Working Studio {or, where I've been this summer}

After a long and winding road finishing this space and a quick summer 

attempting to recover from that project, the studio is finally in working order and I am using it daily. 

I didn't get any pictures of the beautiful butcher block counter, farm sink, and custom designed laundry area, but I will post those when I take them. Thank you so much for all you did to make this a beautiful and functional space, Mom and Alan!

I've been studying and drawing and painting (and teaching) this summer. And I'm keeping up with the laundry better too! I am so grateful for this place to work and to those who have encouraged me 

in these efforts, most notably my dear husband, Scott.

Here are a few of my most recent paintings.

Trees in Shadow, 16 x 20, oil on stretched canvas

Fallen Branch, 8 x 10, oil on linen board

Afternoon on the Trail, 5 x 7, oil on linen board

Trees in Meadow, 9 x 11, oil on canvas board

 

Studio Sneak Peek

This weekend Scott's mom and stepdad came to visit and to work 

on a little project about which I am super-excited. We are converting our detached garage 

into an art studio and Alan is generously doing much of the labor to make my dream studio a reality.

This weekend he framed the ceiling and partition wall (to divide the studio side of the garage 

from the storage side), cut and installed a window, and added a door.  

{Thank you, Alan!}

Over the next month or so we'll be finishing up the electrical work, sheetrock, floor, counter and trim. We plan to install an Ikea counter and sink, epoxy the concrete floor, and I have all kinds of dreams about storage and functional design. Follow my "dream studio" board on Pinterest (see the sidebar) if you want a glimpse 

of that obsession.

The room is taking shape and I can't wait to start using it!

Green Gallery Wall {a study in landscape}

My living room has been a slow work in progress ever since we moved in to this house seven years ago.  We've experimented with a few different rugs, replaced old furniture, added a new (old) chandelier, painted the walls white, and I've tweaked and shifted things around almost daily. 

(That's one of my gifts weaknesses--don't judge!)

I recently redesigned the one big boring wall in the room by creating a gallery wall of original art. Four of the paintings are mine (three oil and one watercolor) and one painting I bought on ebay.

 The composition of the paintings on the wall was tough to figure out. After lots of unsuccessful experimenting with the four oil paintings, I realized I needed one more little one, so I rummaged around in my stash and found the watercolor which I had painted years ago.

I traced the shape of each frame on brown packing paper and cut them out to use as templates on the wall.

Once I decided on the composition, I taped them up to make sure I liked how they were centered and how they filled the space.  Then Scott and I hung the frames with a few minor adjustments and came up with this ~

 The painting on the top left is the watercolor I painted in college. It's a landscape from a photo I took in the mountains outside of Quito, Equador. The top middle is an oil I did a few months ago from a shot I took this summer while we were vacationing on the Oregon coast. The painting on the top right was done in college as well, a study of a Van Gogh. I painted the one on the bottom right a few years ago for an art show at our church.

They are tied together through color and theme, but vary a bit in style. I like gallery walls that are more random, too, but I'm loving the repeated green fields and ocean imagery in this collection.
I think it brightens up the room, and the added height and gold accents relate to the chandelier and make the room feel a little bigger to me.

Tupperware Organization {with full disclosure}

Um. I have to admit something to you. 

I have a discipline problem. 

I'm great with intentions and planning and envisioning the perfect _______ . 

(Just fill in the blank.) 

But I'm not very good with follow-through. If it's a short term, projecty, 

boom-and-then-it's-over kind of a thing then I really shine. But the laundry . . .

Coming to this realization has been really helpful. 

Any new attempts to get my life in order are made with more realistic expectations, hoping for modest gains, and once I find a system I can maintain I feel a real sense of achievement.

Enter my tupperware problem. Does this look familiar to you? 

It occurred to me a year and a half ago that the frustrating experience of never being able to find a matching lid and barely being able to close the tupperware drawer could maybe (maybe?) be remedied.

So I took everything out, stacked like shapes, and threw away any lids with out bottoms and vice versa.  I came up with the brilliant plan (via google) to keep lids in a separate container and I found an old plastic crate in the garage to corral the bottoms.

Then I waited to see if I would follow through and keep up the system. 

A week passed. A month. A year. 

And so, it is with great pride that I present to you my tupperware drawer a year and a half later ~

 

Ta da! I have a new and improved green crate and (you may notice) 

my super-organization has resulted in some color-coordinated decorating pride.

{Full disclosure: This is what the other counter looked like when I took this picture.}

And, my little helper . . .

Three cheers for self-awareness, low expectations, and little victories!

Chalkboard Inspiration

Inspired by Dana Tanamachi's amazing chalkboard creations, as mentioned by these two bloggers, 

I decided to jazz up my dining room chalkboard this week.

I've enjoyed keeping a passage of scripture or some other poetry or lyrics displayed in this busy space. Hopefully, these true and restful words can give my soul a moment of pause and reflection 

even while I'm wiping mashed eggs off the floor or giving a spelling test (or both).

The look I was trying to achieve with this hymn took some pre-planning on paper in order to determine how the phrases could fit together in an eclectic way while still being readable and balanced. 

I especially like how the word "Grace" stands out in the center of the board.

Praise God for the sufficiency of Jesus' blood and rightousness, 

and the sure anchor of his unchanging grace which holds us safe, 

even in the midst of the whelming flood. 

 I'm looking forward to seeing this daily reminder in the weeks to come.

Mustard Yellow Table {love it or hate it?}

Lately I've been loving bright, mustard yellow. I think it started with a scarf I got last summer and now it has resulted in a little table transformation in our living room. Scott and I originally picked up this sturdy end table a few years ago from friends who were moving and I refinished it in a creamy white. I pretty quickly realized the white was too "antique" for me and the table just looked blah.

After collecting some images of little French tables on Pinterest and mulling it over (secretly) for quite a while, I decided to paint it a bright mustard yellow. 

 Scott said, "It's very yellow." I said, "Trust your wife."

Next, I sanded off some of the new paint, revealing some of the old white paint 

and the pale bare wood underneath.

Then, in order to give it a more aged look, I stained the exposed wood.

A final coat of wipe-on polyeurethane finished the job and gave it a hard, durable seal.

The whole project took just a few hours, with most of that time spent waiting for the paint to dry. I bought only a little sample jar of Valspar's "jackson square" paint (from the allen + roth collection at Lowe's) and that was plenty to do the job. The stain and polyeurethane were leftovers from other projects.

And now I have a much more interesting little corner in our living room.

I'm pretty sure a lot of people would think this kind of furniture refinishing is rather unfortunate--

who would want this garish, mismatched table in their home?

Well, call me crazy, but I do!

So what do you think?

Love it, or hate it?

Free and Fast Table Setting {Pure Style Pretty}

 In the many (lovely and inspiring) hours (that I will never get back) viewing home decor-ish ideas in the vast reaches of the interwebs, I have landed on a few brilliant concepts that have made their way into my home.

One of these is the beautiful design sense of Lauren Liess, through her blog Pure Style Home. Lauren's style is a little vintage, a little traditional, a little modern, a bit of kitsch, and lots of simple, natural, comfort.

She often features twigs and clippings and random natural objects she picks up on the side of the road. 

I love how she encourages the discovery of beauty in quirky unexpected places 

and then (boldly) brings that living design into the home.

This Christmas Eve, just before dinner was ready, I had a Pure Style Home moment. I pulled out my wrinkled (relaxed/casual!) tablecloth and napkins, assembled a collection of mercury glass votives, and went out into the yard with some garden shears, ready to bring in any pretty thing that might work.

The result was a mixture of eugenia clippings and ferns in a low vase for a centerpiece 

and single ferns on each napkin for place settings.

Don't you think it's kind of thrilling to create something free and fast and beautiful, or is that just me?

(You can find a link to Lauren's blog ~ Pure Style Home ~ on the sidebar.)

Meal Plan Plan {i.e. planning to make a plan}

I am big on organizational intentions and not much on follow through. 

That's because I'm  lazy right brained, creative, and spontaneous. 

It's been a helpful thing to recognize this and learn to adapt my plans to this reality. 

Here's how I compensate for my loss of motivation in follow-through: 

keep it super-simple.

For me this involves thinking through the spaces in our home, how we use them, 

and what super-simple things I could do to maintain them. 

This is our entry/mud room/music room (below). 

Like most of the spaces in our home it does double and triple-duty. After tripping on backpacks, music bags, and shoes for years, we finally realized we needed a place, right here by the door, to keep these things.  

I'd love to have a long bench with cubbies and cute little chalkboard tags, a hook for each member of the family, and a shelf to display lovely storage-y items.  Instead I have a big basket and a wooden crate. 

It's super-simple. It works. 

Meal planning is similar. There are a few necessary steps: deciding which meals to make, 

grocery shopping, thawing/prepping early in the day, making and serving the meal. 

I used to get stalled after and even during the shopping part. 

Something about the implementation broke-down and I bought things I thought we would eat 

but didn't have a plan for, my meats were never thawed at the right time, 

and I still felt at a loss in knowing on any given day what to make for dinner.

Here's my simple solution:

1. Make a long list of meals our family eats and use this as reference while meal planning. (I keep this on my computer.) What a relief not to have to come up with meals from my scattered and uncooperative memory.

2. Look at the weather and our weekly schedule and plan meals that work for this week. (I am pretty moody when it comes to cooking and I know I'm not going to want a roast when it's warm outside.)

3. Write down which meal will be made on which day. I write mine on the chalkboard in the kitchen. That way I don't have to make a decision each day about what we will have for dinner. There's a default, super-simple list already in place to tell me what needs to be thawed or prepped or what have you.

4. Shop for those specific meals and try not to impulse-buy. (Especially at Costco!)

This works for me. What works for you?

{P.S. This week's meal plan is already on the wall.}

Craigslist Storage Saga

I have a tolerate/hate relationship with Craigslist. 

I've spent a lot of time searching for the perfect something or other, but every time I've actually decided to buy it's been disappointing--people not home when they said they'd be, furniture in poorer condition than advertized--basically a waste of time and gas money. 

But, hope springs eternal, 

and I continue to imagine the perfect this-or-that can be found (cheap!) on Craigslist.

With Jack starting kindergarten this year, I found myself in need of some more storage space for all of our school supplies and so my Craigslist-hunting began. I needed a cabinet with very specific dimensions to fit in the spot I had in mind and be large enough for our storage needs.  In addition to the size I decided that I wouldn't waste my time on anything that wasn't solid wood, or very close to home.

I finally found the perfect candidate:

the perfect size

located nearby

reasonable price

solid wood

and the ad said "excellent condition."

Well, "excellent" turned out to be wonky. The top was loose, the shelf was close to breaking, and the doors were all slightly askew. 

But, hope still abounding, 

and considering the perfection of the size, I decided to try to make it work.

I don't have pictures of the very boring, tedious, never-ending project of sanding, priming, painting, shelf re-enforcing and re-assembling process. Thank me.

I also don't have pictures of myself, sitting in front of the blasted thing, scratching my head, fiddling with levels and tape measures and new hinges and such, trying to figure out why for the life of me I could not get the doors to hang properly.

So we skip ahead to after I took it apart again, squared it all up with exacting precision, nailed it back together, and then had to touch up all the marks and scuffs that the whole baffling process caused. 

{By the way, I used this paint additive called Floetrol to thin out the paint a bit and lengthen the drying time in order to lessen the brush strokes and allow me to touch up with super-thin coats, so I didn't have to repaint the whole thing. Phew.}

And here's the finished product:

I lined the back of the cabinet with scrapbooking paper 

and changed out the wooden knobs for metal ones.

The paper was mounted using highly professional scotch tape.

This project took a lot longer than I would have guessed, but in the end I think it was worth it.

It provides plenty of space for our school supplies, with room to grow.

And it fits in my smallish living room perfectly.

Thanks, Craigslist. (Kind of.)