apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

A crazy wonderful story of renewal on the radio . . .

There was this lady flooded into her house in New Orleans. Her (Sterns & Foster) mattress kept her afloat in her house.

For eight days.

During which time she kept it together, and contemplated redecorating! She was a big fan of HGTV. She never liked those formica counters, thought about putting in marble. And hardwood floors.

You gotta hear it - it'll be up on the site pretty soon, or on WNYC-FM Sunday evening, 6p if memory serves. "This Is Not My Beautiful House" is the name of the episode.

"This American Life" last week was even more remarkable, called "After The Flood". It has nothing to do with home decorating, and everything to do with everything else that is important in life. Also streaming on the site.

www.thislife.org

More today -- before work I bought 39[!] yards of fabric for some new curtains and a new cover for my desk chair... I also shifted around some furniture this morning. Slowly, it'll all come together...

Wow, I'm not sure if you guys should keep encouraging me like this - I feel like such a keener 'cause I want to keep posting photos! But...I have to. Here is the final "styled" version of the entrance hall bookcase "console". The raku sculpture was made for me by a friend, but was kind of lost elsewhere in the apartment, so I'm glad to be able to show it nicely:
http://www3.telus.net/bcwomen/doodlebug/entry3.JPG
http://www3.telus.net/bcwomen/doodlebug/entry4.JPG

Mary, what kind of fabric did you get? How many windows are you making curtains for?

P.S.- thanks, Maxwell! :)

Dorianne, thanks for leading me to the Behr website, it is far more useful than the BM site. I loved the option to see one shade lighter/darker/warmer/cooler. I'm still playing with BM colors since they have a store around the corner from me but, I think the site has helped me to hone in on the right shade (fingers crossed.) I'm going to check out your new pictures now.

I currently have a wall of curtains at the end of my studio. Both of the windows in it have those heavy-duty security gates, and right now I have white floor to ceiling curtains that cover the whole wall. I'm adding in two extra layers of white-ish fabric to add a little soft texture. I got a wall's worth of chick-fluff yellow [to add in a little faux sunlight color] and another batch of barely grey. I plan on making the inner curtains and then shredding them into inch-wide ribbons and then layering my current gauzy ones over top. I get a lot of sunlight, and the gates make hard lines on the floor, so I'm hoping these new curtains help me disguise them a little more [and let me sleep in a little longer].

Oh, I'm glad I could help, SG. Which colours are you looking at? I wanna see, too!

A friend was just telling me about a Dutch Boy colour, and when I went to their website to look at it, I was so frustrated that there's no way to find or even browse individual colours. All those paint manufacturers should fire their web advisors!!

Mary, that sounds interesting! I hope you'll share pics when you're done. How are you going to do the shredding? I wonder if you would get bits of threads coming off all the time if you don't hem or serge the edges...though you could pink the edges...

I planned on, you know, just shredding them. I thought I'd make little cuts around an inch apart and then rip all the way up. I'll cut off the major strings, but want the soft ripped selvedges. There will be so many of them -- there's no way I'm hemming the suckers, other than at the top edge...

Tomorrow's the day--the shelves will go up. Nothing too fancy--I got two glass shelves for my bathroom for storage and brackets to hang a shelf in my kitchen that I used above my cabinets in my last apartment. This will be my first shelf-hanging project! I'll take pictures...hopefully they won't be lopsided and I won't run into any wall snafus.

Should I feel guilty posting something utterly frivolous after that last one? While browsing antique shops in California's Central Valley, we found a weird deco dining/desk chair for $35 -- much more my style than the faux-Mission chair it's replacing. The cool part is that it belonged to a major local figure in the area where I grew up.

The chair! http://wendefeller.com/amusement/chair1.jpg
New seat fabric, from trip to Paris: http://wendefeller.com/amusement/chair2.jpg
The chair's story: http://wendefeller.com/amusement/chair3.jpg
The too, too Berkeley-esque chair it replaces: http://www.wendefeller.com/ebayimages/chair/chair%20002.jpg

wende, of course not!
that's what the lady in NOLA was thinking about . . .

Okay, I probably should have known this - and I guess I did, deep down - but you should NOT put something precious and/or fragile in your entrance hall after you redo it.

Yep, I broke my raku sculpture. I knocked the bookcase. The sculpture fell. It shattered. I sat on the floor, holding the pieces and crying. *smacks own head repeatedly*

I have been trying to repair it. I'll have to fill in some spots with...some kind of filler. So does anyone know if there exists craft paint that resembles raku?

Dorianne, don't think of it as foolishly breaking the sculpture -- think of it as beating the cat at his/her own game.

There is craft paint to resemble anything on earth, though I know mostly about acrylic paint, and I'm not sure it works on pottery.

"...think of it as beating the cat at his/her own game."

LOL! Thanks, wende, I needed that!

I found this link on the HGTV website http://snipurl.com/hsjv - but it's for making glass look like raku, so who knows? *pouts childishly*

I realized the apartment below mine and the one next to it are empty for now so when I got the urge to move furniture late Friday night I went for it. Granted, Saturday required a muscle relaxer and the day in bed propped with lots of pillows, but the layout in my teeny place is much nicer now. I started just wanted to move stuff away from the hugh baseboard heater to prep for the cooler weather but it kind of came together ina nice way - I even found space for my giant retro lamp and an area to "hide" my computer and peripherals when not in use - yea!

I still need to make a slip cover for the sofa, but now I'm also considering something for the space in front of it. I can't afford a nice area rug right now and am wondering if I could get some heavy upholstery fabric (on the flat fold sale table) and rig up a rug-like substitute (it will sit atop a tan-ish low pile carpet that is all over most of the apartment). Has anyone dones similar? Any suggestions?

Thanks!
Libby

It's been a while since I raku-fired anything. OK, to be exact, 20 years. That was in college. But it seems to me that the look of raku is kind of a smoky look, as if it was in a house that caught fire.

But seems like some of the actual glazes on my pieces were kind of iridescent, and then this firing made them look glassy, but the unglazed portions were very, very matte.

So, for the parts that are matte, I would think that just hitting it with a squirt of matte black spray paint my get about the right look.

Apologies for the multiple typos and hideous grammar in my previous post. I think my brain and typing fingers have Monday-itis. ;^ )

Shelves went up in the bathroom...no pic yet, but I was mighty proud of hanging my first shelves and that they look straight and level. I have to come up with a better solution for the kitchen shelf...the one I had was too big for where I wanted to put it.

Bummer about your sculpture, Dorianne! I have a vase like that that I love...I've personally never been successful with glue, other than for paper, but that's me.

Wende,

Your new chair is stunning and the fabric is lovely.
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I've been working on my mosaic on the front walkway. I didn't realize we're supposed to post the URL to the work, and I don't have a URL to post it to - so I sent pictures directly to Maxwell if he's interested in posting my work in progress. Will work more on it tonight, but there isn't a chance in hell that it will be finished by the end of the month.

Libby (9/19/2005)
my very good friend had that same idea. the carpet was carpenter beige-y. It was a rental so she was unsure how she could fix it up.

She bought thick duck canvas. gesso ,water color tempora paints,and some fave designs she'd collected from mags.
One has to treatthe canvas with this special
sizing type of stuff. let it dry. Mix gesso and
apply to the stiffened canvas. she then worked out her designset-up(very spontaneous) and went to work.
When it was done she mitred the corners and turned up a hem under all the way around.
It must dry and sort of cure (so it won't crack.)

She set up her glass coffee table in front of the couchmand placed the dry canvas under the glass table.
It added so much.she had done sort
of seablue and daffodil yellow design,all impressionistic.
let me say she is not an artist,she is a pediatric nurse. The canvas looks great and is just what the boring carpet needed. A final coat of sealer was needed in case some thing was spilled on it.
Very satifying project,and it gets lots of compliments.
on it.I would suggest if the erzatz carpet is to be walked on ,it needs rubber grabbers on the underside to keep the carpet in one place ( safety issue!)

Good luck,
Shan