface or in the bottom of the soap dish, requiring cleaning later.
When we moved into our new space recently, finding a well-designed soap dish was not high on our list of endless more-essential things to accomplish. Without thinking, we improvised one: a simple dry sponge we’d had on hand. It absorbed the watery residue from the bar of soap with no mess, and because it barely got wet, there was no issue of mildewing. To clean it, we just wet the sponge and rinse it out. It seems we’d inadvertently found the perfect soap dish.
H-m-m-m. What if we got a nice looking sponge, like a white one ? (Is there such a thing as a white sponge)? We discovered Twist Naked Sponge on Amazon. read more…
Since we started showing friends around our new space, several remarked on our shower hook solution. While our plan originally was to install hooks to hang towels on the bathroom door as we had in our last space, in reality, we couldn’t bear to hang anything on the beautiful 8-foot high-gloss-painted wood door. So where could we hang our towels to dry? Towel bars weren’t an option a) because we find that they take up a lot of space and don’t still dry towels properly and b) we didn’t want to take up so much space in our wonderfully minimalist bathroom. We’d worked hard to make it’s limited space LOOK spacious, and towels-on-walls would just close it in.
Our solution, at first makeshift, now permanent: we hung pot-rack hooks over our shower bar to hang towels on. read more…
Months ago we clipped a post we’d seen about a Tyvek shower curtain sold by Grain design. We filed it away as a possibility for our soon-to-be-renovated bathroom, since it was touted as being completely waterproof, mildew-resistent and fabric-like (you can even draw on it) with no off-gassing like regular plastic shower curtain liners. The photos on their site showed a pristine, creaseless shower curtain that looks as though it had been ironed.
Since moving, we’ve realized the insane number of details that comprise “a life”: where is a good dry cleaner in our new neighborhood, what to use for hooks for towels until we find ones we like?…it is endless. We’d bought a nice-looking toilet roll holder only to discover to discover that it would be “a project” – time we don’t have – to install on our sheetrock wall. So we devised one out of…rocks that we’d brought from the other apartment. (We’d hauled them from the beach years ago because they are so incredibly useful and wonderful to look at: a sculptural bit of nature.) read more…
It takes quite an eye for color to put together tiles in such a harmonious and charming manner, but if you’re not up to the task…just copy these great patterns… read more…
We LOVE this simple bed on a base of this rough-cut timbers, one longer than the other to extend beyond the bed to make a built-in side table. This bedroom is part of an exhibition at The Villa Noailles, an arts center located in the hills above Hyères, in the Var, in southeastern France. The villa is an early modernist house, built by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens for art patrons in 1925. (It has quite a history.)
Four designers were invited to design a guest room in a wing of the building, conceiving the basic furniture of a room: a bed, a table-office, bedding, a lamp and a vase.
In this bathroom, the walls were covered with artful photomurals, that expand the space (imagining it with plain walls shows the scope of the transformation, do-able in any untiled bathroom.) read more…
Could this beautiful sink stand, spotted in tiny photo story about interior designer Abigail Ahern‘s neo-baroque chandelier, REALLY be made of concrete block, one of our favorite building materials? Imagine…For less than the cost of a fiber-board-and-veneer Ikea sink stand, you can fashion one out of block, planning the placement of the blocks like a puzzle.
As we learned from our early post on Marcel Breuer’s concrete block table, there is concrete block and there is concrete block. The ones used for this sink stand are beauties. Check out the possibilities here. We learned a lot from this great “Basic Training” pdf. about concrete block.
We couldn’t live without the occasional hot bath to cool-out our over-worked selves. Instead of buying expensive, wonderfully-packaged bath salts, “spa crystals” and oils, we came up with a simple formula for doctoring baths that involves no effort at all, is cheap, and allows us to calibrate really pure fragrances to our mood.
We just dump a couple of cups or so of epsom salts into a hot tub; then we add a few drops of an essential oil distilled from flowers, herbs or other botanicals like lavender or rose geranium: voila, instant aromatherapy.
Epsom salts are an old-fashioned, tried-and-true remedy for stressful living, sore muscles, detoxifying (great at the first sign of a cold). You can buy them read more…
Brasilian musician Hermeto Pascoal is famous for making music with unconventional objects. (Miles Davis called him “the most impressive musician in the world.” ) Here’s Pascoals astonishing Musica de Lagoa, made in a lagoon…the lagoon made into a instrument…
“Fascinated by the sounds of nature since he was a little boy, from a pumpkin mammon pipe he made a fife with which he used to play for the birds. He liked to spend hours in the lake playing sounds with the water, and also to pick every piece of scrap metal in his grandfather’s blacksmith shop to hang them in a rope to take sound of them. When he reached the age of 7-8 years old, he decided to try his father’s 8-bass accordion, and never stopped.”
Of course, it got us thinking about making our own music, somehow, and then we opened up a favorite book (that’s worth a post unto itself) to this: read more…
Bathroom reading is a specialized and very personal genre of literature. I imagine everyone has his/her idea of what passes muster for bathroom reading, what its essential qualities must be. Of the books that have had a place on my makeshift bathroom shelf (a pipe) for some time - as opposed to magazines or newspapers that come and go- I look for books that I can open anywhere and find something entertaining, illuminating or educational. Proper beginnings and endings don’t matter. A folding aluminum camp stool (yikes!) I bought at the flea market serves as a book stand.
As a way of finding interesting new things to read and share in the unique sensibilities of ‘the improvised life’s readers, I invite you to join in our first reader’s survey. Please take a few minutes to list your favorite bathroom reads in the Comments.
I’ll start with my current line-up (and an excerpt I came across today): read more…
It’s weird how easily taboos can sneak into our thinking: subtle, almost unconscious “don’t do that”s or “that’s not normal” or “not done”, that keep the status quo. They can apply the all sorts of mundane parts of our lives, and especially our living spaces. The standard height of kitchen wall cabinets is 18 inches above the counter which makes the work surface feel oppressive…why not make them higher? Why not make counters deeper than the standard 24 inches so there’s plenty of room to work, even if the carpenter or contractor says “You CAN’T”.
Ask “Why?” and you often get the answer “Because that’s how it’s ALWAYS done”. “But,” you ask, “if it’s the same amount of work to put an outlet in the middle of the wall (where it’s glaring and ugly) as it is to put it close to the counter where it blends in…why not do it the way that looks best, or is best for the way I live my life?” It can take persistence to identify an everyday taboo, and then to break it.
But taboos also apply to how we live, and what we think we can and cannot do. read more…
Years ago, when I was putting together my very make-shift kitchen, I searched and searched for a pot rack that was the opposite of the ones that seemed to be everywhere – clunky or “country”-ish, overly ornate or verging on Medieval. Nothing I found accommodated my personal pot rack idiosyncrasies that includes not liking pots hanging over head, or making my small space looking cluttered.
So I turned to towel bars. It was a small shift in thinking to envision these sleek steel bars hung with hooks and copper, rather than terry cloth. Why not use a towel bar as a pot rack? (Or simply change its name?) read more…
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