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Tagged: diy

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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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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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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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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christmas footprint (bootprint?)

  • November 9th, 2011
  • 1

So I try not to even think about Christmas until after Thanksgiving, because I really like Thanksgiving–lots of food, you hang out with your family, but no pressure to give/receive gifts and not many songs (which are festive and exciting for like a week and then just aggravating). The thing is, due to limited financial resources and a tendency to obsess about things, I usually make most of the presents we give away. Sometimes this backfires (Dad, I PROMISE you I will finish that damn scarf–enjoy it because I’m never making another one), but normally I feel like it lets [...]

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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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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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