More About the Library

So yesterday I left off by saying I couldn't yet tell you about my potential future plans for the library because I had to go watch Doctor Who (I didn't mention that it was Doctor Who. It was). Today I've decided to do something extraordinary and actually write the future post I promised.

Oh, first off: I realized I forgot to mention that we did this when we were moving stuff around in the library:

There's that beagle again. That round rug used to be under the chair in the library. It doesn't work in there anymore, so I tried moving it into the foyer, where my overgrown doormat was going to live if it were bigger.

It's super practical there because I can toss it in the washer easily (and have many times). It's cushy, and the dogs love it. I don't think it will stay there forever, but I'm happy with it for now.  I think it's supposed to be pushed closer to the door than it is in that picture; it's too lined up with the other rug. But I cut down the mat under it go under the blue and purple rug, so now it kind of moves around a lot anyway.

But back to the library with its teeny loveseat:

As I mentioned yesterday, more seating was one of the goals when we bought the loveseat and, if you pull out the chairs because they're suddenly too damn big, you don't get that. I'm thinking about two small chairs on either side of the loveseat and then a low coffee table.

Like maybe these chairs:

Ikea Stockholm Chair

I haven't seen them in real life to see if the scale is right. But my experience is that Ikea things are generally smaller than I expect them to be. These would be terribly impractical because of the arms; Milo and Dave need to play guitar in the library chairs, so armless is much better. But this one is so pretty.

Still, I might look instead for some vintage mid-century-esque chairs on Craigslist instead. Armless. Sigh. Or Milo can play guitar somewhere else. We have armless chairs in the dining room. They're not that heavy. He can drag them over to the library (where the amp is).

And then I'm itching to find a place for this rug:

Stockholm flatweave rug

And then I have big DIY project plans for the coffee table. 

Something like this:

Source: A Pair of Pears

Or this:

Source: Triple Maxtons

I feel a little silly pouring all this energy into the library when my back porch is practically falling down. But the porch is way out BACK. The library's the first thing you see. Also it's easier and cheaper to deal with.

The Library Gets a Loveseat, or: Perspective Rears its Ugly Head Again

It's been nearly a year since we bought a bunch of Billy shelves for the library. We're still very happy with the shelves, but the armchair in there was always just a placeholder until we could get something nicer. We picked up the chair for $40 on Craigslist, and I think we've gotten $40 worth of use out of it. By "we" I mostly mean the dogs. They love that chair. You can tell from looking at/smelling it.

Here's what the library looked like until last weekend:

There's a beagle wearing a sweater in that chair.

So the chair was fine. Very basic. A little more traditional than I wanted. It wasn't in terrific shape even before our dogs slept in it for a year. My plans for replacing it changed over time. There was a period where I really, really wanted a Strandmon chair from Ikea for example. But one of the nice things about sticking a cheap placeholder chair in your library for awhile is that it gives you time to figure out what you really want. And it became clear over time that one thing we wanted was a bit more seating in that room. It's a lovely room; we all like being in there, but there was only room for three people to sit down before. I thought a full size sofa would be too much for the space, but a small loveseat might be perfect.

I started casually eyeing Craigslist awhile back. And then, sometime last week, I spotted the one we finally wound up with. When I first saw it, it was priced at $150. I wasn't in a rush, and I wasn't totally sold, so I didn't make a move for a few more days. By the time I did get around to showing it to Dave and then e-mailing the seller, it had been sitting on Craigslist for...maybe a week? And she was eager to sell. "Make me an offer; it needs to go!" she told me. So I offered her $100, and she said yes.

Here it is:

As you can see, foster beagle Bella already loves the new seating. When I'm not taking pictures, there's a sheet on it, though. Spot the baby! (hint: he really loves electrical cords)

It's a pretty basic, dark gray, velvet-ish loveseat. I'm really liking it in front of the shelves. I thought it was going to go in front of the windows, but no. It definitely wants to live in front of the shelves.

But here is my problem.

It is so...petite that it makes the green chairs and chess table look ENORMOUS. Like a giant might sit in them, while chatting with the elves who hang out on the loveseat.

Let me show you:

It actually doesn't look quite as ridiculous in the picture as I expected. But still not what I want. (The chess table I had to just shove in another room entirely. I think it's going on Craigslist itself very soon).

So that's the story of how my $100 Craigslist loveseat means I have to buy new chairs. And a coffee table. Maybe also a rug. I kind of love it with just the loveseat. So dramatic! Shelves pop! But the whole point of the loveseat was more seating. So.

I have some ideas for that, but it's late and I need to go watch TV, so I'll save them for another post. Let's just say that I think I need to ask for Ikea gift cards for Christmas.

What do you guys think? What else would you put in this room with the world's most miniature loveseat? Besides more beagles?

Amazing Back Porch Reveal

I have an incredible before and after to show you today. Ready?

I'll start with the after:

No, really: that's the after.

"But," you might be thinking, "that's a crappy screened porch with a plywood floor and a patio set that needs painting. Also, your fan is ugly." 

That's right! That's what it is. And I love it SO much right now. 

The terrifying before pictures will show you why:

I'm not sure why putting crappy carpet down in an area that is, essentially, outside ever seemed like a good idea to someone. But, then, carpet never really seems like a good idea to me, even in places where it makes sense. 

And we did have the house pressure washed last year, but I guess the porch was considered inside enough that it got skipped? Maybe because of the carpet. 

I'd been pretending this porch didn't exist ever since we moved in. Dave did rebuild the dangerous steps awhile back, but other than that there was just so much that needed doing that it was overwhelming to even think about where to start. 

It turns out the carpet was a great place to start. 

You can tell from the picture that the carpet was nasty, but you really couldn't get the full effect without seeing/smelling it in person. We live in Georgia. It rains lots and lots here, and when it's not raining it's still very humid, and, basically, if you want to carpet your outdoor areas for some reason, you should live somewhere else. IMHO.

Dave's been saying we should go ahead and rip up the carpet for months and months now, but I always shut him down. I was worried we'd get started, and it would turn out to be much more complicated and involved than we'd anticipated, and we'd have to spend the rest of our lives dealing with it. Pretending it wasn't there for the foreseeable future seemed like a much more reasonable plan to me.

But then, a couple of weeks ago, Dave suddenly announced, in an uncharacteristically assertive way, "I'm going to go rip that carpet up." And then he did. And it was super fast and easy (if disgusting). It's nice when things turn out that way. 

The carpet was glued down, but the glue had long since lost all of its adhesive abilities, so the carpet pulled right up. The glue residue is still there on the plywood, but it's not a big deal for now. It's not worth trying to sand it down or whatever until we figure out what we're going to do out there long term. 

The carpet is mostly still sitting on the ground next to the porch, by the way. Our big disposal plan is cutting it into sections that fit in the trash barrels and throwing it out a bit at a time every trash day. 

Inspired by Dave's ambition, the kids and I did a little more sprucing up. We cleaned all the siding that we could reach:

And I took a broom to all the cobwebs. And we did some general clearing out of the crap that's accumulated on the porch over time. 

And now it's BEAUTIFUL!

Well. For now we're settling for less awful. 

We have big plans out here that go beyond ripping up gross carpet. 

The deck part probably needs to be completely rebuilt, and I think we've decided it should not be rebuilt by us. So we're hoping we can afford to have that done sometime in the nearish future. There's kind of a weird gap right now where the deck ends a few feet away from the sunroom, so we'd like to extend it to close up that gap.

And then we're thinking we're probably going to take all the screens down, leaving a covered open air porch opening up onto the deck. Right now we have a little deck and a little sunroom; I think turning it into one unified space would be more practical. And with the sunroom right there, we don't feel an overwhelming need to also have a screened porch. 

We think/hope that the screened porch is basically structurally sound, so we should be able to deal with fixing that part up mostly ourselves. Painting will be involved. 

Going back to take another look at this picture:

 

....you can see what I was talking about when I fantasized about a kitchen remodel, only from the outside. See that bay window there? I want that gone, and to push the kitchen out to where the current edge of the porch is, on the right up there. So that one wall where the weird pole with wires and boxes on it is (I have no idea what all that mess is) would extend out and would have a door leading in to the newly expanded kitchen in the corner. And then the new exterior wall would look out on the deck and have a couple of big windows. I should make an actual diagram of all this at some point. Picture's worth a thousand words and all that. 

Anyway. It's a humble start to the big porch redo, but having that nasty carpet gone is immensely satisfying.

Stone Mountain Field Trip

Ari's taking a Georgia history class this year at our local homeschool center, and the class includes lots and lots of field trips (to which parents and siblings are invited). He's actually off on one right now, but the rest of us are having to miss that one owing to some snotty miserableness in certain small members of our family. (I feel like I am doing some very strange and unnecessarily complicated things with prepositions in this post thus far. I will try to stop that).

But last week, we went to Stone Mountain, and no one was sick, so we all got to go. You can do lots of things at Stone Mountain like hike up the mountain or ride a terrifying tram up, or ride bikes around the bottom, or take a train ride, or watch a laser show....but we didn't do any of those things. We need to go back and do them soon, though. We're only 45 minutes away from Stone Mountain, and I remember going there fairly regularly as a kid, but my kids had never been before. For shame.

Anyway, this was the first field trip for the Georgia history class, so it focused on really old history....like the part with all the rocks. We visited the new Discovering Stone Mountain Museum and the quarry exhibit.

We met up outside, where kids climbed on rocks for awhile (I am, incidentally, keeping my pictures to my kids and the kids of people I know are okay with me posting them. If you were on the Stone Mountain field trip and you're reading this, that's why I didn't put in any pictures of your kid. Not because your kid isn't adorable. Exception being that one up at the top. All the kids are in that (or at least most), but they're so far away you can't make anyone out. I hope this is all appropriate blogging etiquette. I try.):

Then we went inside and learned about Stone Mountain's history:

The exhibit is, I understand, pretty new, and it's really nicely done. I learned a lot about rocks. I think maybe the kids did, too.

Stone Mountain when it was just a baby!!! Squee!

Also there was a tunnel to run through. I don't think that's what it was FOR, really, but that's what the kids did with it.

We learned that Stone Mountain is a monadnock. Which is fun to say and means "a hill or mountain of erosion-resisting rock rising above the surrounding countryside."

Since we didn't go up the mountain, this picture of a picture is the best thing I have for you to show you what Stone Mountain actually looks like. Rocky.

Abe was there, too.

Well, here: this is what the bottom of the mountain looks like. If you're going to walk up it, you start here.

On to the quarry exhibit! I was surprised to learn that they kept taking granite from the mountain right up until the 70's. I'm surprised they haven't started up again with all the money to be made these days selling counter tops.

I was also surprised to learn that granite is really heavy:

Also we learned that working in a quarry sucked. But I think we already knew that.

Looking forward to more field trips to force us to get off our butts and out of the house! Also for the education and stuff.

Giant Empty Wall, Part 1: Souvenir Plates

The sun room is probably my favorite room in the house these days; it's certainly the room I spend the most time in. But it has kind of  big problem. A GIANT problem. And that problem is this enormous blank wall:

Whole lotta nothing is what was going on on that wall.

There's still lots of nothing on most of the wall, but we have, at least, made a start at covering the giant expanse of minty blankness. With plates!

(I have a plan for the rest of the wall, too, but it will require a delicate balance of money and patience/time to carry it out).

I've always had a bit of thing for souvenir plates. I mean, really, I can remember sitting around thinking about how great they were maybe fifteen years ago. And they're cheap and easy to find, so there's really no reason why I didn't fulfill this longing for a souvenir plate collection a long time ago.

But I didn't.

Until we started working on the sun room, and I decided that one of the things that big empty wall needed was a souvenir plate wall. I started keeping an eye out for them at the thrift store, and I picked up some that way. Then I got impatient and had to stretch my definition of souvenir plate quite a bit. Like there's one plate that just has a boat on it. Maybe you would want it as a souvenir of a boat ride you went on? Sure you would.

Then I got even MORE impatient and just bought a bunch on ebay. Where they are very cheap. But my previously discussed perspective problems came into play here. See those little tiny plates up there in the first picture? Yeah, I totally expected those to be full size dinner plates. "Why is this big lot of plates so amazingly cheap?!" I wondered. Until the little tiny box got here. Sigh.

So none of these plates were very expensive. Most of them were no more than a couple of bucks at the thrift store. But plate hangers are another story. The plate hangers that you can't even see were the most expensive part of this project.

I thought that surely someone out there had come up with a great free or nearly free method for hanging plates. But most of what I could find (generally involving glue and some sort of hanging hardware) came with cautionary warnings about plates falling down suddenly after months of seemingly secure hanging or stern warnings that the method was to be used only on plates you secretly hoped would fall and break because you'd always envisioned them as part of a mosaic anyway.

But EVERYONE loves these little plate hangers:

All you have to do is get them a little wet to activate the glue on them, then stick them on the backs of your plates and hang them up. They are very easy, none of my plates has come crashing down yet....only problem is that they're around $3-4 each, which makes them more expensive than most of my plates were. But you do what you have to do, right? (I didn't have to buy hangers for all of them, as some of the plates had a spot on the back for hanging them with a wire instead).

I really like the placement and close togetheredness of View Along the Way's plate wall:

Plate Wall at View Along the Way

So that was the inspiration for how I hung these. I want to add to the wall over time, and have it go up over that window into the kitchen and then keep kind of trailing off toward the other side of the room. Like a plate waterfall. (Reminder to self: check ebay for Niagara Falls souvenir plate).

We didn't do anything crazy like measure or plan where the plates were going to go. It's beginning to dawn on me that maybe the reason I prefer things like plate walls and gallery wall with things hung close together is more because I'm lazy and it camouflages inconsistencies in measurement and not really just because I like the way it looks.

Anyway. Here it is! In progress and all finished (until I get more plates. There, umm, might be more on their way courtesy of ebay right now. I may never be able to stop).

That Vietri plate is one I've had since Boston days. It's hung in three of my kitchens now. And one sun room. From a garage sale. I just thought it was pretty. Also I thought it might be worth money on ebay, but it didn't seem to be, so I kept it. 

Dave's being very careful not to measure anything here. Look! One plate is shaped like a fish! How whimsical!

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Happy Labor Day/Blogiversary!

That's right....I started blogging (here) one year ago today. I posted once, an introductory sort of post, and then not again for like two weeks. But THEN....I got pretty consistent and managed to stay that way. I've had a lot of fun, and "met" a lot of lovely people, and I'm absolutely positive my house would not be where it is today without this blog to motivate us to get projects done. So yay blog!

I had hoped to celebrate blogiversary with a brand new blog. But that's not happening. Dave is hard at work on it right this very second, but it's definitely not going to be ready today. I'm not even going to make any estimates about when it will be ready (mostly because Dave refuses to give me one). But, you know, be on the lookout! I will tell everyone how to find the new blog when the time comes.

So happy Labor Day! Back tomorrow with regular posts on this same boring OLD blog.

And I leave you with a completely unrelated to this post picture of my kids. Because I think there's a rule about blogging that you have to have at least one picture in every post or you suck. Even if it's just your kids being goofy.

The Foyer Rug and Problems with Perspective

I have a history of ordering things online and expecting them to be much bigger than they actually are. One time I ordered a bunch of stuff for the kids for Christmas, thinking confidently that I had ordered them so much stuff; it was going to look like TEN Christmases when it got here. I wouldn't need to buy another thing! And then the box arrived, and I was like, "oh, they must be sending it in.....SEVEN boxes. This box is far too small for all of the amazing things I ordered." Only then I opened up the box and there were all the toys...miniature versions of what I was sure I had ordered.

Mind you, no one had been dishonest or tricked me in any way. I just don't pay attention when they tell you what sizes things are. This has been going on pretty much since ordering things off the internet was first invented, and I have NEVER learned to stop doing it.

I've made a helpful graphic to illustrate this problem I have, using Abe's toys:

Okay, so! I actually DID know exactly how big the rug I ordered for the foyer was. And I had measured the foyer, so I knew how big a space it was supposed to occupy, too. But somehow, getting these two numbers to meld together in my head did not work very well.

But let's back up.

A little while ago, I presented some of my finalists for the coveted position of New Foyer Rug and asked you guys to help me pick one. I'm not even sure which one won, because a lot of you mentioned your top two or three instead of just picking one, and then some of you said, "the purple one," and there were TWO purple ones. I think you probably meant the purple one that I didn't actually buy, though. Also the vote was fairly evenly split, it seemed like.

So that part wasn't really all that helpful, although I know everybody tried their best. What WAS super helpful, though, was how a few people pointed out, either directly or indirectly, that this rug was going to be right by my front door, for everyone who came in or out of the house to trample over. This was something that seriously had not even occurred to me in my "ooh! pretty rugs!" fervor. I eliminated the popular but mostly white Moroccan dhurrie right then and there. And then I went ahead and tossed out the wool choices, hoping that the cotton ones would stand up better to being tossed in the washing machine (I'm not sure if you're really supposed to toss your cotton rug in the washing machine, but I think I'm probably going to give it a try whether you are or not).

Maybe at this point I should mention which rug I bought?

I went with......


The Zig Cotton Dhurrie from Serena and Lily!

Once I decided on cotton, there weren't many choices left, but this one had originally been my and Dave's favorite anyway. I found a coupon code online, and it was already marked way down, so it also wound up being one of the cheapest (after shipping, I think we paid just under $70). And since the original price made it one of the MOST expensive choices, I felt like I was getting a FANCY rug. And you know I loves me some fancy.

So my rug got here, and I eagerly unwrapped it, and....it was....small.

To be precise, it was exactly what size it was supposed to be. Only that was smaller than I had pictured.

Well, here, take a look (child and beagle shown for size comparison purposes. And because they wouldn't get out of the way):

That's not a rug! That's an overgrown door mat!

The good news is, it turns out the rug is exactly the right size for the space between the bench and the stairs. Which is great, because maybe you'll be sitting on that bench with your feet on the floor? And they would be cold? Only they're NOT because of the rug! Yay!

But that still leaves the problem of my rugless other half of the foyer.

But the good news THERE is that layering rugs is totally trendy right now. I know because I read it on Apartment Therapy.

So that's what I'm thinking now. ANOTHER rug! This time bigger. Like all the way to 5 by 7 (that one is only 3 by 5). Overlapping with rug #1.

Who wants to help me out with rug shopping again? Rug layering good or bad? What kind of pattern/color/etc. would you go with there?

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