The Latest: Jul 2016

Sometimes, you’ve just got to take a chance. When Pati’s sister offered her a large and somewhat underwhelming dresser, she was on the fence. Pati decided to go for it, and with some smartly selected paint, turned this dresser into a gorgeous credenza. From Pati: My sister bought this on our local Facebook classifieds. She decided while moving, she no longer had room for it. She offered it to me and I was a bit undecided. Not only was it heavy, it needed some work.

Welcome to The Stacked Barn project where I lead you through a year-long odyssey that I’ve never been on before: the building of a new house. I’m going to show you how my new home gets built – step by step. This is Chapter Three. I’ve always loved my old house and didn’t want to change the layout too much, but I definitely wanted to use my design chops to figure out how to make it work EVEN better.

It’s almost hard to believe that this is the same room! Becki decided to make the most of the room’s gorgeous natural light and create a boldly white and bright space. Yes—they removed the stairs! As Becki states on her blog, this was an additional staircase, and really, “who needs two sets of stairs four feet apart from each other?

In their original states, a white pendant lamp and an unframed mirror are blank canvases for creativity. Add the beauty of natural woven fibers and some hits of eye-catching color, and you have a sunny lamp that will brighten any room and a mirror that will turn heads. Put these two DIY ideas on your summer project list so you can enjoy the results all year long.

Cate’s thrift store find was certainly interesting, if a little clunky. After pulling out the pieces she needed for another project, Cate got inventive and the results are pretty charming! From Cate: I grabbed this quirky (and rather large) mid-century modern table lamp from my local thrift store with plans to harvest the brass for another lighting project. After taking the whole thing apart, I was left with some beautiful turned-wood pieces that I couldn’t let go to waste.

Amy’s bathroom was suffering from over-matching-syndrome. It was basically the bathroom equivalent of having your dress match your purse, shoes, scrunchie, lipstick and phone case. With some lucky finds and a lot of work Amy was able to create a calm and cool bathroom, with just the right amount of color. From Amy: My home is a 100 years old, and while the main floor and bedrooms had been recently renovated, the main bathroom hadn’t been touched in decades and was… pink.

If the summer’s got you in the mood to lanyard it up and tie dye everything you own, we say go for it. Here are 15 camp kid blasts from the pasts, perfect for your current, grownup home. This is project that requires a kit, though I think you could probably source the materials yourself at a well-stocked fabric/notions shop. The adjustable closure means you can take them off easily, a huge improvement on the ones we wore all summer until they got all ratty and gross.

Kari found herself facing a familiar design foe, the too large white wall. She eventually landed on an ingenuous solution that added interest to the wall without sacrificing any of the cool. From Kari: When we moved into our house last year, it was basically move in ready but we had a large, white wall in our living room and we had no idea what to do with it.

Laura had been living in her two-bedroom co-op in Brooklyn’s Windsor Terrace for five years before she finally decided to take the plunge and renovate her kitchen. While her cabinets were still in decent shape, the linoleum floor was not: it “only looked serviceable in the five minutes after it was mopped.” And the original 1960s oven, while charming, was clearly due for an upgrade.

I’m a huge fan of the concrete and cement planter trend that’s been popping up on DIY blogs for a while now—but while painting the dull gray surface of standard concrete works, I knew there had to be a cooler way of coloring these little plant homes. After some research and hands-on testing, it turns out that the trick is starting with white concrete and stirring in powdered pigments. From there, the sky’s the limit. Marble them, create an ombre stack, go two-tone.