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Category: before & after

the rat mansion: unveiled

  • August 3rd, 2012
  • 2

Whew! I promised in my last post that I would share a lot of goodies about the rats’ new cage when it was finished, and finally, after a month of work, it is. Like many of my projects, I thought it would be a quicker and easier process than it was, but I’m really pleased with the result–and more importantly, so are Ari and Vetty. Their old cage was perfectly nice, but not ideal–it never really looked like it belonged in our living room, they scattered food and bedding all over the floor, and we had to hide all their [...]

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oh, the life of a cat: diy outdoor lounge for a spoiled beast

  • June 11th, 2012
  • 0

How about this weather, Midwest? It’s been gorgeous, although the drought has put a damper on things a bit (fortunately it gave us a nice big storm today). Our garden has been soaking up the summer sun and giving us outrageous amounts of zucchini, a few handfuls of edamame, a nice crop of watermelon radishes, countless herbs, and around 20 not-yet-ripe-but-starting-to-look-delicious tomatoes. Between the garden’s generous production and our Bounty Box subscription (a local grocer, the Root Cellar, provides us with a big box of local and seasonal produce every week), we haven’t needed much else in the way of [...]

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spray, girl, spray: paint makes everything better

  • February 23rd, 2012
  • 1

(The title of this post is for my dear friend Emily, who greets me with a Tila Tequila-ish “hey girl heyyyyyy” now and then.) I’ve been feeling the DIY urge pretty strongly lately, but at the moment I don’t have much to apply it to. February is a very, very slow month for me on Etsy, historically, so our budget has been pretty tight; thus, projects like building a DVD rack for the alcove or re-renovating the master bathroom have been put temporarily on hold. For the moment, I’m limited to projects that are either cheap or free. Fortunately, I [...]

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i can’t think of a pun on “chair”

  • November 29th, 2011
  • 1

Finally, finally, after hours of watching my MacBook search through unallocated space (which falls just below watching grass grow and just above watching Jersey Shore on my scale of exciting things to do) I managed to recover the photos of the chair redo that I so foolishly deleted last time. After looking at the handful of pictures my scattered brain remembered to take, I’m not sure those hours were very well-spent, but eh. They’re here. There are myriad tutorials out there on how to do a simple reupholstery job like this one; you can probably find much, much better instructions [...]

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don’t judge a vase by its color

  • November 3rd, 2011
  • 0

The other day I was absolutely dying to do some kind of little DIY project. Actually, I wanted to do the kind of thing where you put on an entire season of a TV show, neglect your husband/job/pets/bodily functions, and hot-glue coffee filters to a wreath for 5 hours, but I’ve got a full dance card this week and no time. So while Jimmy and I were at Goodwill dropping off a pile of clothes, I saw this little bud vase. It was glazed a shade of peachy-mauve straight off the set of Golden Girls, but I liked the shape [...]

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race to the (faux) finish

  • October 18th, 2011
  • 4

My dears. I’ve been a bad blogger. I promise, promise, a thousand times promise I will not become one of those blogs where every other post is an apology for not posting enough. I swear. I pinky swear. I’m going to start stockpiling posts about every interesting thing I can think of so I’ve always got something for you lovely folks to read. With that being said…today’s is a good one. I know you all love a nice long before & after (as do I). This one was completed in traditional Kate Moore Half-Baked Whirlwind Fashion™, but it was an [...]

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it started with plastic drawers

  • September 29th, 2011
  • 11

I’m going to go ahead and blame my gorgeous friend/former roommate/supermodelish object of envy Maha for this one. See, upon seeing the vast mountain of disarray that was my makeup collection, she suggested that I sort everything into a set of plastic drawers so I could keep track of what I had and find it easily. And when this girl gives you beauty advice–however tangentially related to actual beauty it is–you take it:  So off I scurried to Target and returned with a set of pretty standard-issue plastic drawers. I sorted my makeup, dutifully cleaned all my makeup bags out, [...]

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before & after: new old filing cabinet

  • September 19th, 2011
  • 11

After Jimmy and I remodeled our office earlier this year, things were looking pretty good…except our storage situation. All the important stuff we had to keep track of (tax papers, medical records, ideas for bestselling novels written on bar napkins) was sort of scattered around: some in an accordion file, some in a really cute Liberty of London file box, and some in a horrible plastic box from Wal-Mart. Something clearly had to be done, but I dragged my feet for months because the prospects were so grim. We wanted 4 drawers and didn’t have much money to spend, which [...]

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