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Category: our condo

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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container gardening for the lazy

  • April 15th, 2012
  • 0

For the last few years, every spring Jimmy and I have tried to plant a vegetable garden. We have had varying degrees of success with this. Two years ago, knowing very little about gardening but wanting the Earth Mothery feeling of digging around in the dirt with my hands, we bought a bunch of terra cotta pots, filled them with potting soil, and planted some seeds from the hardware store creatively labeled with names like “EGGPLANT” and “ZUCCHINI.” As our stunted, wispy seedlings grew into stunted, wispy plants, I glanced at the potting soil bag and noticed in big letters [...]

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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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cruelty-free floor: budget friendly diy faux cowhide rug

  • February 7th, 2012
  • 10

Lately I’ve been working so much on the Etsy store, and on the various friends’ weddings I’ve been designing for, that I haven’t paid much attention to the house. Until last night. I arrived back home from a long weekend in Chicago with a carful of IKEA furniture, tingly-numb legs, and a burning desire to finish the alcove project. Specifically, I wanted to finish the rug. If you’ll recall, I wanted to do some kind of faux-pony (fauxny?) or cowhide rug, but obviously not something from a real animal. The look I was going for was this: Of course, as [...]

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new year, tiny space, big plans

  • January 3rd, 2012
  • 1

Sorry for the wait, kids. I’ve been trying to write a post about the myriad projects I put together for Christmas for a week now, and I just cannot for the life of me find the transfer cable for my camera. I know it’s somewhere in the nightmare pit I currently call my office, so as soon as I get it squared away I’ll have the deets on all my family’s gifts. Suffice to say that in the two weeks before Christmas, I crocheted a scarf, made a quilt, decoupaged photos onto fourteen canvases, made four yarn wreaths, infused and [...]

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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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house tour

  • November 6th, 2011
  • 2

I spend a lot of time talking about our house, and you’ve seen it in snippets here and there–our office and bathroom renovations, the porch tented in plastic for spray-painting, the kitchen counter displaying food. But I thought it was high time I showed you the place as a whole. We live in an approximately 800-square-foot condo in central Missouri. It’s a pretty area–our unit is at the back of the complex, so rather than being surrounded by parking lot, it’s surrounded by trees. During the summer, when the bushes outside our porch are in full foliage, you can really [...]

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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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fuzzy focus

  • October 19th, 2011
  • 8

Sometimes I wonder if I have adult-onset ADD or something. I have the hardest time sticking to a single project. I actually think it’s a byproduct of art school, when I had to think about eighty different things at the same time. I’m still in that mindset, except instead of being assigned a million projects, I think of them myself. Yeah. Like that. Even the things that are clearly the most important–like finishing commissions, taking care of the shop, and doing the things (eating, sleeping, maintaining a basic level of hygiene) that keep a person alive–get lost in the jumble [...]

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