apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I have bought roses from Costco as well and mine lasted 2.5 weeks - A bargin and beautiful.

I didn't know how to answer the survey. Now that I've moved out of feeling overwhelmed, and there is light and air around me, I keep coming up with a new project (or two) everyday. And that's on top of what I've already got planned!

It's happened to me, before, during the cure. Has it happened to anyone else?

Alana that is absolutely happening to me! I only planned to do the one room cure and since then I have rearranged furniture in my bedroom and living room AND pared down our bookcase. Also moved my landing strip and hung some new art....so I might as well have done the whole shebang!

Nope, if that happened to you during a one room cure, I'd hate to think what would have happened with "the whole shebang"! Going with the flow, is best, I think.

What I always seem to miss is the beginning of the ebb to the tide, which should be just about now--but hey, those chairs need painting--the walls needs sanding--the floors need......

ack, ...the walls need...
and AT needs an edit button!

My projects multiply as well, Alana. As the cure progresses, I unearth them from our storage!

Things are going well. Today, our bath remodel was helped by an amazing bath sales rep who pointed me towards stylish bath accessories within our price range.

Still a puzzle: Do you need to go with a smaller tile size to successfully tile any shower or bath cutouts, i.e.-- that place to put your shampoo within the joists?

Yes! It can get out of control. Thankfully I have enough sense to stay far FAR away from the kitchen! Although I have found myself looking at tables on CL....oh well. THIS week I am painting the guestroom, hanging the artwork (remember my bird pic? http://flickr.com/photos/lilkidthings/2387468950/in/set-72157603952996189/) and putting the bed together. THEN I still need to finish the side tables and finalize the floorplan.

I also need a long bench cushion for the top of my grandmother's hope chest, but everything I have found is too deep. I may have to resort to making one, but short of that, does anyone know where I could get something fun? IKEA is too far away and Pier One cushions are too big.

wig3000: it seems like you wouldn't NEED smaller tiles, but it might be a nice detail. Good luck!

Anyone else having a hard time loading pages?

Much too slow.

Anyway, we're off for a few days, good luck everyone!

I had the ceiling fan installed in my bedroom yesterday!
It looks great- the perfect size (30") for a tiny room (mine's 8x9). I will post pictures of it this weekend.

I finally got rid of the uncomfortable but beautiful chair that has been sitting in my outbox. That was hard. I set it out on the curb and waved goodbye to it- hopefully somebody else will love it and take care of it.

I also bought privacy window film and plan on installing it in the bathroom this weekend (and removing the hideous mini-blinds!). I had originally planned on also putting up privacy film on the lower half of my kitchen window, but I realized that I won't be able to see my little windowbox if I do that. What to do??
http://flickr.com/photos/68987525@N00/2374082231/in/set-72157604318239539/

I bought some of those plastic ties to better secure the hidden tangle of wires behind my desk- they tend to expose themselves at will & I'd like to prevent that. :-)
I've also been thinking about getting an Airport for my laptop for ages, but will eliminating one chord (of the four I plug into my laptop) really make much difference?

I've also begun planning the menu/theme for my week eight party. I'm having 7 friends over for a May Day party. When I was a kid, we would leave baskets of candy on our neighbors' doorsteps on May 1 (May Day). I've decided instead to give my friend little flower arrangements in place of candy. I've invited them to bring MayBaskets to exchange, too.
I found the cutest (and inexpensive & modern) little brightly-colored pots for the flowers: http://www.containerstore.com/browse/Product.jhtml?CATID=262&PRODID=10018612
Now I'm working out the menu: Bellinis, fruit, an Amy Sedaris cheeseball, and I definitely want to bake a cake! (Maybe that will justify the purchase of a cake stand!) Any great cake recipes?

Lastly, tulips do not last very long. Lame.

Yep, that's my floor plan. I thought I had a brilliant way to rearrange the space and decided at 9 pm last night to give it a whirl. 1.5 hours later, sweaty and exhausted, I realize that the room is, in fact, much better set up in its original arrangement and then put it all back in it's original spot... just so I could sleep that night. I'm thinking now that I won't really be able to make any big changes until I replace some of our furniture pieces and add more shelves to the wall instead of having a freestanding bookcase.

I need to refocus my energy on decluttering and I think that will make the whole space a lot more bearable.

In other news, we bought a new mattress!! It will arrive next week and I cannot wait!

Ok,
so I am behind...technically. I mean, we're supposed to actually paint next week, right? But I'm going to be soaking in some sun in the Virgin Islands all next week (don't hate me--I need it!!) so I went ahead and moved our furniture away from the walls, un-installed the bedside shelves and spackled the resulting holes. I bought some Harmony primer too.
I'm going to try to prime our bedroom before I leave, so that when I come back I can get straight to painting my color--which I've had a sample of on the wall for a week now, and I LOVE it!!
I haven't posted any pictures, unfortunately, but I will get to that later today.
I feel behind cause I haven't actually executed some stuff yet, but I've been planning for all of it--i've finalized a list of purchases to make, and realized that some things, like reupholstering my chair may have to wait (for financial reasons). I've made a budget, etc.
I just have to pull the trigger on a lot of it...when i get back from vacation.
I know I can catch up...just feels like i'm stuck in a holding pattern. I can't exactly order all my furniture, bedding, etc, right before I leave town and I don't have enough time to do my painting before then either...so...
I have a plan of attack for when I return, but for now, its just going to have to seem like I'm not really moving forward.

I slacked off last week as I awaited quotes for my bathroom remodel. I plan to make up for it this weekend, good time for it because my boyfriend is out of town. I hope to purchase most of what is needed to start the actual work. The new toilet (Toto Dual flush) has already arrived.

The bad news is that the quotes were significantly higher than I would have imagined. I guess that I thought that since the bathroom is so small that it wouldn't cost so much. Also, the contractor I am choosing specializes in "Green" so is very careful to recycle whatever can be recycled (which makes me feel a lot better about the demolition). So I will suck it up and pay this premium. The visions of dollar signs are a little frightening.

I'll be making up for the cost in other areas of my life. Welcome to the spring of my thrift

We kinda gone out of order but rest assured there is definitely stuff getting done here. The biggest of those was actually having my studio (studio as in workroom, not studio apartment) photographed, one little sneak peek to be seen here. I am so pleased with the room and the shoot was such fun after the stress of wondering whether I would get it done in time. That shot is the same room as this one from a couple weeks back, and the background there tells all. It is all nice and spacious now, and hopefully I'll be able to share a few more photos soon when I know what is/isn't being used.
In the meantime, everything that came out of that room has been freecycled to local crafty people, and we don't even want to talk about how much stuff that was, from furniture to magazines to a long-ago-replaced sewing machine.

The week ahead involves a lot of painting for us -- the walls of two rooms (thankfully they are small and square) and two pieces of furniture. And thankfully the sun has finally come out here, so now this all seems a little easier now that it really feels like spring cleaning!

Not much progress this week, I'm afraid, although I've kept up with the flowers (not sure why I love having them in the bathroom so much). I have sent an email to the painter to come back and touch up a few things -- nothing major, but hopefully that'll happen soon. My old TV (shown perched on a temporary stand), I'm in a bit of living room limbo. Plan is to buy a smaller flat screen and put it on an existing piece of furniture. I can't wait to get all that space back!

Given that it was technically home office week, I'm a bit behind, but, I'm here this weekend and plan to get a lot done!

Oh, good... I'm glad to hear that others aren't necessarily going in the exact order, but are still getting great things done. I was afraid that I was taking on too much with dueling one-room and deep-treatment cures, but it's working out really well since my husband has taken on the deep-treatment as his own project (though we do much of the cleaning together).

Unfinished projects that linger for months feel like "repairs" that need to be made, so I'm treating them as such. In that spirit, my husband is finishing our rolling bookcase (decluttering books & media relies on that one), I fixed the lid on our kitchen storage bench, and finally hung some prints that were laying around. This week, I'll go around touching up paint where walls and trim were nicked by something.

Color was a big project that we've actually been addressing all along (our place is rather small, so that's do-able)...
We added color to the bathroom:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kakatie/2404167584/in/set-72157604109523110/
And dialed the color down in the bedroom:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kakatie/2368165371/in/set-72157604109523110/

I'm off to IKEA to buy the items from my list for the kitchen (my one-room remedy assignment)... hopefully I'll make it in time for the 99-cent breakfast. Whoo hoo!

My comment was supposed to say "My enormous TV cabinet went off to its new home, leaving me with all of its contents to sort through. I think I'll be able to purge about half or at least put some into storage or find new places for it to go. Until I sell the old TV (shown perched on a temporary stand), I'm in a bit of living room limbo."

I really shouldn't attempt to deal with HTML before coffee.

I'm still working in the office/closet/guestroom. Bought hangers and storage containers from Ikea today for the closet project. But we still have a king-sized bed blocking most of the room....friend will haul it away this weekend. Considering whether to paint the whole room or just the one wall.

Hi! My Cure is totally out of order, and this is my first (and therefore long) post, but I'm happy to report that I'm enjoying the Cure changes in our 2br, 2bath in downtown NYC. Here's why:

Thanks to the Cure I realized why my living room was feeling wrong, wrong, wrong. It was 80% color and 20% neutral (and as we've learned from Maxwell and AT it should be the other way around). The whole space was too busy with color, and too matchy-matchy. So I removed the extremely colorful, patterned 8 x 10 carpet and replaced it with a smaller, round, neutral carpet from the kids' room. More of the wood floor is exposed, so the space looks bigger.

I switched around the (unused/hidden behind the couch to maximize playspace) coffee table and the kids' art table and added an actual - gasp! - living gardenia plant bought from the Flower District. Somehow we've kept this plant alive for weeks!

On the wall in the living room we had a set of 8 very colorful pictures arranged in 2 rows and 4 columns. Yes, they matched every color in the carpet, the throw pillows, and the kitchen stools. I took down 4 of the 8. What a difference.

Now the space is 80% neutral and 20% color. Ahhh. The room is infinitely more relaxing and restful now. It's lovely.

(I'm not sure what to do with the expensive 8x10 carpet - it's now under our bed, and I'm not sure if we should sell it.)

I'd love to share "before" and "after" photos of the living room, but in my enthusiasm to change things I forgot to take "before" photos. I'll see what I can find.

Regarding the landing strip, I moved our Utensilo/ "Wall-All" out of the kids' room (previously my office) onto the wall next to the entry closet in the kitchen/living room space. It's much more useful now as a central place for pens, keys, measuring tape, scissors, hairbrush, thank you notecards, etc., it looks great, and it's very close to the landing strip of shoe baskets and a mail sorter, which gets refined each week.

As for the kids' room ... my 3yo and I took the carpet from the master bedroom, rearranged the furniture (we do this pretty regularly, actually) and decided to order a junior bed conversion kit for her oval Stokke toddler bed. We extended and raised the bed this weekend, and she absolutely loves her roomy big girl bed. She even took a long nap on Saturday, which she hasn't done in ages. She happily filled up a large bag of toys and clothes she doesn't love, to donate to Housing Works or to her school. We agreed to edit down the family photos to only those that tell a story (so that's my next project) and move the store-bought nursery artwork closer to the beds.

For the master bedroom I considered repainting our bedroom's accent wall from mauve to robin's egg blue, to make it more relaxing, and I went so far as contacting a painter and getting color chips, but I've decided to hold off on that project. I posted ads to sell a beautiful but unused Monarch nursery chair, currently in the bedroom, but I haven't gotten any interest off AT, Craigslist or UrbanBaby.

Other basics: I've cleaned out the closets, discarded or donated things, and moved winter stuff down to our small storage locker. Yet somehow all these closets, and now the storage locker, are messy again. Argh. I'll gather more stuff to donate this week. Also, I've got to take another look at the kitchen drawers (and the whole kitchen cure chapter).

I'm thrilled with the 80/20 breakthrough in the living room. I'll review the book and hope to post (more briefly, I promise) on other Cure-inspired changes soon!