Bringing Order into Chaos (a house tour)

I've been in my new house for a little more than three months. I guess it's about time to introduce you to the place, no? We (my roommates and I) are pretty settled in at this point and we've hosted a couple of get-togethers. I have been sensing your mounting jealous of said guests. So--calm DOWN--here is a house tour for you!

To show you exactly how far we have come in these three months, I present to you a picture summary of where we are and where we've come from (I hope the philosophers out there appreciate that pun-attempt..). Because this is a long, picture-heavy post, I've decided to try to keep words to a minimum. Youuuuu'rrreee welcome!

Before going any further, I must say a big thank you to Sole, Paul, Brandon, and Holly's family for helping me move. Also, a HUGE 'thank you' to this girl, my sister, Gracie.

People often mistake her as me, or as my twin. Wrong and wronger.
I do not have a twin. But if I did, she would play the part famously.

The move ended up being much more complicated than I anticipated (thanks to the fact that the house had not been cleaned before I moved in....it was as gross as it sounds). I might have been a big(ger) hot(ter) mess if I had gone through with my original plan of moving all by myself. So, yeah, extra big thanks to Grace.

Living Room:

Right after emptying the moving truck

At the end of day two

The living room stayed like the above photo until [1] my roommates moved in (bringing a necessary area rug and bookcase (see below pic)) and [2] wall hangings. The empty white walls started driving me nuts by about week two.

All finished!

View two

View three

View final

True story: I live less than five minutes from campus, though typically I stay on campus until I finish with classes. One day, I had had enough of the naked walls. Finding myself with a spare hour between classes, I bolted home, hung all 16 paintings/icons/sconces/etc., and was back on campus in time for class. I felt like I had conquered the worlddddd!

remember these?

All of the books on the bookshelf belong to one of my roommates, and it is only half of her personal library!

Bedroom:

Poco a poco, se va lejos. "Little by little, one goes far." This was the official mantra of my junior/senior year high school Spanish class. I think it is a pretty fair and accurate description of the ever-ongoing styling project in my bedroom.

Uno

Dos

Tres

Throw in a few rugs and some wall decor...

Viola! (Wrong language. Mea culpa.)

After sleeping in not-my-bed for three months, my home mattress felt like heaven!

I don't know why I didn't tidy the desk area before snapping this pic

Kitchen:

There was some kind of Explosion of Nasty that happened in the kitchen (and bathroom) before we moved in, which meant a 7-10 hour delay in the unpacking process since it had to be cleaned up. It was gross. And Grace was a total trooper through it all.

Don't let this picture fool you. Grace was amazingly upbeat actually!

Making some progress. And eating lunch.  

In the picture above, you can tell that we are our mother's daughters by the fact that we put on a tablecloth, used glass dishes, and had a centerpiece [a] on moving day and [b] for a simple meal of PB&J. Bringing some semblance of beauty and normalcy goes a long way in actually making the transition from house to home! 

Also amazing is what food can do: Change a hangry badtitude to a happy camper. Turn a frown upside down. Okay, I'll stop...

 And some extra deets:

getting all artsy-fartsy

When it was all said and done, Grace and I made ourselves a fancy-pantsy dinner and dubbed it the official "first meal" of the new house. Maybe it was cleaning-chemical-induced delirium, maybe it was exhausted hunger, but we both thought it was the best meal ever. 

The end!

Shopping for free

What? No, I am not kidding. Psh, come on, I don't kid about this stuff. Free shopping is serious business.

While visiting Tess last weekend (as I mentioned in my last post), we struck gold at an estate sale that a local parish was holding after Sunday Mass. Estate sales are usually one of the most wonderfullous events known to mankind. This particular estate sale was even better because it was free!! Granted, it was free because it was just the sale's dregs/bottom-of-the-barrel. None the less, we found some gems.

I've often admired wall hangings that are/mimic architectural salvage pieces. But, as it seems to be my lot in decorating, I never seem to find something that I like OR that I can afford. That all changed last weekend when I found these babies:

Not only are these right up my style-alley, they were right up my price-alley, too (i.e. FREE). When no one else wanted them, I was thrilled to pick them up to bring home with me. I mean it when I say "thrilled." I felt like this inside:

GIFSoup

I was equally pumped to

Time Tunnel

Oh. Heeey...Three months goes by way faster (like, WAY FASTER) than I can believe. Was it really April that I last checked in with you? Geesh. That's embarrassing...

Excuse: The rent contract was up for renewal in May. Since I had a few loose ends in my life, I debated long and hard about the possibility of moving. Ultimately I decided to stay put. During the deciding period, I put all projects on "hold" for the entire month of May while I sorted through my options. What's the point of home improvement if [1] you are going to move really soon and [2] you don't have to spruce up the place for selling? 


After re-signing the lease and settling in (if you can say that, it's not like I ever unsettled) for another year, I got busy with my back log of projects--only I never got around to sharing any of it with. Whoops! Now here we are in July. If I had a tail it might be between my legs at this moment. But, alas, tails were snuffed out of my species quite some time ago.

Enough of my pseudo-self-chastisement/CYAing. Let's get down to biznizz. And, yeah, I have been biznizzy (i.e. "busy" for all the non-gansta folk readers). Though I left you out of the loop, you can now expect a steady stream of "what I've been up to" posts as I catch you up to speed.

First up, the bedroom.

As you recall, I have been trying to fix up the other half of the room because it was, well, embarrassing the nice half.

I cringe looking at this picture. Something is afoul in Denmark and it is this corner of my bedroom. (For those of you who didn't get the reference, pick up the nearest copy of Bill Shakespeare's Hamlet).

The highest priority for this corner was rearranging the gallery wall(s). Over the course of the months of March, April, May, June and July (I am not exaggerating), I tried numerous times to remedy the sorry situation. Here is a photo-review of my earnest stabs in the dark. Seriously, I felt like I was in darkness...

This was my first attempt. I mapped it out on paper beforehand and was pretty excited to see how it looked up on the wall. Let's just say it was a major letdown. I had a bad taste in my mouth about the arrangement by the end of the week. Being the eternal design optimist that I am, I decided I would leave it be for a little bit and see if it grew on me.

Nope. Not a chance. In fact I got more dissatisfied with it each day I had to wake up with it staring back at me. Something had to change. I chronicled my many attempts for happiness-a-la-wall.

Psssh. No.

Nice try. Not.

Failed at failing.

Voted off the island.

I was getting pretty down about the prospect of having a half-pretty-half-embarrassing bedroom. Something had to change. I slowly had built up my stash of wall hangings, but things just weren't falling together like I had hoped.

For a while I had entertained the idea of painting the frames of the pictures white and possibly swapping out the old photos for new ones. After one too many new nail holes in my wall, I decided it was time to get down to business and simply change what I was working with. Cue the spray paint.

Boom.

Bang

BAM!

While the paint dried, I printed out some new family photos and picked up a few photo mattes at my friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart. I forgot to get close-ups of the new family snap-shots, sorry. But, trust me, my family is really good looking.

After reassembling the photos with their appointed frames and spending about and hour and a half deciding on a gallery layout, this is what I ended up with.

I am pretty happy with the outcome! I had hoped to be able to spread the pictures, etc., across the two walls. Check! I also craved some kind of continuity or unifying element that would allow the walls actually to smell something along the lines of an eclectic style, instead of the "here is a bunch of random crap I've collected over the years and slapped on the nearest wall" look. 

To help create the look I was going for, I swapped the brown desk chair out for a white one that I had in another room. Not only does the white go well with the new white frames, it also is a better match for my white desk (you can see one of the desk's legs in the photos). The chair's cushion goes well with the warm, yet bright tones in some of the wall hangings as well as the color palette of the bed's quilt (not pictured, see it in an earlier post). I already had the green-black-n-white side table bookcase in the room, only you probably couldn't tell because it was always pushed off in a corner since I couldn't find a satisfactory place to put it in the room. Since I painted the table myself, I was glad to finally be able to fit it comfortably in to the room's layout. 

So, there it is: A new conversation-corner-slash-reading-corner-slash-guest-quarters (the futon lays out for a very comfy sleep arrangement for overnight visitors). It's a far cry from landing on the cover of Elle Decor Magazine, but it will more than do for now. I finished up the arrangement almost three weeks ago and I am still very happy with it. A big change from the previous attempts!

Lampshadapalooza

I have been a bit ADD with my bedroom corner remake. I have a rough plan/idea of the direction I want to take the room area. Yet, I can't seem to do (read: "finish") one thing at a time. Case in point: The multi-headed lamp I started a few weeks ago. Here is a refresher of what I started with:

Mmm, hot and dangerous!

From here, I took the lamp to something like this:

I am still working on figuring out how to better connect/unite/unify/transform the individual stems of the lamp heads. Any ideas out there??

In the meantime, I gave you a preview last week that I have finished fancying up the lampshade. So, I am here today to show you the how-to of that accomplishment.

I started out with a curtain valence that I bought on sale at Wal-Mart. It is a champagne-gold sateen fabric which is layered in tiers.

I had to do a little maneuvering/trial-and-error testing before figuring out how I was going to attach the curtain to my lampshade. Here is a picture of of the curtain simply clipped to the shade. Notice [1] it wraps about one-and-one-fourth ways around the circumference, and [2] it is twice as long as the shade's height. 

To remedy the circumference issue, I took some spare fabric and laced it through the space where a curtain rod normally would be inserted.

Then I used my hot glue gun to pucker the upper ruffle of the curtain. If had not done this, the upper ruffle would have laid limply. That would have been gross.

Sorry, this apparently is the only picture I took during the hot gluing process!

After letting the glue set, I set to address the problem with the length. What first drew me to the curtain was the tier design. With the idea of a wedding dress bustle in my mind, I decided I would try to "bustle" the tiers using needle and thread. Here is a panned out picture of my work station, aka my desk.

At first I was simply sewing the fabric to itself:

 but that quickly proved itself not to work as the weight of the fabric resulted in a sagging effect, where I was going more for a light-weight look. 

 

In, out, and repeat!

To fix this, I changed my method to sewing the curtain layers right into the lampshade. By tethering the fabric right into the shade, the fabric no longer weighed itself down. Since the curtain had four tiers of fabric, the lampshade has four layers of bustle. I attached the fabric with two to three stitches per point--just enough to securely attach the fabric without leaving a bulk of thread to conceal later. If I had really planned out my attack, I probably would have measured out and marked the lines and points of attachment. Maybe I will do that next time. This time I just eye-balled it.

After a little primping and fluffing, I officially declared the lampshade a successful finish!

What do you think? Any ideas on how I can best finish off the lamp's base? I could use your helpful suggestions!