Laurel

Styling a Bookshelf with Actual Books

November 28, 2016January 11, 2017by Laurel2 Comments

So we’ve all seen them, the “How to Style a Bookshelf” posts, they’re everywhere! But have you ever noticed what’s most lacking in these bookshelves? Books! Almost ever tutorial, every blog post, every instruction manual I’ve ever read on styling a bookshelf maintains that you need many knickknacks and very few books. Well, for all my fellow bibliophiles, let’s take a minute to acknowledge how little that makes sense. If you’re anything like me, you have tons of books. You may reread them, they may be on your to-read list, they may sit untouched just looking gorgeous on your shelves, but doggone it, there’s tons of them! The joy of having too many books and not enough book storage has haunted me ever since I memorized the words to the Velveteen Rabbit and told everyone who would listen that I knew how to read. It has never been uncommon for me to have stacks of books sitting all over my home. After college, I stacked books 3 and a half feet high in my bedroom on my childhood dresser. Miraculously they withstood the 2014 Napa Earthquake.

Every time I see another “How to Style a Bookshelf” tutorial, I sigh, think, hmmm that’s pretty, and move on, because for me, that’s completely impractical. My bookshelves are groaning under the weight of years of reading material. They’re packed to the brim with thousands of pages of paper, trillions of words, hundreds of stories. And that’s how I like them: full of books. The bibliophile in me wants more and more, collects them even. The romantic in me dreams of home libraries packed to the brim and smelling of paper and ink. The designer in me pauses a minute and thinks, how can I make this collection attractive?

This past weekend I moved around the furniture in my room and this bookshelf got booted out and into the bonus room upstairs. I packed it full of as many books as I could, styled the top, and it’s beginning to set the tone for this whole room.

Without further ado, how to style your bookshelf with actual books! If you follow these guidelines, not only will you have an attractive bookcase filled with books, but you will also be able to store more books than you would normally. Booklovers rejoice! You can use any books for this, hardcover, paperback, falling apart, old, new, used! Is this the only way to style a bookshelf full of books? Definitely not. But this method is fun, fresh, and brimming with books!

First start with an empty bookshelf. The small hole drilled in the back for your childhood stereo is essential. Just kidding! Pretend it’s not there…

Gather a stack of books in the same color family, you want the stack to be about as tall as your shelf when laid horizontally. Place that on one of the shelves.

Gather another stack of similarly colored book spines. Place that next to the horizontally stacked books.

Add more books in this spine color to finish out this half of the shelf. Begin gathering books of other spine colors. At this point you might want to pop in a special books you have. For me, this means a collection of dilapidated books on top of the bookshelf and a three volume series on a shelf below.

Now things began to move quickly. Continue adding stacks of books vertically and horizontally until your shelves begin to fill up. Things will move around a bit as you adjust for different spine colors. Don’t be afraid to mix hard- and soft-cover books together! At this point your goal to to pack the shelves and keep your horizontal stacks misaligned for a more collected look.

As you continue on past the first few shelves, you may vary between one horizontal book stack and two per shelf. This helps keep you eyes moving around the shelves.

As you get further down your varying colored books help give the shelves blocks of color, creating a more appeasing and “styled” look over all.

At this point, your shelves are full, but don’t stop there! Add an arrangement to the top of your bookshelf to tie the entire thing together. I used an old printed wooden box I have which mimics the blocks of colors formed by the books in the shelves below. The plant adds some organic shape and life; it’s long tendril down the side of the shelf visually binds it to the books on shelves below. A candle, a little metal house, a silver stein, and a happy painted armadillo fill in the remainder of the space.

And that, is a bookshelf styled full of books! I love this because not only can I fit way more books on this shelf, but it looks clean, collected and modern rather than cluttered. There are many ways to style shelves, I don’t have anything against most of them. But for me, it’s important that my styled shelves are packed with the books I need them to store, and not just interesting objects!

I made a gif so you can follow along with this step by step as well!

I’ll share the bookshelf I have downstairs later, to show you how I style shelves with fewer books too. And guess what? I need more bookshelves… I’m out of room and there are stacks of books everywhere around my house, eek!

Do you run into the problem of not having enough book storage? Have you styled your shelves full of books in a different way? Let me know your secrets!

Appetizers, Entrees, Food

Lemon Veggie Wild Rice

November 7, 2016January 11, 2017by Laurel1 Comment

Well, it’s officially autumn here in Portland! The leaves are falling, the skies are grey, and it’s been raining a good amount. Autumn makes me want warm food, a hot fire, and a good book. Since I keep my pantry well stocked with yummy grains and non-perishables, I often buy a bunch of veggies to sauté together which I throw on top of rice or lentils or whatever else Fred Meyer’s organic bulk section is stocking. I decided to mix it up a little bit the other day and stumbled into this yummy new dish I’ll be cooking up for years to come. I brought it to my ~~first-cousin-once-removed-in-law’s~~ uncle’s 76th birthday (sometimes it’s easier to simplify familial relationships). I was pleasantly surprised by how delicious this simple dish is! Give yourself some time in the kitchen to get everything going, but then pop it into the oven and socialize until it’s time to eat. Covered after removing from the oven, this will stay plenty hot for 30-40 minutes, so it really is great for taking to a friend’s house or to make ahead for your own gathering!

Lemon Veggie Wild Rice

Serves 6-8 as main dish and 12-14 people as a side.

Ingredients

1.5 cups organic, tri-color wild rice

2 cups organic vegetable broth

1.75 cups water

1/2 stick butter or 2 tablespoons olive oil

5 small, organic carrots

4 stalks organic celery

1 small onion (I used a yellow onion, but a red onion would taste amazing in this!)

1 medium, organic leek

6-8 leaves sliced, fresh sage

1 tablespoon fresh thyme

1/3 cup chopped, fresh parsley

3/4 cup dried cranberries

3/4 cup toasted sliced almonds

1 organic lemon

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

feta cheese to sprinkle

Recipe

Start by putting the rice, broth and water in a medium sized pot over high heat, bring to boil, then reduce heat to medium-low and allow to simmer for 20-30 mins until water is absorbed. Melt butter (or heat oil) over medium heat in 4 quart dutch oven (or other large oven safe vessel). Chop carrots and celery and add to pot with butter, sauté for 5-1o minutes, stirring frequently. Pre-heat oven to 350° F. Chop leek, and onions and add to carrot celery pot, sauté together ten minutes, stirring frequently. Test rice, it should be soft with a slight crunch. Once rice is cooked, turn off heat on both pots and add rice to sautéd veggies. Add cranberries, salt, pepper, sliced almonds, and the grated rind and juice of one lemon. Stir together, cover with lid, and place in oven. Bake for 40 minutes. Remove lid, and let rest for ten minutes, then serve sprinkled with feta cheese.

Let me know if you try making this! It’s perfect for a fall night, but the easily found ingredients make it a dish that can be served year round.

Home Upgrades, House & Home, Painting

The Long Weekend

November 3, 2016January 11, 2017by Laurel4 Comments

Before we moved in, I walked the Duplex with my landlord and she pointed out several issues. One of those issues was the poorly laid LVT tiles downstairs, the other was the gross, old, stained carpet in the bonus room. She mentioned during this tour that she was considering replacing it with laminate. I heartily agreed. In my opinion, hard surface flooring is the way to go in rentals. Carpet simply doesn’t last and gets gross quickly. For anyone who has allergies to dust or dander, carpet traps dirt and dust and even the strongest of vacuums can’t get it out. It’s affordable in the short term, but over time, the cost of ripping up and replacing carpet adds up quickly.

Fast forward two and a half months. I reached out to our landlord via email and asked about her timeline for replacing the flooring on the stairs and in the bonus room. The carpet was nasty and a little smelly. I’d gone to Home Depot and gotten a quote on the installation and labor for a laminate floor. Home Depot estimated $250 in costs to remove the existing carpet and $850 in labor and materials to replace everything with an inexpensive laminate. The bulk of that cost was in the expensive laminate stair treads.

Unfortunately, life happens, and due to some unforeseeable personal matters, replacing the flooring was no longer in her plan or budget. So I suggested something else. What if I ripped out all the carpeting and painted the subfloor? A quick look around the internet told me I could do this for under $250. I proposed this solution as a way to make me happy in the short run, and allow her to spend on new flooring when she was ready. With her approval (yay! Happy dance!) I planned my attack. It was less than 200 SF so I figured I could knock everything out in a weekend. Little did I know how back breaking that would be.

My weekend commenced and proceeded to look a little something like this:

Friday

5:50pm – arrive home from work

6:00pm – quickly eat left overs from fridge, change clothes

6:15pm – move all the furniture out of the bonus room

6:30pm – begin ripping up all the carpet

7:30pm – finish ripping all the carpet out

7:45pm – finish ripping all the carpet pad out, try not to gag looking at the amount of dirt that’s been hidden under the carpet for going on 20 years (see brown smears in picture, much more obvious in person!)

8:00pm – finish carting all the carpet and pad into the car (laying it on top of a tarp to protect the van)

9:30pm – finish pulling up all the tack strips, add these to the pile of stuff in the car

9:45pm – sweep floors

10:00pm – vacuum flooring

10:15pm – begin pulling the 253 billion staples out of the stair treads/risers with a pair of needle nosed pliers

10:30pm – my roommate comes home and helps pull out staples from the bonus room

11:30pm – roommate goes to bed

1:00am – finish removing all the staples I can find (approximately 589 trillion)

1:30am – fall into bed, showered, but sore

Saturday

8:00am – alarm goes off

8:45am – finish breakfast and dress in project clothes

9:00am – sweep floors

9:15am – vacuum floors, assess supplies, realize I don’t own a spackling knife, hope the tinted primer works well with the paint selection

9:30am – wipe down floors with wet cloth, remove the 33 million more staples I find while doing this

10:00am – run to Home Depot for spackling knife

10:30am begin filling screw holes, saw cuts, and spaces between particle board panels, day dream about how much easier than paint prep, painting will be

1:00pm – eat quick lunch of something you just pop into the oven from Trader Joes

2:00pm – hop into car

2:30pm – buy Benjamin Moore Natura Semi-Gloss paint in Waynesboro Taupe at Powell’s Paint. Color selected quickly as the swatch isn’t yellow-brown, but doesn’t clash with the trim and is light enough to help reflect light around this dark windowless room

3:00pm – arrive at Environmentally Conscious Recycling and weigh van

3:30pm – finish unloading car at ECR, weigh car again, pay minimum $25 fee

3:45pm – stop by Home Depot again for more wood filler and wood transition strips

4:00pm – fill remaining holes and cut marks

5:00pm – hop into shower

6:00pm – wash ibuprofen down with wine (not recommended) at Nikki’s, eat authentic homemade Japanese curry, try not to fall asleep on her sofa

10:00pm – fall into bed, more sore than before

Sunday

7:30am – alarm goes off, groan in pain, take more ibuprofen

8:00am – finish breakfast and get dressed in work clothes

8:15am – beginning cutting in Kilz Max Stain and Odor Blocker water based primer (highly recommend! Not too smelly – though I wore a mask – and had excellent coverage)

11:30am – finish cutting in primer, begin rolling primer

12:30pm – finish rolling in primer, eat lunch, take break while primer dries, realize I’ve missed tons of screw holes/cuts that will need to be filled

2:00pm – start second coat of primer in certain areas (like those that now have exposed wood filler)

3:00pm – wash brush and roller, eat snack, take break

6:30pm – install wood transition strips at entries to bedrooms and bathroom

7:00pm – start cutting in paint, realize wet paint is nearly the exact same color as dry primer and it is basically impossible to tell where you’ve painted or just primed, discover the paint (luckily) dries much darker. Primer is the main field color below with cut in dry paint on the right and cut in wet paint on the left!

10:00pm – finish cutting in paint, start rolling

11:00pm – finish rolling, eat dinner, shower

11:30pm – fall into bed more tired than ever, dreading work the next morning.

Whew! I’m exhausted just remembering all this! Yup, that was my weekend. My exhausting, back breaking, someone please feed me, weekend. And I am 100% glad I did it and 100% not willing to do it again any time soon. Especially since the next weekend I went back in, touched up a few spots I missed with paint (got to love Benjamin Moore paints that only required 1 coat!), and then sealed the floors with Safecoat Acrylic. I let that dry for another week before bringing the furniture back in.

We still have the futon in here for guests and all of the electronics on the built-in counter I want to drill a few holes and add some grommets to tame that mess. I did buy a nice big West Elm rug which I’m hoping will cozy up the space!

You can see here how the window in the stairwell sits low, below the half-wall railing in the bonus room, preventing much light from illuminating this room. Even in the middle of the afternoon, this room is pretty dim. A light colored paint on the floor was a must for brightening up the space!

Our yellow brown trim will always stand out pretty starkly, but that’s the nature of it. If the room was brighter, I would have painted the floors a nice deep black. The trim would still have popped against the black, but the room would have been dark dark dark! In person the color is the perfect blah tone that fades away on the floor, letting everything else speak for itself. I don’t mean that in a bad way at all! It’s a nice safe background. This picture below shows it very close to how it looks in person.

And this post wouldn’t be complete without a kitten photobombing, so here we go, model pose!

How much did it all cost?

Supplies and a Gallon of Primer cost about $60

Benjamin Moore Natura Paint Gallon also $60

Recycling Fee for the carpet $25

Safecoat Acrylic Sealer $95

Which left me spending about $240 which my landlord happily reimbursed me for. Although the labor was quite demanding, I’m pleased with the result and couldn’t be happier for the change! It’s mush nicer walking on the painted and sealed subfloor. I don’t miss that gross carpet one bit!

Have you ever painted subfloor? How has it held up for you over time? Although painting didn’t take long, I was a bit shocked at the number of staples that needed to be pulled up. My hand had the imprint of the pliers for a week afterwards!

Furniture Upgrades & Builds, Home Upgrades, House & Home, Organizing

Hanging in there!

October 25, 2016January 11, 2017by Laurel5 Comments

Woah. Did you guys watch the Walking Dead last Sunday? Because, I need to talk to somebody about that punch-you-in-the-face, heart- wrenching, knock-you-dead season premiere! So violent. So psychotic. So depressing. Wowza! Let me know your thoughts. I need to talk about it with somebody or I’ll go crazy.

In other news, I am no longer living with all my pots and pans sitting on the counter! Nice segue, right? Remember when I filled up my china hutch-turned-pantry and started pulling this kitchen together? I shared this shot:

Well, take a look at this and see if you can spot the difference:

No the dead plant is still the same dead plant (really need to get my s*** together and share a shot of the lovely new snake plant which now lives in that pot!). And no the random lamp on the floor isn’t anything new (you should remember that lamp from long ago). It’s the pegboard over in the kitchen! That’s right! Vertical storage wins again!

Now rather than moving 15 million pots and pans around every time I need to use the counter space, I can actually use the counter space! It’s the little things, people! The back wall of our kitchen was so under utilized before. A big blank wall with nothing but some mismatched trash/recycling receptacles was not an ideal situation in a kitchen lacking storage.

There just is no reason for this wall to have so little purpose. And no reason for all those pots to sit on the counter. Now? Much better.

Matching trash and recycling containers from IKEA (I spray painted the recycling bin green) plus a pegboard adds up to a much nicer view. Most of the pots and pans are my roommate’s, but the center column holds my cast iron pans and the one pot I’ve had since college. My Staub dutch oven and pie pans live in the china hutch. Having all the pots and pans within such easy reach is absolutely wonderful. I just reach over any time I need any thing, I much prefer it to digging through the lower cabinets. Putting together the pegboard was super easy. Anyone can do it as long as you have the right tools.

I picked up the actual pegboard at Home Depot and had them cut down the 4’x8′ size to the dimension I wanted: 3′ x 6′. They offer this service free, so take them up on it if you don’t have the correct cutting tools. While I was there I grabbed a couple of 8′ long 1x2s to pop the board off the wall (allowing the hangers to slip in) and some 1x3s to trim the board out.

At home, two quick cuts later and I had the boards ready for the back of pegboard. Excuse the dark garage photos. There are worse pictures yet to come. Cutting the 8 foot boards down to just under 6′ allowed me to have boards along the lengths of the pegboard and the top and bottom. They didn’t need to be perfect since they were purely for function and wouldn’t be visible. I screwed them in from the back so they were completely invisible (like ninjas) from the front.

The trim pieces were almost as simple: set saw to 45 degree angle and cut. But of course I started right off with a mistake. Luckily I was able to reuse the board for the top and bottom trim pieces and didn’t waste much.

Once I turned my brain on, I quickly made the rest of the cuts. Each length was an inch longer than my pegboard so the trim would stick out from it on all sides. I then screwed all of these boards into the pegboard and things started taking shape. It looked so good, Malary decided to pose with the pegboard. It’s so nice to have such a supportive pet.

Since edges never match up entirely perfectly, I filled the mitered corners with wood filler and gave the same treatment to the more prominent knots.

Then I did some minor sanding (I get super lazy about sanding, but it’s a requirement so I tried to tough it out). After that, I filled the gaps where the trim meets the pegboard with some paintable caulk wiping up the excess with a wet finger. I like this little container because it stays good for a long time, rather than drying out immediately like the caulk guns.

Once everything was caulked the board was functional, it just needed a coat of paint to spruce things up!

Two coats of primer later, it was ready for some paint.

I chose Benjamin Moore’s Palladian Blue (HC-144) in their Natura line (zero-VOC) for the board. It’s a really light aqua tone that is subtle, but still stands out from white. It has quite a bit of grey in in and the swatch seems to be almost white, but once it’s up on the wall, BOOM! COLOR! Plus, I love Julia Child and she had teal-blue pegboards all over her kitchen, so I’m in good company! After two coats of paint, I did three coats of Safecoat Acrylic sealer in high-gloss. I wanted the board to be extra protected from water and oils. Once that was all done, it was time to bring it inside.

I hung the board on the wall with a few heavy duty D-rings hooked on hangers screwed into wall studs and it is fairly sturdy. I picked up this pegboard hardware kit at Home Depot too, which was way more than enough to hang the pots and pans. I have enough left over I might take the pegboard scraps and make another for the garage!

Covered in pots, it really does make things look happy, colorful, and organized. I’m ready to sauté those carrots at a moments notice now.

Having our counters back and free for their original purpose (prep space) is delightful. Not looking at a pile of pots and pans every time I walk into the kitchen is pretty great too! The trash and recycling containers are just the right size for us too. I love the matching size and though not everyone would like the different colored recycling, it’s nice to easily be able to identify it as “the green one” when people come over.

Plus I get to lovingly stare at my cast iron pans now. Definite bonus.

I love those pans… though I wouldn’t mind upgrading them to Lodge pans down the line. I’ve got these guys seasoned just perfectly now with just over a year of use. Cast iron is my favorite!

So if you have a blank wall – put it to use! Don’t fuss around with birds, put a pegboard on it! (I’m so Portland now).

Have you guys ever come up with creative storage solutions in your rental kitchens? I’d love some good ideas!

Home Upgrades, House & Home, House Tour, Room Checklist

3 Months In and What’s Next

October 11, 2016January 11, 2017by LaurelLeave a Comment

So we’ve been here in the Portland Duplex for a little while now and I wanted to show you all an update on how things stand. We’re starting to make progress in a few areas and anything is better than the chaos when we first moved in! Also this is a nice place to list the twenty million ideas I have, Young Houser Love’s “Listy McListerson” style! Since I know this house is not long term – I have no plans on being her longer than my year lease – there are many things I am very cautious about putting money toward. Basically, anything I can take with me? Sure, spend the green, anything more permanent? Not happening this year. Hopefully, my next home will be a much more permanent living situation! There are tons of updates anyone can accomplish in a rental though, so that’s what I’d set out to do!

– THE ENTRY –

Before/Current

The Duplex Moving In Tour | Land of Laurel

A whole lot of nothing going on in here! I really haven’t started.

To Do:

Get seating for putting on/taking off shoes
console or buffet for mail/purses
Hang art and accessorize
Paint back wall to hide electrical box better?
Organize closet
Shoe storage!

– The Long Hallway –

Before/Current

Also untouched!

To Do:

Hang Art
Add runner?

– The Powder Room –

Before/Current:

Untouched as well since this room is currently playing host to the house’s newest member! Six month old kitten Jackson is using this room as his safehouse until his stitches heal from his neutering and he and Malary learn to settle their differences.

To Do:

Buy bath mat/rug
Replace toilet seat
Hang art
Add plants
Find nice hand towel
Remove ~~curtains~~ and hardware

Soon there will be two cats photobombing all my pictures! Check out his little face in the meantime!

– The Kitchen –

Before:

Current:

Not a ton has changed in here. Those floors are impossible to keep clean so I’m looking into a runner which will hide some of the dirt I hope. We’ve still got all our pots and pans on the counter! Luckily the lovely china cabinet is helping store a lot of my things and frees up cabinet space! The stools were up for grabs when my new office moved from east to west Portland and I nabbed five for $20 beans each.

To Do:

Buy rug/runner
Make use of back wall with vertical storage (I’ve been working on this guy and can’t wait to share)
~~Get stools for bar area~~
Re plant something in that pot

– The Dining Room –

Before:

Current:

Things are looking a lot more lively in here now that I’ve added my furniture! The table is from my grandmother’s home, but it actually belonged to one of her tenants so there isn’t any sentimental value. The bookshelf was a surprise hand-me-down from my parents.

To Do:

Remove ~~curtains~~ and hardware
Paint/stain/refinish table (the top isn’t sealed properly, and I’d love to update it, this looks like a fun option, but they also look really elegant stained if styled correctly)
Paint bookshelf black to coordinate with china hutch

– The Living Room –

Before:

Current:

Things have kind of landed in here for now. I’m using my old trunk which used to live at the bottom of my bed as a coffee table in the living room at the moment. We don’t have a couch yet and when we do get one I’m not sure the scale of the trunk will work with it. We’re using the bench I got as a hand-me-down from my parents and these two chairs as seating in here for now and it’s working pretty well. The larger chair is my roommates over which I draped a large wall hanging I got at the Berlin flea market. The wood arm’ed one is something I got from work in Oakland about 8 months back. The vintage suitcases were my Oma’s, I’ve stacked them and stuck a tray on top which is working really well as a cute side table! The other side table is some of my cherry crates stacked together with another tray. Fred is living on the coffee table at this house right now. The floor lamp is a recent IKEA purchase (my roommate’s). The faux cowhide is free from work.

To Do:

Buy sofa
Buy rug to layer beneath the faux-cow hide
build larger coffee table?
rewire green lamps for use on side tables
rearrange entire area to work with the sofa?
Hang art

– The Bonus Room –

Before:

Current:

This room has also pretty much just gotten a few pieces of furniture plopped down. The rug in here is awful truly awful. It might be original to the house. It’s covered in stains (some of them marker red) and sometimes smells a little bit! Our landlord said she wants to replace it with laminate flooring, but it hasn’t happened yet. The white drawer units were another item I picked up when my office moved. They were free and I napped 8 (they still sell them at IKEA for $79 each if you’re interested). I’ve got a couple in the garage, a couple in my bedroom closet, and these three in here are holding crafts supplies! It’s so nice to have them all sorted nicely. I’d love to bring a desk up here and make it a real craft room! The futon is also my roommates, I threw a couple of IKEA sheepskin pillows on top as well as a mudcloth I got at the Alameda Flea Market in the Bay Area before I moved.

To Do:

New flooring!
Build shelves for over the weird counter
Buy a nice plush rug
Hang art
Add desk

– My Bedroom –

Before:

Progress:

Current:

Nothing great in here! My bed broke during the move so even though I’m on my own mattress and not the futon mattress, it’s still a mattress on the floor! Pieces from my old place all came with me, everything in here is still chaos! It took me way to long to go from the progress shot to the current shot too.

To Do:

~~Remove curtains and hardware~~
~~Hang new curtains~~ (I’ll share this soon!)
Build bed
Style room
Rearrange furniture
Organize closets
Layer a rug on top?

– The Bathroom –

Before/Current:

Nothing really done it here.

To Do:

Style counter
Add bathmats or runner
Get Malary to use downstairs litter box

So there it is guys! Plans for the entire house. Very feasible plans and totally rental-friendly! I’m diving in, can’t wait for you to all follow along.

Food, House & Home, Organizing

Extra Storage in the Kitchen

October 7, 2016January 11, 2017by LaurelLeave a Comment

When we first moved in, our kitchen was a hot mess. The small, awkwardly placed cabinets were difficult to organize. Living with a roommate means doubles of many of the “basic” kitchen items – in our case, baking supplies – which takes up more room than it should. We each had half of a cabinet for all of our food, the rest of the space was filled with pots, pans, tupperware, and all of the other kitchen things you tend to accumulate. This wasn’t working with my grocery shopping/food storage habits. See, I like to keep a lot of things (legumes, nuts, grains, flour, etc) on hand in my pantry at all times, so the only things I really need to grocery shop for are items that get stored in the fridge (almond milk, eggs, vegetables, fruits, cheeses). This allows to me to stock up on non-perishables infrequently and makes my trips to the grocery store a bit quicker since I only hit up two areas, rather than the entire store.

Remember what my kitchen was looking like when we first moved in?

A hot mess. That’s what this place was, except minus the hot part.

Our storage system evolved a bit after we settled in a bit more, but these pictures remain exemplary of our kitchen’s progress in the first couple of months we lived here. It was not working! I needed a solution, and after seeing something similar in an airbnb my mother and Aunt Stephanie stayed at while visiting, I got an idea stuck in my head. I started hunting for a china cabinet on craigslist soon after. A china cabinet? Isn’t that a little dated? Just wait. See that weird wall that caps the closer side of the galley kitchen? It’s not in line with the long hall way wall, but rather 2-3 feet back closer to the kitchen. It’s almost perpendicular to the center line of the refrigerator. It makes no sense! It serves no purpose! It annoys me! That is where the china cabinet will go. It will extend the kitchen storage and make the wall more functional in the mean time.

I hunted and hunted. That wall is only 43″ wide so the cabinet had to be skinny. I still wanted something tall though, so I could gain as much storage as possible. Finally, I found it! The perfect cabinet. It was exactly the right width for the wall! I drove with my friend Kayla to Hayden Island in North Portland and we stuffed the china cabinet into the van I borrowed from my parents, paid the man his $90 bucks, and headed back to my house. A little dusting and a wipe down with Honest Co. Multi-Purpose Cleaner, and she was ready to be filled on up!

The cabinet even came with a little light that makes the pantry goods look super cute and cozy in their new home. The glass shelf inside lets the light shine down on to both levels. I filled the open middle area with cookbooks belonging to both my roommate and I. The cabinets below hold mason jars, my Staub dutch oven, and my waffle iron, while the drawers contain some random bits and things like frosting squeeze bottles and rolling pins. Boom! Insta storage! The cute cabinet almost makes me forget the annoying the flooring transition I talked more about here. Fake wood meets fake tile in such a dumb way, don’t even get me started! Just concentrate on the glorious cabinet!

You see I also got some new stools. And one of my Parlor palms died. I’ve left it there in such a stylish manor. I bought a new snake plant replaced this guy with the new one in the meantime! The stools I bought when my office moved from east to west Portland. I picked them up for $20 each and I have five. I’ve been using 4 here at the “counter” but the ledge is only about 8 inches deep so people mostly sit sideways and I think I’ll need to remove one more for ease of access.

The china cabinet so perfectly fits this spot and it really ties the kitchen into the living room beyond. It feels so great to walk over here in the evenings and grab my jar of cous cous or lentils. Each morning I make my bowl of oatmeal and set the bowl in front of the cookbooks while I get out the chia seeds from the upper cabinet to sprinkle them on top. It’s quite a handy spot!

Inside my jars hold a whole manor of non-perishable goods! I really have more storage for this than I really need, but I really love the affect of all the jars within. On the left side I have muesli, sunflower seeds, chickpeas, cous cous, black rice, and sliced almonds on the top shelf and rye flour, lentils, dried mango (for the all of two days I have it before devouring every last piece!), polenta, whole wheat flour and my tin of steel cut oatmeal.

On the right side I’ve got black beans, black eyed peas, tri-color wild rice, finely milled whole wheat flour and pine nuts on top, while the bottom shelf holds tri-color popcorn kernels, chia seeds, rolled oats, and usually chocolate chips, but I believe I finished them off before taking this picture!

Our kitchen is small so it’s not a big deal to walk to the china cabinet; it’s no further from the sink than the fridge! Having everything out in the open in the china cabinet makes things so easy, too. There is nothing like a full pantry to make me smile. I just love the way different foods look in jars! It’s simple and colorful, classic and clean. It makes me feel like a pioneer with jars full of canned goods lining her cellar. In reality I have jars full of foods that were not available then and none of them are canned and I can walk into the grocery store to buy them pretty much any time of the year. But that makes it feel less special, so I still like to day dream about pioneer cellars.

I love these jars. I’ve been picking them up at IKEA for a few years now. The small ones are $2.99 and the larger ones are $3.99. I hope they never discontinue them, though it’s hard to imagine needing any more that I already have. I did buy a few more when I bought the cabinet, since I wanted to fill up both shelves. They’re well worth it. The jars I fill with organic foods mostly from the bulk section. I loved Berkeley Bowl for this when I was living in the Bay Area. I’ve yet to find a go-to grocery store here in Portland, but these were all filled with bulk goods from Fred Meyers here which has a surprisingly good organic bulk section!

The cabinet is standing functional for now, though I would love to paint it at some point soon. I’m thinking of painting it a lovely black similar to how Dana at HouseTweaking.com re-did her armoire in her studio. The hardware I might keep or just replace with knobs. I’m not sure yet and I don’t have plans to paint this until a number of other things are checked off my to-do list! For now, I’m just to busy staring at all the non-perishable pantry goods with goo-good eyes.

How do you store your food? Does it affect how you shop? Are you the matching jars/containers type or the everything in the box it came from type?

Home Upgrades, House & Home, House Tour

New Digs in Portland

September 20, 2016January 11, 2017by Laurel1 Comment

Get ready to dive in! I am really excited to jump into my new house in Portland. There are lots of budget and rental friendly upgrades to be made here. The layout of the space is great and allows lots of flexibility. You probably saw the beginnings last week in the video house tour I shared. Here are the first pictures of the space right when we moved in. I’m talking the day after the first night we slept here. Prepare for some crazy, for boxes, and cleaning supplies, and general dirtiness. Get pumped for a brain dump of ideas that may or may not manifest! Deep breath. Ready? Let’s go.

When you come into the house through the front door, there is a decent sized entry area. The space opens up into the hall with a small nook immediately to your left. This entry area gets no natural light unless the door is open. The door on the right in the below image is a coat closet. Which makes me feel fancy! Somewhere to hang coats that’s not my bedroom? How novel! You can see someone put a cheap, tape on mirror on the door. I had begun ripping that down before even snapping this pic. One of the weird things about the house is all of the flooring transitions. The entry is sheet vinyl, the hall is luxury vinyl tile and the closet is carpet. The sheet vinyl is original and a previous tenant decided to rip out the carpet that covered the rest of the main space about 5 years ago, replacing it with the LVT. Apparently he decided to leave carpet in the closet. And to leave the carpet sticking out about 1.5 inches from the closet. Picture me rubbing my temples and sighing. That I need to fix. I’d love to get a carpet to help disguise the sheet vinyl in the entry as well and smooth the flooring transition. There’s a boob light in here and I believe that box on the wall is the doorbell.

The little nook is immediately to the left of the door and is recessed back just a couple of feet. The wall on the right is the wall with the entry door. The back wall of the nook unfortunately has an electrical panel on it. I’m considering a few ways to hide it. I have a large 36″wide mirror I’ll be hanging here which will cover half of the panel. Maybe I’ll paint the wall a deep shade of green or even black so the panel recedes into the darkness hiding it from view. Right now, I’d just love to have some sort of console table to stick the mail on and an ottoman to sit on when I put on my shoes. We don’t wear shoes throughout the rest of the house and I have no talent for balancing on one foot while slipping the other into a boot. So really the lack of an ottoman is a safety hazard. Multiple times I’ve slipped on shoes, walked the half-block to the bus and tied the shoes on my way into work. I’m just classy like that.

Once you come inside the house you’re greeted by a long skinny hallway with lots and lots of doors. The first door on the left is the coat closet, the second door (the pocket door) on the left is a little half bath, and the third door on the left (the bifold doors) is the laundry. On the right is the entry to the garage which has helped to shape this funny architectural foot print. At the far end you can see the slider door to the backyard.

The half bath is a pretty decent size. There’s a nice big window which provides plenty of natural light (something lacking in this home!). The toilet seat has got to go though. I can only take so much faux wood! The sheet vinyl floor has water damage stains which will hopefully disappear under a small rug. The blinds work great though.

The other side of the powder room has a pretty big built-in vanity. Excuse the mop, again we were cleaning everything! The towel ring is well located and I don’t mind the Hollywood lights above the mirror. The vanity top is green laminate that I can definitely make work. A little art and a rug and this room will be pretty much complete.

Further down the hall we have the laundry nook. Three cheers for on site laundry!! Lugging clothes around is not my favorite. The laundry came with a small shelf which I’ll probably replace with two more sturdy ones; this guy is bowing pretty badly at the center. The washing machine is being supported on one side by a stack of cardboard. I’m going to pretend I never noticed that because I don’t want to address that issue. No thank you! This room is convenient to the kitchen though so it’s become a great place to store cleaning supplies.

The kitchen is pretty 1980’s builder basic. It works just fine. The appliances are newer and work great, a lovely benefit. You’ll notice the flooring switches back to sheet vinyl in here as well as in the laundry and powder rooms. It’s a bit crazy! The kitchen is kind of dark since there are no windows. We pretty much always have the lights on when we’re in here. Which is often true for any kitchen, I suppose, as you need lots of light to cook. There are three of the same white boob light in this room. This light repeats in our bedrooms, the bonus room, the hallways, etc. The builder clearly liked it (or it’s pricetag!) a lot.

When you reach the end of the long hall from the front door you look over the dining area and straight out the back slider. Usually we don’t display our handheld vacuum like this, but we pretty much owed it a golden throne after all the cleaning it did on the week we moved it! Those curtains are gone now. They made the room seem a lot darker. Because the back of the house faces east and has a few large leafy trees, the house is pretty dark overall. Optimal natural light inside comes between 10 am and noon… right when I’m never home. Whomp, whomp, whomp. Taking down the dark curtains allowed a lot more light to stream in and really lightened up the space. I’m considering replacing the curtains with white ones on brass rods hung higher and wider than these are, but I’m not completely sold on the idea of white curtains on white walls yet. And yes, I think I’m leaving the walls white since painting once now and again when we move out would be so much work! The white isn’t bad, just… white.

The main living space is actually pretty big, but unfortunately the same tenant who installed the LVT floors decided half of the living space should be a faux wood laminate (Are you drinking every time I mention faux wood laminate on this blog yet? You’ll be drunk soon, I promise!). It looks pretty decent, but it chops the space up. Boy, is the laminate easier to clean than that LVT though! Fewer cracks, smoother surface, my vacuum runs right over it. The living area has a big opening to the kitchen which allows us to chat with guests or each other while we cook. The bar height counter extends about 8 inches which would be barely enough to have people sitting there on stools. The window mirrors the slider doors and gives the space some symmetry.

Once you turn towards the right you can see how all the spaces open up to each other. The closer wall at the end of the kitchen is recessed about 2 feet from the other wall, randomly, making the closer half of the kitchen shorter than the half with the refrigerator. The laminate ends just under half way along that wall, but 1.5 feet to the right of it… it’s very strange. We’ve decided to permanently leave all these boxes here to cover up the transition. Kidding! Kidding! Sort of… Anywho, the third type of flooring on this floor is the carpet on the stairs. It’s original I think… and gross. The landlord is talking about replacing it with laminate down the line.

There’s a window in the stairwell. It faces north and is a bit lower than the half-wall that serves as a railing on the second floor. That half-wall (here on the right) thus blocks a lot of the light from streaming into the bonus room. Which is why the next few photos are so heavily edited!

At the top of the stairs is the bonus room! We have a small counter and another closet! I’m dubbing this closet the craft closet. I can’t wait to fill it with all sorts of paints and canvases and sewing things. The room is pretty big, so – as I said in the video – we plan on putting a futon bed and a desk in here. That huge, flat box is the futon frame. The faux wood laminate wood work capping the half wall is chipped slightly in the corner. Any ideas for hiding that which don’t involve paint?

If we turn towards the left, we get the little hall to my room. There’s another closet on the left which we’re using for linens and camping supplies; to the right is the door to the main bathroom. You can see old shower curtain rod in the foreground, which I removed pretty darn quickly and replaced with one from Target, whose box you can see in this same picture.

The bathroom was pretty basic when we moved in and I immediately removed the rod and replaced it, hanging up the shower curtain from the Berkeley Bungalow in the process. I’m not positive it will get to stay in here though. The gold of the curtain clashes with the blue and red flecked (purple) laminate counters. I’ve also tucked a kitty box by the toilet.

Finally, there’s my bedroom! My room gets a bit more light than the living area since it’s on the second story. You walk in and there are closets to the left side and an off center window on the wall in front of you. Since you see this view from the bonus room and it’s the first thing you see when you walk in the room, I will have to find a new place for the hamper and make this view something yummy instead.

When we first moved in, I slept on the futon mattress until the majority of my belongings came up from California. This part of the room is pretty blank. The vaulted ceiling makes the space seem much larger. It’s really a good sized space. Oh, and yes, that is an upside down clear storage box I used as a nightstand. And yes the futon is just in the middle of the room.

The wall across from what will be the bed wall has all the closets! Yay for tons of closet space! Maybe the hamper will even fit in there if I reorganize a bit. It’s a lot of closet directly across from the bed though, which is not exactly an ideal view (especially considering I’m bad at closing the doors!). The alternative would be to have the bed face the window, with the headboard against the wall where my phone charger is plugged in above. But as much as that view would be great, I much prefer the symmetry underneath the ceiling vault.

Because my roommate’s room is her private space and I won’t be sharing it on the blog, this concludes the house tour! Welcome to the Duplex! I can’t wait to share where we’re at now and all the little transformations I have planned for the future!

Decorating & Finishing Touches, House & Home, Room Checklist

Bungalow Bathroom

September 13, 2016January 11, 2017by LaurelLeave a Comment

So before I talk all about my new home, the Duplex, I want to wrap up the one room I felt looked totally finished at the Berkeley Bungalow. No, it wasn’t my bedroom. It was the bathroom. The room that felt totally me. The room where the art was hung. Oh wait — you don’t remember the art being hung? Let me fill you in.

Remember how the bathroom looked when I first moved in? Gorgeous, but it needed a few finishing touches to bring it to life. Boy do I miss that house. The Duplex needs… let’s just say… a little more work. The Berkeley Bungalow’s bathroom got a shower curtain and plant stand with a peace lily to start.

The space worked. The litter box did the room no favors. Overall it was not a bad start. But let’s take a look at how things were right before I moved out…

Painting the plant stand was the first step towards creating a plan for the room. I decided to embrace the gold I’d accidentally incorporated with the Target shower curtain. I then later switched out the old vinyl shower curtain liners with some healthier, washable polyester ones. I searched for storage and ended up with some clear glass jars. Finally I added some plants and painted some IKEA pots to make the space a little bathroom jungle. The finishing touches involved adding art and a full length mirror!

I switched things up and moved my jewelry into the bedroom, freeing up one corner for yet another plant. Yay! This guy does well in low light and humid conditions. Perfect for a bathroom! The framed art above I bought in Milan in 2013 and popped into an IKEA frame. It’s Gerolamo Induno’s 1862 Forebodings. I really liked the piece in person and bought the print at the museum store. It depicts a girl sitting on a bed starting to either get ready for the day or ready for bed. It seemed fitting for the room where I do just that!

The other side of the room got a full length mirror from IKEA which I really wanted to paint gold (of course!), but never got around to it. A hanging IKEA planter from the towel rack incorporated yet another plant and I added a vintage 1950’s tourism poster of Berlin above the plant stand and towel rack to call this side of the space done!

This room was always bright and sunny. The natural daylight made even the toilet look cute. The plants I put on top might have helped a bit though too.

On the counters, I switched out the wooden soap holder for a red ceramic one I picked up for a few bucks at Target. The red tied into the red on the tub and added some contrast with the glass jars I’d bought at World Market.

The space finally came together and I was sad to leave it. The bathrooms at the Duplex leave much to be desired. But I’ve long since gotten used to the idea that the Berkeley Bungalow might be the nicest house I’ll ever live in. So instead of dwelling on the idea of cleaning my sheet vinyl floors again (do they ever get clean?!), I’ll just day dream of baths in this room. Heck! I’d pay rent just to live in this bathroom!

How’d I do on the list I made for this space? Pretty decent, I think!

~~Find the perfect glass storage jars~~
~~Add a piece of furniture to place a glass of water or a book on when I take a bath~~
~~New shower curtain~~
~~Necklace holder~~
~~Soap dish~~
Moved it into my bedroom ~~Better jewelry storage~~, ~~perhaps building an earring holder??~~
~~Add some plants in small pots on top of the toilet back~~
~~Paint the plant stand gold to go with the shower curtain~~
Somethings aren’t meant to be ~~find a better way to hide the kitty litter box~~
~~Organize the vanity cabinet to better contain everything I hide away down there~~
~~Hang art~~
~~Even more plants?!~~
~~Take so many bubble baths!~~

So, that there’s the end, folks. That’s the last Berkeley Bungalow post. Now we’re in Portland. Home of the endless options for delicious food. I’ll shock you with the comparison of this room to my new bathrooms and start listing ideas of how to spruce those guys up soon! Get ready for some to do lists and painting shenanigans!