Category: At Home

New Family Member

We have a new family member. It doesn’t eat or breathe though so don’t get too excited (although we’re dying to get a small dog). I guess I should backtrack and explain a little.

Well, it’s tax season. I had great fun doing our taxes (don’t look at me weird like that) and got them done about a week ago. Also, a photography studio downtown was having a going-out-of-business sale (don’t feel too bad for him–he was retiring actually). Anyway I wandered by the closeout sale and saw an opportunity we couldn’t refuse. A one-year-old used iMac. Before you get too outraged at our spontaneous purchase, let me say that Doug’s laptop hasn’t worked properly since 2005 and the cost of this beaut wasn’t even half of our tax return. Pretty good situation actually.

I’m still trying to get the hang of the operating system… I’ve been a PC person for 10+ years, and it’s weird to make the switch. Hopefully this investment will kick my blog into high gear; we’ve also got photoshop on here and I’m going to try to get more into graphic design (I might even go take some classes at a community college or something).

I promise someday I’ll stop doing “show and tell” posts and actually conquer some real projects that I can show you how I did step by step!

Last Weekend’s Total Steal

Someday, I’ll stop shopping compulsively for my apartment. But there are still so many useful things I don’t have, so for the time being I will keep snatching up mega deals when I see them.

Last weekend we went to Target to get a round tablecloth for the dining room table. See? the painting may be done but I haven’t forgotten about the lil guy (the dining room, that is). We had our choice between solid white, solid green, and solid red. Nice job, Target. I had a white tablecloth in mind anyway because it’s the easiest to clean, but I would have liked to see a bigger selection.

While there, I checked out the clearance endcaps as usual. We found some small rugs that would look good in our friends’ house but upon further inspection they varied in length by about an inch! The idea was to put them together to make it look like a larger rug but the length inconsistency knocked them out of the running. On another endcap a large box caught my eye. Three matching lamps for $27! We have no floor lamps and just two small lamps on our bedside tables. When we move to an apartment without overhead lighting we would be in a pickle. Anticipating this predicament, we snagged them. Also, the price was too good to pass up!

Here we’ve got a picture of the taller one (about 4 feet?) and one of the smaller ones. The other small one is in the office. I love the matte black metal and the clear glass ball. They look way classy for their price, and I love how the black corresponds with the other black around the room–picture frames, etc. Yes, we did have to assemble them (the tall one screws together in segments), but that will come in convenient when moving, we can essentially deconstruct it and put it in a box!

Easy Interest Spot

Ever since we put together the tall bookshelf in the living room, I have been trying to come up with a creative way to add visual interest to the big section in the middle.

Here’s a quick before:

I’ve got the star there, which most people think is creepy (the words “Blair Witch”) have been used more than once, but I love it because it reminds me of my friend Gina. She made it when she spent Christmas here (before I moved in, actually). She’s now in Rwanda and has been overseas since September! I miss her so I keep the star!

The other photo is of me and my [first] San Diego roommate, Yuriko. It was taken mere weeks into our Freshman year of college.

That’s all well and good, but the tan “unfold and tack onto the back of this bookshelf” faux-finished cardboard was depressing me–I wanted to obscure it as much as possible. Luckily I found the perfect solution when I started taking stuff off the walls and rearranging the dining room.

click for a slightly bigger version

I just stashed this bulletin board here temporarily but it turned out to be the perfect solution! The cork color and light wood frame make it stand out texture-wise but blend in color-wise. All the stuff tacked on is of sentimental value, which is even better. Ticket stubs for concerts and plays, postcards from our friends around the world, a boutonniere from our wedding, and more. The space in between the picture frames is where our daily mail lands. I removed it for the photo-op but it’s back up there now. ;)

Whenever I pull a freebie switcheroo in my place it reminds me of the HGTV show “Freestyle” where they’d clear a room out and find stuff from other rooms and freshen it up. I’ve been trying to do that some around here as well, as evidenced by today’s post. Have you ever lucked out by accident like this??