Just a girl with a hammer

Tag: decor

  • How to make your own French-Belgian linen drapes

    How to make your own French-Belgian linen drapes

    Well, the curtains are done.

    Before

    If you’d like to make your own version of CB2’s French-Belgian linen panels you just have to follow a few easy steps.

    First, fall in love with an expensive fabric. The hallmark of a good sewing project is thinking you’re going to save money by making it yourself, then spending a TON of money and wondering if you should have hired child laborers instead (kids with ADD can sew a straighter seam than me). I chose a Tencel “linen-look” fabric that drapes beautifully and can be dyed.

    Next, cut off eight foot lengths from your bolt of fabric. Don’t vacuum or swiffer the floors first. You want the fabric to catch as much dust and hair as possible. Ideally you should be muttering, “Oh my god, what is wrong with me?” every couple of minutes.

    Starch and iron all your edges. The rolled hem foot on the sewing machine is a bitch to use and if all the stars are not aligned correctly everything will go to hell and you’ll be ripping out stitches for hours. A crisp fabric really helps in this case. Practice using your rolled hem foot until you feel confident using it. I bought a smaller piece of my fabric and sewed the edge, cut it off, then sewed it again and again and again, for what seemed like forever.

    Start sewing on your real fabric. So far so good.

    Oh my god, what is wrong with me? Son of a . . . bitch . . . shit. I hate the rolled hem foot.

    Rip out the seams and redo it when this happens. Start to wonder if it wouldn’t be faster to use a regular foot, even with all the pressing you’d need to do. Run your finished panels through the washing machine before hemming the bottom, just in case they shrink (pros do this before they ever start sewing but I have issues). Notice that a lot of your seams now look like hell when they seemed just fine pre-washing.

    What is wrong with with my rolled hem foot? Blerg.

    Spend an exorbitant amount of time at JC Penney (sorry, JCP) trying to special order the stupid corner bracket for your curtain rods. They have a new system and the clerk is 1000 years old (but nice! so nice!). Pull up the part on your phone and show her, as you realize that you could’ve just ordered online, in your pajamas no less, and saved everyone the headache.

    Wait for freaking EVER for your hardware to arrive. Learn that JC Penney screwed up charging your gift card twice, so your order never shipped. Also, they processed the order under the name “Haether.”

    Hem your panels. You’d think by this point you could reasonably sew with your rolled hem foot but YOU ARE WRONG. Decide that the lack of overhead light in the living room is probably a good thing.

    Hang up your panels with simple clip rings and realize that you can’t really see the shitty hems, so maybe everything’s gonna be okay. And you know what? They do vaguely resemble the inspiration panels.

    Congrats! When they are closed they look like you spent a lot of time and money to hang white bedsheets.

    Also, you screwed up the length.

    So. Greg thinks they need some color and I’m worried about the sun bleaching any color we put in them, which is why I wanted white curtains in the first place. We’re going to live with them for a while and I’m going to get more Ikea Enje blinds so I can get rid of the current situation:

    This attractive option was installed by the house stager from my reveal. She was *so* worried I’d peek at the room that she posted signs everywhere and glued (OH, SO MUCH GLUE) those awful looking blind inserts into the window casing.

    And then she emailed me, admonishing over and over not to peek. My friend told me I should peek, just to spite her, but I am a rule follower. I didn’t peek. And I didn’t remove those god-awful blinds until now.

    I have a couple of options now. The first, to dye the curtains navy. We have a lot of blue in the room currently.

    Second: dip dye the bottoms dark blue. The blue wouldn’t bleach out because it would fall below the window. This is on-trend right now but it will eventually go out of style. Of course, if that happens I can just dye them navy at that point.
    It might look something like this.
    Or this.
    So I guess the last step in making these panels is crippling self-doubt. Tada! Any opinions are greatly appreciated.
  • I have expensive taste

    I have expensive taste

    I feel like my house reflects me as a person, in that I clean up okay but I’m always lacking a bit of polish. I’ll get all dressed up for work and notice that my shoes need to be polished or that I have threads hanging off of my crappy old purse. My house is lacking in finishing details like window treatments and area rugs. 
    You know why? Those things are freaking expensive. It doesn’t help that I always fall in love with the expensive ones. But it makes me feel like I’m pretending as an adult to have bare floors. I may be 35 and own a house but nobody’s buying it because we don’t have a rug in the bedroom.
    Though someone did call me “ma’am” the other day and I died a little inside.

    Every year, like clockwork, my focus turns from gardening to the interior of the house. Right now I’m obsessed with rug hunting. We have two area rugs in the house, one in the living room:

    And the shitty indoor/outdoor rug from my reveal, which now lives in the basement:

    I found the perfect rug for our bedroom, for the low, low price of $1685 at Schoolhouse Electric. It’s soft, it’s not made of polypropylene, and it’s not a trendy style that I’ll hate in two years. It’s so pretty. 
    Image: Walton handwoven llama rug from Schoolhouse Electric
    Come ON, that thing is sexy! And it would look great in our bedroom! (And maybe I’d throw one of those army blankets across the end of the bed. And now that I’m staring at this picture I want to swap out those nightstands. And the lamps. Hmm.) Someone help me convince Greg that we should buy this, should it ever go on sale.
    Or maybe I’ll keep the heat off in the morning this winter and he’ll convince himself.
  • Curtain prototype is done

    Curtain prototype is done

    Last year I found the perfect mid-century pinch-pleat draperies at JC Penney. Pam at Retro Renovation said her readers found them to be a good source. At Christmas my parents gave me a gift certificate to JC Penney for so I could buy some . . . and JCP immediately stopped producing the style/color/length I needed.

    Image from Retro Renovation

    So I’ve been buying (and returning) curtains left and right, trying to find something I liked. Then I saw this post on Emily Henderson’s site about where to find cheap but good curtains. I liked these “French-Belgian linen panels,” but at $60 a pop I’d need to spend $600 just in the living room.

    I am so sorry for these terrible photos. Do you know how hard it is to photograph a window with natural light streaming through? I picked up some “linen-look” tencel fabric, which is dyable, and used a rolled hem foot to zip a 3mm hem around all four sides. The real deal will be a floor-length panel with a more substantial curtain rod.

    I have an Ikea Enje blind behind it, which is wonderful during the day but it provides zero privacy at night. I wonder if all the people who have installed Enjes in their house realize this? Wait for the sun to go down, turn on your lights, then step outside and see your life on display.

    So now I start the laborious process of doing the prep work for a bunch of panels. The fabric is so thin and malleable that it has to be starched and ironed (and any stray threads trimmed) before running it through the rolled hem foot on my sewing machine. My hope is to get one panel prepped after work each night, then sew like crazy this weekend and get them hung. I figure that gives JC Penney enough time to magically start producing the pinch-pleat draperies I wanted in the first place.

  • Readying for guests

    Readying for guests

    My two oldest girlfriends are coming into town this weekend so I’ve been prepping the guest room for their arrival. I’ve been googling “guest room essentials” which turned up some good tips (Kleenex!), as well as some weird ones (“an orange or an apple”).

    As an aside, I’ve shared a bed with all of my friends at some point, male or female. We take trips together so I know exactly who snores, who hogs the blankets, and who will spoon you accidentally. Greg was really confused about how my two friends were going to deal with the one-bed situation.

    “So wait, they’re going to sleep together?”
    “Yes. Why is this weird?”
    “I don’t share beds with my friends. How will that even work?”
    “You’ve never shared a bed with a platonic friend? I imagine one will sleep on the left, and the other on the right. It’s a queen sized bed and they are both petite. It should work.”

    And then Greg gave me one of those “women are such a mystery” looks and I thought, “It’s a good thing you’re cute because you sure can be weird sometimes.”

    Now that we had that sorted out, I just had to figure out where to put the apple or orange. In other essentials news, I’ve got two ottomans, which work as luggage stands and can hold towels. Or I guess they could sit on them.

    I cleared out some space in the closet (extra blankets in there) and hung some wooden hangers. All of the online guides were very specific that the hangers must be wood. Joan Crawford, your legacy is undeniable.

    I hung these sweet bird hooks that Bill gave me. They have very strong magnets under their chins that can hold keys or anything metal. Their beaks can hold mail or paper reminders. Or you can just hang a wet towel over them.

    All of the online guides were like, “A robe! How about a robe? Have you thought about a robe?” I own five robes, one of which I spent a hot week in the summer sewing myself, and I never ever use any of them. But okay, fine, I’ll give them robes.

    I’ve got a box of Kleenex (note to self: buy a better looking square box), an iPhone charger, and an alarm clock.

    Bottled water and two glasses. That’s a real plate that looks like a paper plate, another great gift from Bill. I want them to be hydrated while they sleep together like cretins.

    I dusted our packed bookshelves. They feature my signed picture of Stephen Colbert and the “no hamburgers” sign from the library where I used to work. You know why we had those? Because someone left a hamburger in the stacks one day. College students are animals.

    And I hung the dragon doodle that Bill created for our last Chinese New Year celebration. None of the online guides mentioned dragons, but I’m sure they meant to.

    I doubled up and hung the dragon calendar. Nothing says “luxurious spa-like experience” like dragons. Bill also gave me this. Don’t you wish you were friends with Bill? He gives the best presents and he’ll help you replace the wax ring on your toilet. He also won’t bat an eye at sharing a bed with you.

    I bought a rad new pot from Garden Fever and put out an empty bowl for jewelry. There are magazines and a few light books. I put out a bottle of smelly moisturizer, mostly because one of the visiting friends hates smelly beauty products. The best hostesses are a tiny bit irritating. If they weren’t, guests would never leave.

    And a fan. I love fans. I love the white noise, I love it being as cold as possible while I sleep.

    I also washed all the bedding, down to the mattress pad, even though no one has slept on them since the last time I washed them. Like an idiot I left the comforter in the dryer too long and singed it. If the girls notice I’ll tell them that a dragon scorched it. If they don’t believe me I will hit them in the head with that stupid orange.

    I have extra toiletries and a hair dryer in the bathroom and there’s fruit in the fridge, where it belongs.

    What am I forgetting?

  • If you are a house blogger . . .

    If you are a house blogger . . .

    If you are a blogger, chances are you’re either redoing your kitchen or you’re pregnant. No, seriously, go look at your RSS reader. Pregnant or remodeling their kitchen or sometimes both.

    I don’t want babies so I’m satisfying the demands of the gods by doing the only kitchen remodel I can afford: painting the door. These pictures best show the gnarly state of our kitchen door. Dinged, dented, filthy, peeling, and just sad.

    Upon taking apart the doorknob, I discovered that the previous owner had affixed it with caulk. Like the kind you use to seal your bathtub. That makes sense! I used a scraper to get the caulk off, leaving me with this mess.

    I sanded everything down but I didn’t have wood putty because of an unfortunate accident where my tube of wood putty hardened at the top and I squeezed too hard and the whole tube pooped out its contents from the bottom end, all over me. That’s pretty much what having kids is like, right?

    I wanted to get the door done before the boy returned from his work trip (Surprise! Paint fumes!) so I just painted it without filling the gauges. Enh, we’ll live. I also hit up the knob with some Brasso.

    It looks better, ya? Of course, now that the whole thing looks shiny and new I kind of feel like it would look better with a color. Maybe I could paint it yellow and Greg would feel better about the fact that I stole his yellow hallway from him.

    Or maybe that’s a bad idea.

    Sherwin-Williams Daffodil

    Sherwin-Williams Chartreuse

    Sherwin-Williams Jonquil

    The kitchen has always been tricky because the yellow counters are so cool and the floor tiles ended up being so much warmer and browner than I expected–I’m still trying to find ways to bridge the gap between the two. Regardless, I need to address the trim which still needs to be filled, sanded, and painted.

    Now go double up on your birth control and get ready to pick out faucets. Or suggest paint colors for the door if you’re feeling opinionated.

  • Holiday decorating

    Holiday decorating

    I don’t normally get into decorating for the holidays. By the time I realize I should do it, the holidays are over. But! This year I actually made something. Inspired by this blogger, I created a snowflake curtain for the kitchen window. I am putting “install the light fixture I bought two and half years ago above the sink” and “finish painting the window trim” at the top of my to-do list because they are really dragging down this scene.

    The morning light shining through them makes me happy. Since this is over the kitchen sink, thus subject to steam, I hit them with spray starch and a warm iron, pressed between sheets of parchment. They are a little sturdier as a result.

    And disco Jesus and his aluminum tree have made their triumphant return.

    That’s it, that’s all I got. Laura’s doing a much prettier things over on her blog. But this makes up for the fact that we don’t have a wreath or a tree, right?

  • The freakshow bulb keeps giving

    The freakshow bulb keeps giving

    I loved this freakshow bulb in health.

    Allium schubertii

    And I love it in death, too.

    Greg doesn’t seem to care for it but I’m going to keep loving it until terrifying bugs hatch out of it.

  • Update on the living room

    Update on the living room

    I still need to switch out the lamp and figure out window coverings and sew new throw pillows, but the living room is starting to feel like a real room again.

    Just a reminder of what it looked like before:

    And the huge cracked mirror behind the artwork on the mantle . . .

     . . . which we had to dismantle . . .

    We know the mirror wasn’t original to the house because it was stamped with “April ’52” all over the back.

    Spackle, spackle, paint, paint, paint! Swap in the boy’s couch for mine and grab the painting from the dining room.

    My grandma was stoked to see her clock over the mantle.

    I found this label in the attic when Greg and I tried to fix the noisy bathroom fan.

    The last mention of the Albina Shingle Company in The Oregonian was on May 3, 1946 when the  factory burned down. So I think that label dates from pretty close to when the house was built in 1938. It very likely came in the package with the original roof.

    The view from the dining room.

    Of course, these didn’t go anywhere. I will not apologize for my Battlestar Galactica prints.

    What do you think? Are my modern pieces playing well with the boy’s traditional couch or do I need to kick him out?
  • A man-cave fit for a man in a cave.

    A man-cave fit for a man in a cave.

    It’s almost been a year since I put the flooring in the basement and I’ve never really done anything with it. Just a friendly reminder of what it looked like when I moved in:

     
    And then I did all that work last winter so it looked like this.
    And yesterday my electrician came out and configured all the plugs so we wouldn’t have to run an extension cord from the dryer area to the finished portion of the basement. And now it looks like this:
    It’s starting to look like a real room! It needs baseboard and window trim but it’s getting there! I grabbed the painting from the reveal that used to be over the living room mantle.
    But don’t look over there; when I do I get the theme song to Sanford and Son stuck in my head.
    The boy and I have an agreement, stolen from a very smart friend, that we will keep everything we own for the first year of living together. So we have two beds and lots of duplicate kitchen gear that got boxed up and stored in the garage and basement. The last thing you want to do after a relationship ends is to have to buy a new bed (or a new cheese grater, or whatever) because you got rid of yours when you moved in together. So we’ll reassess in a year or two or whenever we feel like it and then we can start to pare down our stuff. But for right now we have a mattress in the alcove.
    Now I’m itching to paint the wood paneling that lines the stairs down to the basement and replace that nasty carpet.
    And lastly, Hall and Oates will finally have to go.
  • I have closet envy

    I have closet envy

    Despite the fact that I’m a fairly techie person, I still greatly prefer paper and pen for my to-do lists. My very favorite is the back of an envelope. My purse is full of crumpled, discolored sticky notes that say things like “paint trim!” and “harissa?” They are like tiny time capsules of what I was cooking and what I was working on in the house at that moment in time.

    Last winter, when I was so burned out on home repair, my to-do list said only “One Tree Hill” and “cookies.” It was glorious.

    I recently found one of my to-do lists from that first summer in the house. On that list was “paint front hall closet.” I never did get around to that and I figure I should do it before the boy moves in (he actually owns things like raincoats and umbrellas). I painted it a crisp white because it’s a dark closet and white would look good, right?

    Then I saw what Sara over at Russet Street Reno did with her closet:

    HOT DAMN. I went white swan when I should have gone black. And now I sort of want to paint the closet again. How beautiful is that?