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Tagged: home

room inspiration: bright breakfast nook on a budget

  • April 17th, 2012
  • 2

Way back in January, I asked whether you all would prefer the kind of inspiration boards I’d been putting together–without regards to cost–or if it’d be more helpful for you to see some boards done on a tight budget. The budget boards got the most votes, and so I’ve been hard at work putting some together for you. They definitely take more effort; pretty stuff is everywhere, but pretty and cheap stuff is a little more hidden. It totally exists, though! If you can, scour your local thrift stores and garage sales–you can find an incredible number of gems–and if [...]

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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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room inspiration: future bedroom

  • November 5th, 2011
  • 0

Jimmy and I are kinda-sorta house hunting. By “kinda-sorta,” I mean we don’t have a lot of money, we have a lease that isn’t up until July and it’s probably not really time to be looking for a house, but we’ve pretty much decided on moving next year and I’m determined to have a) a “real” house and b) a place we can renovate/do things to without fear of losing a security deposit. Half the fun of getting a new place is daydreaming about how you’ll decorate it (probably more than half, really–signing papers and moving and updating contact info [...]

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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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operation awesome office

  • September 18th, 2011
  • 4

This happened a while back (the weekend before Valentine’s Day this year–I think the aftermath of a blizzard had just melted and I was itching to do something), but I thought I’d share it with you in preparation for a smallish before-and-after project I’ll be writing about later this week. Our office, when we moved in, was a dark little room (fun fact: there are no windows in our condo–only doors, one in each room) with dark green paint and a big closet. Other than putting up a bright yellow pegboard, we basically ignored the place, throwing stuff in there [...]

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