revolver.com
We recently discovered Easy Home Tricks, a pinterest board from Remodeleze.com. A lot of DIY home sites involve repurposing everything to the point of absurdity, but while this board has a little of that - covers up a bathrooms window??!! - for the most part it’s extremely USEFUL. We think of it as a more modern Hints from Heloise.
So far we’ve discovered a lot of great everyday home solutions, many of them ‘green’, including read more…
photo: sally schneider
I thought it would be fun to give a sneak peak of the new space I’ve been renovating – the secret project that has run me ragged for months. It will be a sort of laboratory for many ideas we want to explore on ‘the improvised life’. Although it will probably never be ;finished;, this before-and-after gives an idea of the challenging design problems the apartment posed. (The before was taken when I first hauled a few things up to the space to start to try to figure it out.)
Take this fatso design challenge: a long living room wall butted right up to the edge of the window on the adjacent wall (a product of the original cheap, corner-cutting construction). Tearing down the sheetrock wall on the left helped. Then I had a mirror the exact size of the window placed on the wall to form an L with the window; the mirror reflects the window, giving the illusion of a big corner window.
This simple optical illusion vastly expands the space, bounces more light to the back of the large room, while reflecting the best part of the park view outside. I tested the initial idea out by propping a cheap mirror that had been left in the apartment next to the window. read more…
On Ikea’s impossible-to-translate blog, Livet Hemma, we found this image of the two-toned fabrics European Ikeas are selling. We’re not crazy about the color scheme but love the idea: why not overlap vividly-colored tablecloths or large swathes of cotton or linen to make a color block table? Unhemmed ends are CHIC.
Related posts: found: frosta/alvar aalto stool knock-off!!!
ikea hack: reverse-painted glass brick room divider
linen apron as improvised table cloth
copy this: “moderne” patchwork tablecloth
one big swell table from several smaller ones
At The Chive, we came across a list of 16 simple solutions to some everyday dilemmas: a virtual, visual Hints from Heloise. We’ve found some incredibly useful, like using bread bag tags as cord labels (of course, with our obsessive minds, we’d go looking for stylish tag in a color we like: white! – and might trim it to a cooler shape).
David Saltman reports that he’s been using the strategy for getting an elevator to go directly to the floor you want, useful for emergencies (Note: We recommend reading Mary Reynolds thoughtful comment below.) read more…
Now that spring has officially sprung, we find ourselves ready for new projects, around our houses and outside. We keep coming back to our friend Kate Payne’s The Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking
The books covers a ton of ground, from what you need to stock your home (and how to make your own resources) to the basics of easy, stylish home design. She has trouble-shooting options for virtually any common home mishap. It was Kate’s blog, of the same name, that we turned to last week when we needed instructions for how to hang pegboard in your kitchen.
Some of our favorite springtime gems from Kate’s guide include, her how-to on setting up your own bucket garden; read more…
photo: christopher rudqvist
Lately, we’ve come across some extraordinary uses for OSB – oriented strand board (also known as waferboard) – a cheap, strong, durable building material made from pressed tree chippings and resin. It’s generally been viewed as garbage, something to use for structure and hide, until open-minded designers started to explore its potential and beauty.
Architect Carl Turner’s use of it to clad the interiors of two barns borders on obsession; it is everywhere as itself: as walls, beds, sofas, benches, even an interior pod that houses a bathroom and utility room. read more…
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We’re crazy about this smudged chalkboard wall – no words – that reminds us a bit of the chalky walls in Paolo Soleri’s Cosanti. And that got us thinking about how we might mix custom-colors of chalkboard paint (for writing or not) in colors that we LOVE, like an this odd green, or a rich midnight blue or ORANGE. Then we stumbled on a couple of posts about How-to Mix Your Own Chalkboard Paint. Easy-peasy. The most reliable-looking formula is from Martha Stewart Living. The gist is simple: you mix a spoonful of unsanded grout (we have some left over from setting bathroom floor tiles) into flat-finish latex paint. Voila! Chalkboard paint. Once you paint it on, you need to temper it with chalk (easy). Here’s the method, via Martha: read more…
We’ve been mulling the idea of using a pegboard on the inside of a tool closet door, the cleaning closet door (to hang mops, brooms, vacuum cleaner hose) and perhaps even in a walk-in clothes closet where it would be useful for hanging jewelry for jewelry, belts etc. We can’t stop thinking about Julia Child’s famous kitchen (you can take a virtual tour of the Smithsonian’s re-creation of it) with it’s charming/homely blue pegboard that hung many of her copper pots and tools. When painted, a pegboard’s polka dot grid can make a pleasing visual, witness the non-utilitarian pegboard headboard we posted a while back.
As is happening more and more, as soon as we started thinking out our options, an answer appeared. This one came as a great how-to found in Kate Payne’s Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking. She takes you through hanging up a kitchen pegboard step-by-step, and has some indispensable lessons learned. read more…
photo: ellen silverman
We are thrilled to publish some of resident photographer Ellen Silverman‘s work from a forthcoming exhibit at the Umbrella Arts’ gallery in New York City, “Spare Beauty: The Cuban Kitchen” her ongoing project.
This past year I travelled to Cuba three times; having a strong interest in food and food photography, the kitchen was a natural subject for me to focus on. I was welcomed into homes where I found sparse spaces, where time has stopped. Due to years of lack of money, supplies and equipment, many Cubans have been forced to adapt and improvise. These photographs reflect the personalities and circumstances of those who inhabit them. If you are unable to come to the gallery please take a few minutes to go to my website and view the photographs online.
We’ve published some of Ellen’s moving Cuban kitchen photographs in the past and love seeing 30 of them on display (in person and on the web)… read more…
We’ve checked out A LOT of d-i-y shipping pallet furniture, and have been contemplating possibilities for plywood shelving with unfinished edges. Today we realized the simple key to keeping these recycled wood creations from bordering on “granola” and making them more stylish: paint them. White is always reliable (dig this white-painted coffee table), but black or dark gray can do wonders. Apart’s black sofa made (carefully) of shipping pallet wood and painted black is a great example of the possibilities, even in rougher iterations: read more…
photo: marc raboy
One of the most inspiring D-I-Y books we know of is from the 70′s, with illustrations in black-and-white. It is Spiros Zakas’ More Furniture in 24 Hours, a book of plans for making simple, sculptural, practical pieces of furniture FAST, like this folding screen made of hollow-core doors and piano hinges. Unlike most hinged doors, this one doesn’t have to zig-zag to stand up…it can even be configured in a circle.
The book is chock full of ideas, which, if you don’t actually do them, will lodge in your mind as a possible solution or way to improvise your own creations, as a kind of liberation. Writes Zakas:
Making thing is an art, whether it is baking bread, sewing a quilt, or building a table. It is self-expression, a way of knowing what we like and how we like it, of discovering who we are. The interesting thing I have found is that everyone is creative in many ways if he or she will only try them. Just because you have neer done something doesn’t mean that you can’t. read more…
christophe niemann for the new york times
A revelation from last weekend’s New York Times’ Magazine: the great Christophe Niemann doodle made while he was ‘on hold’ forever, waiting for a person to pick up, listening to Clair de Lune. Click to listen while you follow the amazing path Niemann wandered and the many discoveries he made…
(Our strategy for being “on hold” is to wear an old-fashioned telephone headset
What do you do while you’re on hold?
Related posts: christopher niemann’s fab color-tiled bathrooms
christophe niemann map: my (your) way
doing ‘nothing’ can be doing a lot
(Video link here.) This inspiring TED Talk by Britta Riley recently introduced us to the world of Windowfarms. These vertical hydroponic gardens allow city-dwellers to grow vegetables, herbs and fruits in the windows of their otherwise cramped apartments, all year long. Think ‘strawberries’!
But what’s most intriguing about Windowfarms is the community behind them, constantly refining the product and experimenting with new possibilities. This isn’t a community of traditional scientists or farmers–it’s just a bunch of folks who are passionate about an idea.
Riley describes the process of what goes on at our.Windowfarms–the Windowfarms open source community platform–as “R&D-I-Y” (research-and-develop-it-yourself). read more…
On a recent Selby visit, we spotted this fabric-draped sofa in the wonderful home of Hitoshi Uchida-san – owner of J’Antiques Tokyo (check out the full story). The beauty of it is that the sofa is covered with a really big swath of fabric that can bunch and drape luxuriously. The fabric is wide enough to go from the floor in front of the sofa, over the seat, up the back and hang over by a couple of feet – not something the usual 54-inch width of fabric can do. But where do you find affordable fabric like this? read more…
Last week, we posted our best recipes for how to brine a turkey, make side dishes and freeform tarts, and some suggestions for wines to serve at the feast. If you’re having a crowd, now’s the time to figure out what to serve all this on, and where the guests will sit…
We went back into the Archive to dig out links for how to make big tables both round and rectangular, and a variety of makeshift seating options, including our favorite bench made of chairs. We’re posting it early, in case you need to stop by the lumber yard for plywood of planks.
The essential liberating rule of thumb: nothing needs to match…neither tableclothes, nor napkins, nor dishes, nor chairs…nor glasses… read more…
