Category Archives: house

Spring Cactus

Posted in house, plants by

Spring is one of my favorite seasons mainly because it signifies the end of short dark days.  Nothing says Spring for me like the blooms on my Spring Cactus.  Every year, around the end of April, my Spring Cactus sprouts lots of red buds and then come the wild red flowers.  So beautiful. So Spring.

Spring Cactus in my “office” room

This cactus stays on the window still in my room all year round.  It is really a perfect spot because this room gets pretty cold in the winter which is necessary for the cactus to produce blooms in the Spring.  Also the window is South facing so it gets lots of direct sunlight.

Second Floor Hallway.

Posted in basement, house by

We have been working on removing the wallpaper on the second floor hallway.  Once all the wallpaper is removed (which is a never ending process because there are multiple layers of wallpaper and the walls are about 11 feet high) we have to repair the plaster.  We have removed one small area of the wallpaper and this is what the wall looks like:

The plaster is in pretty bad shape and we need to repair all the walls in the hallway.  It looks like the previous owners attempted to “fix” the crumbling plaster by slapping on many layers of wallpaper.  Also this hallway has a beautiful curved wall so I think that this is one project that will last through the fall (at least).  What is really cool about this plaster is that it has horse hair mixed into it.  Yes your read correctly! Apparently this was very popular back in the day.  To find out more about the fascinating history of of plaster in old buildings click here.

Once of the first things that I did after buying the house was to buy rolls of black and white damask wallpaper.  I fell in love with the curved wall in the hallway and I couldn’t wait to get the new wallpaper up.  Now almost three years after buying the house I am finally close to getting a black and white hallway.  This is what the hallway looked like when we first bought the house:


This is what it looked like after we removed the carpet and refinished the floors:

Successful upholstery project.

Posted in DIY, house, Kiran's Room, Trash picked by

My friend and I were taking a stroll through our neighborhood (with Kiran in the stroller) when we found a stool on the sidewalk.  I was pushing Kiran in the stroller so I made my friend pick up and carry the stool home.  My friend obliged but she complained the whole way home about how ugly the stool was!  I recently upholstered the stool, in some fabric from Ikea and I think that it looks fabulous.


The stool is being used as an end table in Kiran’s room.

The basement needs some attention.

Posted in house by

Scott has been working on repairing the plaster on the wall leading to the basement and installing drywall on the opposite wall.  This is one project that I have had nothing to do with (so far).  He has also been working on the shelves that we want underneath the stairway. 

This is what the entryway to the basement looks like right now.  It is already a huge improvement from what it used to look like.  It had wallpaper (ah yes everything in our house had wallpaper) and it had black paint leading down one side.

I want to paint all the walls white, the shelves white and the stairs leading up white.  To liven things up a bit I want to paint the stairs leading down to the basement in fuchsia and then seal it.  I don’t like going down to the basement but I am sure that if the stairs were fuchsia it will be a much more pleasant journey.

We will install hooks to the right of the door to hang mops, brooms, and dustpans.  We are going to install some hooks to the left for extra jackets because our vestibule doesn’t hold a lot of jackets, especially when we have guests over. Also, I hate hiding the fabulous Moroccan tiles in the vestibule with jackets!

Sometimes you need to hire professionals.

Posted in DIY, house by

I have been working on re-upholstering this chair.  I started working on this chair about a month ago and then I ran out of staples and then I ran out of the motivation. Now I wish I had just taken the chair to get re-upholstered! You can see what this chair looked like in this picture (chair is to the left of the picture).

 I got the fabric from Ikea.  I love black and white fabrics and I have a small collection of Ikea fabric.  Sometimes when I am bored or if Scott is working late I get out the staple gun, pick out some fabric, and I start upholstering a chair or a stool that I either bought or picked up on the side of the road.  Clearly this is not a project that I should have started.

I’m not a minimalist.

Posted in house, Inspiration by
Via emmas designblogg

Minimalist is not a word that describes me.  I am always striving to de-clutter and not acquire any junk.  However, I love the things I love and I love a lot of things.  I find that having beautiful things around me makes me happy.  I am never quite comfortable in minimalist spaces.  Another thing that doesn’t quite make me feel at ease is going to someone house and encountering a glass table.  A glass table is one of those things that doesn’t evoke the feelings of comfort and relaxation.  It just looks cold, gets dirty really fast and feels pretentious. I also don’t enjoy stark spaces devoid of any personal touches.   I enjoy  spaces without clutter but filled with color, streamlined furniture and full of personal flourishes.
This entryway pretty much sums up my sentiments.  While I may not necessarily pick the wallpaper or the stairway runner I love the way the patterns and colors all work together.   I especially love the Ikat bench.

Yellow Door.

Posted in house, Inspiration by

Via Apartment Therapy

I recently saw this picture and I’m again inspired to paint the door of the my room in yellow.  Since our house already has so many colors I wonder whether a yellow door will be too much.  All the rooms on the first floor all lead into each other.  Our living room is yellow, the dining room is a pale blue, the kitchen white and my room is the palest of pinks (mostly white). Maybe if  I painted the dining room a light grey then the yellow wouldn’t be too much. I keep coming back to grey in the dining room.  Also, even though I really liked the pale blue in the dining room when we painted it I haven’t grown to love it.  It just doesn’t seem to work.  Now all that I have to do is convince Scott that we MUST paint the dining room grey NOW!

The Living Room (update).

Posted in Books, bookshelves, house, living room, thrifted by

This is our living room.  I’ve been meaning to post pictures of the living room for a while now but I never got around to it.  This is mainly because the living room is really hard to photograph.  It is generally filled with light but all the pictures facing the windows generally come out either too dark or too light.  Well finally this snowy day I found the right time to take some pictures. Click here and here for some earlier pictures.

The couch is from Crate and Barrel and it was our first new piece of living room furniture.  The chrome rocker on the right of this picture is a Milo Baughman chair that we got for free while we students.  At the time we just thought that it was a fabulous chair without any knowledge of its pedigree.  The coffee table is from a flea market in New Jersey and it was manufactured by Lane. I think we paid $45 for the coffee table.  The chest on the left is also by Lane and it is made out of Cedar.  The rug is an eighty year old Persian rug that I bought on eBay.

Thrift store bottles, old thrift store lamp, puppets from Indonesia and Lane Cedar chest from the 50s.


Milo Baughman chair (possibly)

We found this chair at a thrift store in Philly.  While it looks like a Milo Baughman chair there aren’t any markings on the chair.  I love this chair. It was love at first sight.  The chrome and wool chair in the dining room, to the left of this picture is part of a pair that I bought on eBay.  Yes I have a thing for chairs!  We bought the butterfly leather chair on my first trip to Sri Lanka with Scott.  The rose brass lamp was a total score at $30 dollars at a local thrift store.  I was so excited to find it that Scott had to talk to the person at the store because he was sure that I would pay more for it than what they were asking.  The white lamp we bought recently on the side of the street when we were coming home late one evening.  I think we paid $60 for it but I had been wanting a task lamp in white for a while so it felt like a good deal.

The “library”
We found this mantle at another thrift store but it wasn’t thrifty at all.  We have always had a mantle in the old apartments that we’d lived in Philly and we really wanted one for this house.  The mantle houses some of our books.  This was supposed to be a temporary storage place for our books until we built bookshelves but we ended up really liking the books in the mantle. 

View of Mantle from the vestibule door
A lot of the furniture in the living room is from thrift stores. We also have end tables (not shown) with dove tail detailing that match the coffee table, that we found at a Goodwill store in New Jersey (ten years before we bought the coffee table).  I love old furniture.  Mainly because it is built really well but also because I rarely see new furniture that I like (that I can afford). Every piece of furniture in this room we’ve both been immediately drawn to. Also most of the furniture has been with us for so long that is intimately woven into our lives. 

Dreaming of Renovations.

Posted in exterior, house, Inspiration by

Whew! I have been busy. We had a few contractors come over and take a look at the brick on the side of our house.  The house was built in 1890 and still has the original mortar! However, there are some places where the brick needs re-pointing.  Most of the contractors these days don’t really know how to restore and work with original bricks and mortar.  It has definitely been a learning experience for me. 

The problem with re-pointing old brick is that some masons slap on Portland Cement, which is a very hard and non porous substance.  Brick on the other hand is very porous and it needs to remain that way so that water doesn’t get trapped between the layers of brick.  Our house has three layers of brick on the periphery walls.  When the brick expands the the Portland Cement does not expand which causes the brick to crack.  Basically the new mortar must be as soft as or a little softer than the old mortar.  There are labs where you can send the old mortar and they will analyze it and give you a breakdown of the original mortar ratio.  However, it is also possible to estimate the mortar composition from the age of the house. 

We have also had contractors over to get estimates on repairing the stucco on the back room (my office) as well.  I think that we will go with a dark grey almost black stucco.  Also, I have been dreaming about getting all the trim in the house, and the eighteen windows painted a deep black.  Since dreams have no limits I have also been dreaming of getting a deck installed on top of the back room which will be accessible from Kiran’s room.  I think that it will be nice to have a sand box and have some toys for Kiran to play on that deck. 

I have been having some problems with our computer so I don’t have any pictures of the other million things that I have been working on.  Instead I will leave you with this beautiful black house (and I will keep dreaming of my black/grey stucco):

Living Room Shelf Remorse.

Posted in house, living room by

This is a photo of the shelves and Tv set up in the living room (this photo is a little crooked but you get the idea).  Am I happy with the arrangment? Not quite! I love having the Tv downstairs and I love the credenza but I don’t love the shelves.  I thought that we should have some shelves over the Tv for the CD player and also to stack some books.  Unfortunately  the books on the shelf looked too cluttered.  So then I put some plants on the shelves and I am still not quite satisfied with the shelves.  I don’t know what I was thinking putting up shelves on this wall!

I really need to work on curating the shelves better (and no taking the shelves down is not an option).