Mid Century, But Not Retro

Yesterday, a friend of mine texted me some pictures of a few mid century pieces of furniture she found for sale. The prices were incredible, and she asked me if she should buy them, possibly for resale. I answered a quick "Yes!" Based on my experience searching for mid century modern pieces on Craigslist and in flea markets, I was pretty confident telling her it was a good investment. This elegant, distinct style is very popular right now, which is bad news for those of us who try to find it for cheap.

This home is a space I really wanted to share for a couple reasons. First, the owner of this home is Elizabeth McTague, a talented macrame artist who inspires me daily with her creativity. If you don't follow her on Instagram, you really should fix that.

Second, sharing this home gives me a chance to talk about that iconic furniture style that's getting harder and harder to score for a thrifty price.

We're Moved In and My Least Favorite Thing About Seattle Is....

All our stuff is in the Seattle apartment, and I have made a promise to myself to never again move until I can afford to hire a moving company to do it for me. I'm so tired of carrying my dresser and mattress up and down stairs.  But we're done with that for a while!

We moved in and we haven't gotten our wifi set up yet, so I haven't been able to blog in a few days. I want to show you how everything has fit into the little place. Somehow, we managed to lose both our HAMMER and our DRILL in the move, so until I get my new ones from Amazon, nothing is hanging from the wall or ceiling. So it looks a little more crowded than it should.

The Little Apartment on Capitol Hill

One more little step in the process is complete. We picked up the keys to our little apartment, and we are free to move in. First I had to take photos, and next I need to clean, but baby steps, people. Baby steps.

Living Room

There's not much going on around the Eckhouse these days, but I noticed my house tour photos are really outdated. I guess blogs require some routine maintenance or whatever. Anyway, I decided to play house photographer in my living room. The results aren't too bad, I think.

The peacock chair has come downstairs, where it can get more attention. Plus it told me it wants to be seen with the giant wall hanging.

That lamp was a freebie from my friend Amanda. It needs a shade and some rewiring, but it has an awesome shape. I hope to get brave enough to play with it soon. Anybody out there know anything about rewiring vintage lamps? That scares me a little, but I've seen others manage it.

I think I made the right decision sticking with the green sofa. It keeps the room light and bright. Now I'm working on expanding my collection of pillows to break it up a little bit. I'm also dreaming of finding a reasonably priced cowhide rug for the middle of the living room.

And here's an extra photo of Simon chasing the laser pointer and scratching up the sofa. He's such a cute little monster.

My Dressing Room

It's been a year since I mentioned this little room in my house.  The last time I visited this topic, I was trying to decide what color to paint it. This was the last room I finally repainted, and I ended up going with BM Classic Gray walls and my usual BM Simply White on the trim. I painted this room last April or May, but then when I took my after photos, I cringed a little about sharing photos of my clothes. It just looks like a mess, even when it's clean. So I just didn't say anything about it.

But here it is. This is where I get dressed in the morning. I decided to finally share these photos because this room is next on the list to get its carpet torn out and its hardwood floors painted white. I'll have to empty everything out of this room in order to do this, and lately I've been tossing around the idea of turning this room from a dressing room to a craft room instead. It's nice to have a whole room dedicated to my process of getting ready in the morning, but I kind of think I would enjoy a craft room more.

It's not a bad space though, yes? I get up before Rand does every morning, so this provides a place where I can turn on all the lights and get ready for work without waking him up. I also love having all my clothes, shoes, bags, and scarves out where I can see them.

I love this tiny little room. It has four windows, three of which are unlike any others in the house. They are on hinges and used to swing into the room and attach to hooks on the ceiling. Unfortunately, they could no longer attach to the ceiling because the ceiling fan was in the way, and they were incredibly drafty. It was like standing in front of an air conditioner in the winter months just to be near those windows. We didn't really even use this room for that reason, so sadly, I caulked up those three beautiful windows. Caulk is removable, so they could be restored sometime in the future, but for now, this room is much warmer and functional, so I'm glad I did it. The fourth window is a double-hung window like we have throughout the rest of the house.

This dressing table rarely looks like this. It is usually piled high with clothes and whatever I empty out of my pockets each night (usually things my students have given to me). I love having a place to sit when I put on make up and fix my hair.

Here are some photos I snapped last year as I was getting ready to paint this room. It was an unbelievable mess. I had to fill a million holes in the trim with wood filler and sand, plus I discovered tape and nails sticking out all over the place. Someone had just painted over all the junk on the trim rather than taking it out and making it smooth. I was furious with the previous owners the entire time I worked on this room.

I'm still completely undecided on what I will do with this room. Either way, everything is coming out soon and that carpet is coming up. There's no telling what I'll find underneath, but I'm hoping to paint it all white like the bedroom. Then, I'll either move everything back in and keep it a dressing room (maybe with a few upgrades I have in mind) or I'll relocate my clothes and turn this room into a craft room.

I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on this project. I'll be back soon with some inspiration photos to help me make up my mind on this important life decision.

Kitchen Tour

Good morning! Time to tour my kitchen!  Disclaimer: this is a pretty small room and it was really tough to photograph. So be nice.

The previous owners of our home did a gut renovation of this kitchen before we got here. They installed the new lighting, cabinets, tile countertops, tin ceiling, stainless steel backsplash, sink and faucet, and floor tiles. I thought those things looked fine, and I couldn't afford to redo them, so they stayed as-is. I just did a few cosmetic improvements here and there.

I added the pot hanger early on. I'm not sure if I still like it that much, and our pots and pans are all old hand-me-downs from my family, but now that I've poked holes in the tin ceiling, I guess we'll keep it!  

The previous owner's paint job in this room was pretty terrible. I think they did it at the last minute as they were moving. Not only was it hideous with mustard walls and black trim, but the paint was bubbling and peeling off the trim.  We removed every piece of trim and sanded it down to bare wood to start fresh before priming and painting again. Now that paint is not going anywhere. Just like in the living room, the trim is Simply White, and the walls are Moonlight White, both by Benjamin Moore. We also added the trim along where the ceiling meets the wall. Before, it was just a rough edge of tin.

I painted the basement door with chalkboard paint, and the mountain art is a DIY with construction paper. The photo is an enlarged print from Celebration City in Branson, MO. You know, one of those old-timey pictures where you dress up and hold guns? It was taken about ten years ago, when I was still blonde.

I painted that stair runner forever ago. That landing below the little window where the living room stairs meet the kitchen stairs is actually called a "saddle." Then the stairs join together and go up to the second floor. The art on the wall is a Donald Judd knock-off by me, made with electrical tape.  

We sanded down the windows to bare wood, just like everything else, but I didn't repaint the inside part of the kitchen windows. My original plan was to paint that part of the windows Onyx, like our fireplace, but since then I've gotten busy with listing our house and making higher-priority repairs, so they are currently just stained wood. I'm not sure if I'll do anything different with them at this point.

Painting the walls of this room was a nightmare. At first, I had planned to paint this room light gray, like the dining room. I didn't think the wood cabinets would look right next to white walls, and I thought this room got enough light. After a coat of BM's Stonington Gray, I was stunned to see that the gray I had picked out looked periwinkle and way too dark. It was horrible.

So, I thought all I needed to do was go with a lighter gray. I grabbed another gallon of BM Classic Gray, which is the gray in our dining room and applied two coats. Still periwinkle and horrible. And still not sure how that color could look so right in the dining room and look so gross in the very next room.

I went with Moonlight White out of desperation, having painted my kitchen two different colors and two coats of each. Fortunately, this finally seemed to work, although I think I would have given up after that no matter how it looked. Interestingly, the Moonlight White looks like light gray in this room. *sigh*

At the end of the day, I really do love this kitchen. The layout really makes the most of the space, considering that we're dealing with the windows, stairs, and four doors in this tiny little kitchen. The tin ceiling and track lighting seem to make this room sparkle, and it really takes about ten minutes to get it completely clean.

And here's my favorite part:

{Before}

{After}

See what I mean about those paint colors? That before photo was from our walk-through with our realtor, during the day!  

Dining Room Tour

It was the Maskros light that started it all. I had been dreaming of a light, airy bungalow for a while, and I knew that painting the trim was the first step. But I just needed a nudge to get started. Last summer was my last long summer. I had agreed to move to a school with an extended school year, so I knew that this would be my last June off, and I felt the need to make it count. 

As I've mentioned before, I live in Missouri, seven hours away from the nearest Ikea. That means that Ikea products that the rest of the country takes for granted are like gold around here. I had wanted a Maskros light for so long, but I wasn't able to drive that far, and I just wouldn't pay Ikea's ridiculous shipping charges. So the Sunday after the last day of school, I typed "Ikea" into the search box on Craigslist, and a huge Maskros light came up. For $50. It was mine later that day.

Hyped up on my Craigslist find, I decided my house was not currently worthy of this light, so I called my sister, Lisa, and bribed her to come over in her painting clothes. Together we sanded, deglossed, primed, and painted all that trim, plus we painted the ceiling and the walls. The trim is Benjamin Moore's Simply White, and the walls are Classic Gray, also from BM. This gray, by the way, is the most perfect gray paint I've ever used. It is really light, but without too much of the green, purple, or blue undertones that grays often have.

By the end of that first week, my dining room was fit for a Maskros light.

The hanging garden was really hard to photograph, and I still think this photo is too dark, even after some Photoshop help. I'll give more details about the macrame plant hangers in another post. My plants absolutely love it here.

The yellow school chairs came from a flea market here in town.  I paid $30 for the set of four.  Right now they are randomly hanging out in different places around the house.  The table and chairs are from Pier 1, many years ago, and the armoire is an antique that my mom had in my nursery when I was a baby.

Like all normal people, I keep my bike in the dining room. Not only is this Huffy Suncountry fun to ride, but it's also nice to look at.  I got it for $5 at a garage sale.  Yes, $5!  One of my favorite finds.  The print above it is The Grand Taxonomy of Rap Names from Pop Chart Lab.  It was a Christmas present from Rand.

You know how I love to have old family stuff around my house. This radio belonged to my grandparents, and the container next to it belonged to my Papa. Like I said, this armoire was used to store baby stuff in my own nursery. My mom got it at a flea market when she was my age.  It conveniently breaks apart, without any screws, for easy loading into a covered wagon.

Thanks to all those amazing old windows, this room is always so full of light. I know there are those out there who might think it's a shame that I painted over the wood trim, but I'm in love with my new dining room. And of course, to really appreciate it, you have to see the before and after photos:

{Before}

{After}

So what do you think?

Living Room Tour

In a way, I'm a little late to the house blog party, since a lot of my rooms were redone before I started this blog. But since my house is still a work in progress, I still want to add some posts with before and after pictures, since the sweat and tears that went into these projects were no less important, even if they happened years ago.  

My living room was one of the most controversial rooms of my marriage when I finally painted it in June 2012. I thought the wood trim throughout our house was dark, dreary, and in bad shape anyway.  My husband was convinced that we had some sort of obligation to preserve the unpainted wood trim, and that painting it would be a horrible crime against home design history. I painted the trim white anyway, and now he loves it. It's easier to ask forgiveness...  

The wall color is Moonlight White, the trim is Simply White, and the fireplace in Onyx, all by Benjamin Moore. This was back when I really had no idea where to start, so I just used the colors that Anna Dorfman used throughout her house. I figured anything she's done would be a safe bet, and sure enough, I am still in love with these colors. Moonlight White reads as white, but with a tiny bit of gray that makes it interesting, and it is so beautiful next to the bright white trim.

The only paint color I'm not sure of is the brown I used to paint the stair runner. I just used some leftover paint I found in the basement. That project must have been in between paychecks.

Painting the trim in our house almost killed me. It was shellacked, so it had to be sanded and deglossed.  I primed all of it only to notice that the wood was bleeding through, so I switched to a heavy duty primer, and still had to apply two more coats of primer. When the wood finally stopped bleeding, I had to apply two full coats of paint to get good coverage over the primer. By the time I was done, I had gone over every inch of that old wood trim seven times. Hands. So. Tired. 

Everything in this room is an item I love, and I've tried to gather and arrange things as carefully and thoughtfully as I can. The camera on the left is the Minolta my dad bought in Japan during the Vietnam War.  My grandfather's WWII foot locker is spray painted gold and serves as an end table next to the chaise lounge. The giant E was a flea market find, and it looks like the E in MOTEL, with holes for light bulbs to stick through. I made the hanging pendent lights (before Pinterest existed, just saying), and the table runner under the TV is handmade from a lady in my hometown.

That fiber wall hanging above the sofa was an incredible find at a flea market. I had seen wall hangings like this before on blogs, in art galleries, and all around Pinterest, so I was so excited to find one buried under a pile of junk in the basement of a flea market for $3. The credenza, saucer chair, and vintage lamps are also from flea markets, while the coffee table and matching end table were purchased on Craigslist.

While I love decorating my home, I'm a little self-conscious about my skills when it comes to photographing my home. I don't have a particularly nice camera or photo-editing software, and I also just don't think I'm very good at it. But I want to get better...so here's my first try.

Disclaimer: I don't love that sofa and loveseat set. That is the cheap set we purchased for our first apartment nine years ago.  I want a new sofa so bad! But my budget says to wait, so that's what I have to do.

Want to see what this room looked like when we first walked through this house?

{Before}

Yes, the fireplace was painted red. And do you see what I mean about the trim being too dark? If you could see it up close, you would also see how it was in terrible shape and had been stained different shades in different sections. I don't regret my decision to paint the trim at all. 

{After}