Home Style Guide - Brought to you by Linden Street and JCPenney

Buying unique and affordable art these days is easy thanks to the web. I’m currently in the process of getting a nursery together for my baby due this Fall and I’ve found it’s easy to surf around online and find artwork for the nursery that’s not screaming cheesy commercial cartoon characters. I bought this Rabbit and Flora wood gocco print recently ($28 unframed/ $48 framed) from Petit Collage. You can also surf around Etsy.com using special keywords such as “art” or “prints” to find just what pleases you and your room.

Here are more of my favorites:

Sitting Pretty print ($20) by the yumi yumi shop.

Pink Flowers and Joyous Birds ($18) by Oh Smile’s Shop

The Big Moon Print ($18) by The Black Apple

Family Sweet Family ($20) by Ashley G and Drew.

by Craftzine

Isn’t it amazing how one photo in a design magazine can stick with you? It’s happened to me before—a rusty orange rug in the bedroom of a Colorado home, a cool steel window in a Wyoming residence, a certain cerulean vase on the bookshelf of a Manhattan loft. I remember these random, tiny details, just like I remember a bedroom I saw in a spread in a magazine last year. Oh, was it ever perfect.

There was a four-poster bed—not the old fashioned kind, with mosquito netting or curtains hanging all around—but a more squared-off, contemporary bed that was much more updated than the old traditional four-posters. It was adorned in simple, clean white linens; at certain angles, they almost looked gauzy. The walls of the bedroom were a mottled, taupe-gray-brown color—one I just can’t get out of my head because it was so beautiful. The resulting color scheme—the rustic brown of the bed frame, the subtle taupe of the wall, and the white of the linens—was really something special. It’s remained in my gut ever since.

What I loved about this bedroom—whose magazine spread, unfortunately, I tossed out with the trash one morning—was its intentional simplicity. There weren’t mirrors on the walls or decorative pillows on the beds, no ornate rugs or vases with reeds. There was only simplicity—but miraculously, it wasn’t cold and sterile.

I must be drawn to rooms like this because they don’t even come close to resembling every day life in my own house. In my house, the bedrooms are lived in—lived in to the Nth degree—and that’s okay.

But for The Lodge bedrooms (above), which will ultimately be a haven not just for me and my family, but for guests, I plan on starting things off right. The right bed, the right linens, and the right paint color are my focus right now, and I plan to get those in place and re-evaluate before adding any other furniture or accessories.

I know that level of simplicity is difficult to pull off, and as a woman, the need to build a nest can often involve adding, adding, adding. But since I’m starting with a clean slate, I’m considering it a personal challenge to reproduce the feeling of that original bedroom I saw in the magazine.
I just hope I don’t forget what it looked like.

by Pioneer Woman

When my husband and I were newly married, we furnished our tiny apartment with hand-me-down corduroy couches, $19 folding chairs we bought at an import store, and old pots and pans borrowed from our parents’ kitchens. Fifteen years later, I’m looking at a house full of furniture and belongings we gathered as we rolled along, had kids, and made a little more money. And, while our home certainly looks nicer and feels more comfortable than our humble newlywed apartment did, it also comes with a weight I don’t always feel like carrying.

We’re not super-acquirers, but we’ve got your average complement of “grownup house” trappings. Martini glasses we have no idea what to do with, tablecloths that sit, folded and unused, in a hallway drawer, a wine vacuum pump (?). All stuff we figured we’d need, or we’d gotten as gifts, or we’d collected during our travels. Problem is, sorting, cleaning, maintaining, and putting away this “stuff” takes up quite a bit of time, especially with two kids conspiring to undo my feeble attempts at order.

Stuff has a way of taking on a life of its own: demanding one’s attention and care but giving little in return. And so, a subtle turnaround has taken place in our home. We now get as excited about getting rid of stuff as we used to about getting it in the first place. Every trip to the resale shop or Goodwill yields a thrill. Every item sold on Craigslist feels like a triumph. Everything passed on to a friend (or stranger) in need regains a bit of its luster. And with each bag or box that leaves our house, life feels a bit more open. With the extra room in the closet comes room to breathe.

The homemaking guru Flylady calls decluttering “blessing the world” with your stuff. I used to scoff at her euphemism, but I’ve come to believe that she’s onto something. Not only am I setting my stuff free so it can help or delight someone else, I’m setting myself free as well.

by Asha Dornfest, Parent Hacks

One of the nice things about working from home, well besides the obvious (pajamas, watching tivo’d Project Runway episodes on coffee breaks) is the ability to make your workspace your own: No standard issue manila folders. No industrial thumbtacks. No corporate “artwork” on the walls.

I’ve found that even if I’m working off a desk that was my family’s kitchen table in the 70’s and my chair is less than ergonomic, little design details make me smile every time I sit down to work. Some of my favorite online spots for home office coolness:

See Jane Work has an outstanding collection of goodies that make work more beautiful. I love the vintage wire desk trays and the modern patterned corkboards from NotNeutral.

Red Stamp Cards is a great site for stylish stationery, but they’ve also got a sweet little office supplies category with no generic marbled composition books in sight. The Thomas Paul collection is particularly drool-worthy, with great-looking pencil cups, file folders, and maybe the nicest mouse pads I’ve ever seen.

Museum stores are always a smart bet for those cool desktop details. The steel and aluminum fan-like Note Holder” from MoMA is great for organizing those pressing letters and bills, and I love love love the porcupine paperclip holderfrom Alessi that’s a far cry from the standard middle management cubicle accessory.

At the SFMOMA, I found this awesome set of artist-designed wastebaskets (I know!) for just $15 each. They’re biodegradable to boot. Clearly there’s something clever line in here about the irony of throwing away the garbage can, but I haven’t figured it out yet.

Next stop: The dream desk. If only I could find that one for $15 too.

I used to save our pretty dishtowels to hang attractively from the oven door. Then, when someone spilled something, and my husband reached for a conveniently located towel to mop it up, I’d screech, “DONTUSETHATONE!”

Shortly, I realized that chastening my family for using dishtowels to wipe things up was insane. I solved the problem by gradually replacing our utilitarian dishtowels with pretty ones, and breathing more deeply when people used them for their intended purpose.

The upside to routinely staining dishtowels is that I can spend more time lusting after the handmade versions on Etsy. Hello, darlings:

Hand Printed Linen Tea Towel

$12 from Leanne Graeff

Oranges Flour Sack Kitchen Towel

$10 from Ink Lore

Orange Chrysanthemum Tea Towel

$12 from Flower Press

Ice Cream Lollies Tea Towel

$16 from The Mr. PS Shop

Big Breakfast Tea Towel

$16 from The Mr. PS Shop

A week after returning from my sister’s home in Austin (see above), my house is much farther along on the road to being clutter-free—well, unless you go upstairs to my kids’ rooms, and I haven’t even begun thinking about that trip through Purgatory. But the downstairs? The kitchen and living room area? It’s so clutter-free, it’s almost scary. I still can’t decide if it looks like mom and dad came and stripped my dormroom of all their furniture…or if it looks the way it should look. All I know is, it’s sparse. And I’ve never been happier in my life. Suddenly, a huge weight has been lifted.

We’re in the middle of a huge remodel project on the ranch—not in our own home but in The Lodge, an old guest house up the road from our place. We’re more than halfway through the remodel, and are about to finalize the kitchen plan. Soon we’ll begin thinking about wall colors, furniture, and accessories. Here’s what it looked like before we started the remodel:

My recent Clutter Revelation has got me thinking. While I want The Lodge to be comfortable, homey, warm, and inviting to guests (or Marlboro Man and me, when we escape the mile and a half there to go on an occasional “date”…but that’s another story for another time), I can’t help but shake the notion that I want things to be simple, clean, understated, sparse. It is, in fact, a “lodge”, though, so stark stainless steel and sleek, contemporary furniture and cabinetry would be completely out of place. But the way my mindset is right now, so would big, ornate leather sofas, Navajo throw pillows, and paintings everywhere you look. I don’t want the place to look highly contrived and decorated. I want people to walk in, kick off their shoes, and feel at peace.

Basically, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I want the Zen-type feel of sparseness and clean lines. But I want the warmth of a luxurious Colorado ski chalet. What approach am I after?

This is what’s been occupying my thoughts all week.

So this is where I go off about how much I am in love with Flor tiles. It’s a nasty, dirty love, probably not safe for work or appropriate for young children. Some of you have noticed these carpet squares in some of my daily photos and have asked if I like them, do I recommend them, how well do they clean up, do they taste good with peanut butter? Oh, but they are that and so much more, can clear up oily skin and enlarge your penis.

The tiles come in 20-inch squares in an endless variety of colors and textures. We bought 49 squares in Morning Coffee - Decaf to make a 12-ft square rug in the living room (pictured above). When Leta spills her beer or Chuck throws up that diaper he ate this morning, we just break out a baby wipe, and poof, the mess is gone. I am not even making this up. Have you ever tried doing that with regular carpet? You end up with a giant off-color spot right there in the middle of the floor, and you just know people are coming over and looking at it and wrongly assuming that you are the type of person who smells her underwear to see if she can wear it an extra day.

In our old house we used six of the Shirt Stripe - French Cuff tiles in the kitchen, and then when we moved into this house we decided they’d be put to better use in the office:

You would not know this, but there were once red wine stains on those tiles, stains we took care of with a single baby wipe. Does this say more about the awesomeness of the tiles or the power of a baby wipe, I don’t know, but whatcan’t a baby wipe do? Have you ever stopped to think about that for a second? Raise your hand if the first thing you do the second anything goes wrong is reach for a baby wipe, before calling 911. That’s what I thought.

Perhaps the best thing about Flor tiles is the fact that they are recyclable, and the company is very serious about being friendly to the environment. We used these tiles in Leta’s bedroom and are now using them in the basement utility room (I don’t believe they make this particular pattern any longer):

But since they’re pink and hard to match with anything I’m thinking I may send them back to Flor for them to recycle (they will pay shipping) and ordering a different color. Not sure yet, depends on how fancy I want to get with the utility room. I should probably make a decision soon, because I got an email from someone who saw a picture of these tiles in Leta’s bedroom and said that they were so ugly that if I didn’t get rid of them Leta would develop a neurological problem, and I would have no one but myself to blame. I am so glad that the Internet is here to take care of me.

from the dooce archives

Click the bathtubs to find out more information! Here is a roundup of Bathtubs from NOTCOT.org, because, well, there is little that can wash an exhausting and stressful day/week/month away like soaking in a hot bath… and as anyone who has tried a few out will know, not all bath tubs are created equal! So here are a few of the ones that i have been pining for, and some that amuse me, and other that are just too interesting not to include!

As I recently chronicled on my website, I just returned from Austin, where I spent a week visiting my sister, Betsy, her husband, Matt, and their new baby boy. I’d never seen their new house—the house they moved into over a year ago—and after spending an entire week there, I returned to my home having decided something important: We humans have too much stuff.

Betsy and Matt’s house is in a dicey area of Austin, so they were able to get a pretty cool house for less money than if they’d bought in a better area of town. You’d think this would mean they would have used the money they saved to fill their new house to the brim with tons of furniture, pillows, accessories, and velvet wall hangings of The King. But they didn’t. They just kept it simple, using the cleanlined furniture they already owned, and resisting the urge to accessorize-accessorize-accessorize.

As a result, the only clutter in the entire house was the stash of Central Market groceries I brought to their house every day: I had to put all the bread products on top of the fridge because I’d filled the fridge itself with sushi, grilled tilapia, gourmet soups, and Eggplant Parmigiano. I even cluttered up the island—which formerly housed only a plain glass bowl of fruit—with lotions, bath gels, and baby products. Before I showed up, however, except for the oft-used collection of Betsy’s cookbooks, the kitchen was as clutter-free as the rest of the house.

In a nutshell, everything in Matt and Betsy’s house is in its proper place, and sparseness reigns supreme. There aren’t stacks of magazines or baskets of stray junk to distract your eye; you only see clean.
The result? At the end of the week, even though I’d spent the majority of the time taking care of a newborn baby and helping my sister around the house, I felt relaxed, mellow, at peace. And I couldn’t help but think that spending all that time in a clutter-free environment played some role in that. And I resolved to go home and rid my house of every single item that wasn’t monumentally necessary to human life.

Wish me luck—I may not come out of it alive.

-Pioneer Woman

I always seem to have a drawer of little bits I’ve collected at events or an afternoon out. I never seem to know what to do with them though…until now! Whether it’s a vintage postcard or cute toy, shadow boxes can be a great way to collect these bits or special memories and turn them into personal art. You can easily make your own with design*sponge’s cardboard shadow box tutorial (pictured above), or choose from the wide array of handmade vintage shadow box art below.

Nesting Shadow Box
by Cathy Michaels Design
$32

Shadow Box Assemblage Couple and Bottle
by Le Collage Shaq
$185

Original Sewing Fashion Collage Mixe Media Shadow Box in Wood Frame
by The Rummager’s Shop
$35

Vintage Bird, Lace, and Flowers Shadow Box
by The Bronte Life
$48