Camera still broken...

....lots of things afoot though. We bought a couch this morning and I can't wait to get it home this weekend. Its vintage, and a bit beat up, but it was in our price range, it has really nice lines, I like the fabric (for now) and somewhere down the line I'll want to get it reupholstered, rather than toss it.



In the picture it looks a little yellow/tan. It is much more of a mustard/brown kind of color......

We felt like since we finally had a piece of furniture baby boy really needed a chair of his own, so on an impulse we bought him this chair:
the Kapsule chair from OFFI (you can link for a better photo). I'm not sure about it, but I think it's cute, and I like the hole in the back for moving it around/storage. Baby boy didn't actually sit in it today, but he did climb on it, stand on it, and but block in to it...so it definitely wasn't a bust.

Welcome to Ludi, born yesterday. Congrats Lisa and Robert!!!!

No Camera, Craigslist: Yellow

My camera didn't start working again.....I've been dying to take pictures of things, (my adorable son) but can't. Luckily this Saturday is my birthday, so guess what my gift will be?

In the meantime I found more inspiration via Craigslist. It is hard to miss the current blogger obsession with yellow, so here is my own homage to this sunny hue:




I know I already posted the ebay wallpaper, but it went so well with the yellow theme.....
The sofa isn't exactly yellow, but the hue went so nicely I couldn't resist adding it.
In fact if you were to combine the barrister bookcase, the sofa, and the armless mustard chair, you would have a nice beginning to a very beautiful living room, (that would go very well with the dining room I put together last post)

I can't find the link for the yellow table, but it was for sale in LIC.
I'm not posting the link for the egg chair, because I am trying to buy it.....
Barrister Bookcase
Armless Mustard Chair
Vintage Sofa
Swivel Chair

Virtual Fleamarket/Dining Room or Entryway Design

Vintage chrome and marble dining table
2 Antique chairs with sunburst pattern seats
1960s Style Hanging Lamp
Vintage Bookshelf
Vintage Schumacher Wallpaper

Plus these curtains from Anthropologie.

So funny story...I couldn't find my camera yesterday, I finally found it today. However, I discovered it in a zippered pocket of my son's bag after a yogurt exploded and I rinsed it out. Hopefully it will dry out and work....we'll see. So my plans to post pictures of my living room in progress with sofas and curtains I am thinking about was foiled. I did finish (mostly) painting my entryway, and started to assemble a collage of my collection of postcards. It is the first "art" I have hung up and it really made me start to feel like this might be a home for us.

Anyway, all of that aside I was surfing craigslist for, well for anything really because I have hardly any furniture for this apartment. I found this amazing dining table (pictured above) and was really trying to figure out if I should get rid of my little Paul McCobb dining chairs I've had forever (they just wouldn't work with the table) Good thing I am pretty broke right now, because it was really a moot point, I can't afford the table. Instead I made a little imaginary dining room, all from Craigslists finds, some vintage wallpaper off ebay (meant to line the back of the rather dusty looking, but awesome vintage shelf) and some sale curtains from Anthropologie (I can't figure out how to post pictures from their website so I just have a link) So, if anyone were to read my blog, I designed a nice little entryway (or add some chairs and it could be a dining room) for them.

PS The whole thing costs less than $500.

My Living Room Before

So today the baby was sick and slept almost all day, in fact after waking up for about an hour he went back to sleep. I could have gotten a lot of stuff done on the house, but instead I figured out how to make a photo montage on Photoshop. Which, since I am shockingly computer illiterate, ended up taking me most of the day. I was going to take pictures of the living room as it currently looks, and post pictures of a sofa and curtains I think I want, but instead here is the montage (8 hours in the making) of one side of my living room before we moved in and I started working on the house.

MUST HAVE THESE RUGS

If I don't get one of these rugs from brocade home I think I might die, that's how much I want one. Should I get a runner for my entry way, a 5 x 8 for my work room/dining room/library (or it will be anyway)???? What if I got both, too much? (also know as could I afford it?) The entryway is almost painted and the bathroom just needs wallpaper (well, and a mirror, and some shelves, and a toilet paper holder, and some hooks, but close) When they are done I can look at them and decide if the rug should go there.

bathroom photos (forgot)

Shoes and Bathroom Floors

Since I only have a few minutes before the kid starts freaking out and I have to get to work I thought I would do a quick double post. So baby boy almost out grew his last pair of shoes, and then threw one in the garbage can (we think) and no one noticed and then had only snow shoes. So one day, in desperate need of shodding for my son we took a trek over to Manhattan Ave, where I found an odd little Polish shoe store with a ton of cute cheap shoes. I bought 2 pairs for $30, which is great considering his last pair cost $50 on the Upper West Side. (I really do try to frequent local businesses and thrift shops rather than super stores, though it does sometimes cost more. Or maybe not, I think I buy a lot less. Everytime I go to Target I come out with 3 bags of stuff and have spent $100, and I went in to check out their newest home goods line and buy some Method dish detergent) Back to the shoes, I love them.....even their awesome packaging. Baby boy loves them to, he keeps bringing them to me and making me put them on. Then he runs around the house in his diaper and new shoes growling. (Yes, I let my child wear nothing but a diaper, sometimes not even that, and he loves to growl, it is his main form of communication these days.)

As for my bathroom floors, I will let the pictures illustrate my frustration. (just imagine the smell of cat pee soaked into a few layers of glue that some how appears to be going bad) I am not sure that I won't get into trouble for pulling up the tile, but it started out innocently enough. One tile was loose and I pulled it up to see if I could locate the odd, unpleasant smell that no amount of cleaning seemed to be getting rid of. Pulling up that tile caused the one next to it to come loose, and revealed the full force of the smell. So then I tried removing just the next layer below and the top layer which worked sort of, until I got to the edge and another layer pulled up with the glue from the layer on top. It was linolium and had gotten so brittle it was breaking apart, so now I am 4 layers down and half-way through the bathroom, because of course the first few tiles were just itching to come up, tempting me into a tile peeling frenzy. However the remaining tiles seem intent upon staying attached.

Son freaking out, gotta go.

475 Kent

So I haven't been posting very much, just started a new job, after traveling for almost a month and after moving.....I had friends who lived at 475 Kent, the building that just got evicted in Williamsburg. Tonight was the first night I really sat down and read all the press and buzz in the blogosphere about the evictions and I am shocked at the vile, hateful, comments and reporting.

New York is not always the easiest place to make it, we all do what we have to and one of the things I have always loved about New Yorkers is their homes. Rich, poor, artist, wall street broker, we all live on top of each other. Space is the biggest premium. I have been in places where people pay thousands of dollars per month and spent millions decorating and they still lack much of the luxury I grew up in because they lack space. I have also been in tiny studios, broken down tenements, illegal squats (in the days before they cleared them all out of alphabet city and turned it into a hip neighborhood), upper-west side pre-war classics. People make their homes here, rent or own, they find their corner and they claim it. When I go home to Kentucky no one ever understands why I would spend money on a rental, paint it, love it, stay for years....to understand you have to understand New York.

Part of me watches the rise of the condo with interest, the designer in me (though most of this is a lot of poorly built, poorly designed shit with a veneer of trendy modernism that attracts me in spite of myself) wants to see what happens, but then I know that what is really interesting to me lays not in destruction and reconstruction, but true development, which I believe should embrace the community. Otherwise we are just building some homogeneous over-developed monolith where everybody has the same Design Within Reach "licensed" reproduction Mies sofa, at the expense of our communities and our individuality.

I read a thread of comments accusing the parents who lived at 475 Kent of being irresponsible for raising their children in such a building...what the fuck???? What right do we have to judge each other. I believe that good design should be design that doesn't make our children sick....should I judge you for buying a condo in a brand new building where I know that the glue they used to lay-down your new hardwood floors, and the sealer they used on them all produce toxic gas that can give your child asthma? I just moved into an old Victorian and my child (though I hate to say this) is in more danger from fire because of the nature of the wood frame construction and old wiring than any child at 475 Kent, a concrete warehouse building, ever was or could be. Do you want to judge me for putting my child in danger?

475 Kent was an amazing community, to say people broke the law and got what they deserved is so nonconstructive. New York is a lawless place in many ways, and the laws about buildings, codes, residential, commercial are a myriad maze of both the arcane and the necessary, which have waxed and waned based on developers greed for almost two centuries now. It's New York, we find our corner and we claim it, we make our homes. No one, especially not rent-paying, tax-paying, members of our community deserve to be thrown out of their homes in the middle of a cold night. Regardless of where you fall on the political side of this issue, as members of a community we should all be there for each other as humans, as fellow New Yorkers, as fellow Brooklynites, to give at least a few words of sympathy to our neighbors.

I'm sorry if this is a bit rambling and disjointed, but I was really upset by a lot of the ignorance and cruelty I just read.

Places in my neighborhood: Cafe Grumpy's

So I am a coffee fiend, particularily esspresso. I gave it up mostly when I got pregnant, but I just couldn't give up my morning fix. One of my first missions when moving to Greenpoint was to find coffee!!!!!! Yes I could make it at home, save myself money, but the walk to get coffee is part of my morning ritual. I've been doing it almost every morning for more than 10 years now, and without it I feel like my days don't go quite right.
My wonderful downstairs neighbor pointed me to Cafe Grumpy, and I love it. It's not exactly on the corner (it's a ten minute walk, brisk, nice) but I don't mind, their espresso is strong, it reminds me of the coffee from Heine Brother's in my hometown, Louisville. The baby likes it too, and the art is nice, interesting, I want to buy some.

Bathroom: Before (sort-of)

So in typical me fashion I started the bathroom 2 days before the baby and I left for New Orleans and, of course, could not finish it. So we came back yesterday to a bit of a mess, but hopefully I can finish it this weekend. I also finally emptied out my camera and realized I had not taken before pictures of the bathroom--though I had a gazillion of the rest of the apartment. So these are pictures about halfway through the process, i.e. after a coat of primer. half of a first coat, some spackle and caulk, removing the broken medicine cabinet, and cleaning up the mold left by the previous tenants. Your not getting the really dirty and yellowing color of the 80s drop ceiling, but please note the hideous floor-tile, the crumbling tub surround, and the florescent light (which does not work, it just flickers, there is an electrician coming to fix that.) The walls are actually 1970s wood paneling, with wallpaper on the bottom, all of which has been painted several times (probably an improvement over the original.) I would love to gut this and start over, but alas it is a rental and my little renovating heart will have to live with some paint and wallpaper magic....I might have to replace the sink down the road though. I could live with the peeling enamel, or the crumbling pressboard cabinet held closed by a screw, or the fact that it is only 30" high (or as my husband calls it "dick-height") but all 3 is just beyond my ability to overlook. Besides I really want to try this grey-water flush system, (thanks materialicio.us) However, such an ambitious (and expensive) project will have to wait until I am at least done with the painting and have some bookshelves.
We are leaving again on Tuesday for a 3 state holiday tour; hopefully I can finish the painting at least and post some more photos.

Empty Apartment

We are finally out of my apartment. These are pictures of what, empty at least, looks like such a huge space. I left behind some things for my subletter. It is her first apartment in New York; I hope she loves it. I worked so hard on the space, I've redesigned it so many times for different times in my life. There it is, sad and lonely, with empty shelves, the shelves that were the first thing I ever built by myself, and the beautiful Osbourne & Little wallpaper that I craved, but then found in every decorating magazine, after I hung it.....Well it is done, and it is silly to be so maudlin about an apartment I never really loved anyway.
I'll post the before pictures of my new apartment soon....I don't really know exactly where I am going with this blog, but I think I want it to be about discovering my new neighborhood, and about creating a home for my family. I'm off to paint the really gross bathroom...hopefully I can get a coat on the walls before the baby wakes up.

Paint on the Walls...finally

I finally finished painting a room!!!!
My husband and son are asleep, and I am so exhausted I can barely see straight, but after a rather horrendous week, culminating in an ER visit last night to reattach the baby's pinky finger (a story I don't have the energy for right now) I just couldn't go to bed without finishing something!!!
Tomorrow I'll clean-up and begin to notice touch-ups that are needed and all the little imperfections, but for tonight I just want to exhault in the finished project.

New Place, New Life?

After nearly 15 years as Manhattanites, my boyfriend and I are taking our 14 month old son, 2 cats, and all of our possessions to Brooklyn. Through a friend we have rented a floor-through apartment on the top floor of an old Victorian in Greenpoint. The apartment is a bit run down, but that's just how I like them. If it were too pristine I wouldn't know what to do with myself. I'm getting ready to start painting, and then, if all goes well, we should be sleeping there by the end of next week.
After spending the last year and a half squished into my old 380 sq ft, 5th-floor walk-up I am overjoyed at the thought of 1000+/- glorious square-feet, but still it gives me pause. This is a huge change and I'm actually giving up my apartment to make it. My apartment is not exactly beloved, but it is the dependable, steady friend that I can always count on to be there. I found it, 9 years ago, after a break-up when I desperately needed a place. It has its problems (shower in the kitchen, floors so beat-up that I have used duct-tape to close the gaps) but it has a spacious living room, flooded with light, and in Manhattan where space and light barely exist for under $3000/month I've always been grateful. It is also where we brought our son, his first home. Right now I see all of the problems with the place, but I know years into our future it will always hold a rosy glow of perfection in my memory, forever seen through the lens of happiness that our baby has brought us. Even if he has to walk in a 10 foot circle this apartment is where he took his first steps, staggering from his father to me, just a few steps at first, and then, so suddenly, from room to room, as if he had always known how.
I know that holding on to this place would be ridiculously sentimental, but part of me is terrified. Will this new place be a home, when I am in need will it be there, patiently waiting for me, welcoming me, promising that in this city, where sometimes you get your ass-kicked so hard just trying to make it, I will always have shelter?