What Have We Done!?! (What we have done)

Back in early July, we reached the all important done-but-not-finished stage with the guestroom/Brie's office/Craft room as seen below. Since then we've mostly use this space for guests (big win) and also for overflow storage while shifting ballast from room to room during other projects. Other than the addition of some end tables, it was in a pause. Circling back to this space, Brie used the back half of December to tackle the closet, which she had always intended to have a built in table and work space. In the breezeway that connects the house to The Room, the previous owners had installed a coat closet of sorts, though it oddly jutted into The Room, cus why have anything make spatial sense? What is life? You can see the platform for this closet and the doors that opened to the breezeway in the above picture. The doors, like all doors in the house, were the shittiest of hollow core doors (Here's a decent explainer on hollow core vs solid core vs solid wood doors ). Brie s...

Supergraphics. They're back! Proof ! Supergraphics are just paint finishes designed to give architectural qualities to walls, ceilings and floors. They often use opposing angles, lines, and curves to create a sense of movement in a space or connecting multiple spaces.  They had a major moment in the 70s as this weird hybrid mutant child of the mod 60s and Up with People . They're one of the inflection points indicating the tail end of the classic mid-century design period. And yet there are ample examples of successfully implemented supergraphics that meshed well with the Usonian core of the mid-century design.  Much of it has to do with the correct colors and using the shapes to help define the space rather than just decorating it.  *** Brie sketched out a supergraphic for the back hallway early last February and since then supergraphics decided to become trendy on social media. The pain of being on-trend. With Blaine's help we're going get the sketch up on the walls ...

 A year of muscle memory makes flooring a room a shockingly pedestrian effort these days. 200ft² room runs about 3 days during the work week and 2 days with no interruptions. But there are pitfalls in efficiency. You see, we have this sensitive dog and he thrives on routine. It normally takes him a day or so just to adjust to one of these room shifts where everything goes somewhere else to create space. With Brie and I effortlessly achieving drift compatibility, it's easy to forget about the sensitive boy and his grumpy grandma sister.  *** Typically Brie handles snap-in installation while I handle cutting boards to size. This creates a logical flow where I deliver cuts, step away for a couple of minutes to do my job, then swing back to pick up new marked boards on my way outside to cut them. The dogs tend to follow me while I'm moving from station to station and are generally sanguine despite choosing to monitor my work over hitting their normal nap times.  Yesterday I m...

Just a progress shot today as we made great progress on flooring my office. Tomorrow (or Wednesday as time allows) will be all about the closet. We have to remove the baseboards, pry out the nails, saw off the bottom of the closet casing to allow room for the flooring, and then do some custom cork cutting to fit around all the nooks and crannies. -S.

We spent our New Year's Eve day painting my room. It's physically located between Brie's room/guest room (sage brown walls with earth tone red/browns/greens) and the our bedroom (warm, saturated blue/black). There was desire to balance the colors, without creating two similar rooms. We played around with lighter blues and yellows, but with the cork flooring the blues made the room look like a nursery and yellows were all too close in tone to the cork so it made the room look like a 1 color cube. We also know that this room is going to see a lot of art/canvases/framed items hung up and that took most higher note or saturated greens off the table as they would make a terrible backdrop for most of these pieces. We ended up spinning the wheel on a more saturated purple that was warm, but not too heavy. I also wanted to bring in another grounding color b/c unlike Brie's room where her closet doesn't go to the ceiling, I have this giant wall above the closets and wanted t...

We spent Friday breaking down my office and moving it into the bonus room. This led to the discovery of an outlet that didn't have power that previous did have, yadda yadda things snowball. So here's a belated post and then another to come. While I share some space with the dogs, we're going to paint and floor my office. But I really want to highlight someone else's writing today. *** McMansion Hell is a top notch architecture and style criticism blog run by the furiously talented Kate Wagner and they alternately feature discussions on trends in bad house décor and design and lessons in proper and logical architectural applications.  Since Blogmas is focusing on a lot of the color and design choices we're considering, I thought their most recent post, on the whiting/greying of the American home and how these decisions are often made based on exterior assumptions over interior demands, fit perfectly. Please enjoy. this house may or may not be real -S.  

Today I present a brief photo essay on the taxonomy of piles titled: "Stuff, Junk, or Trash"  ***  We're nearing the end of year 1 in the house and many of our belongings are still A) in boxes or B) piled up somewhere on shelves or in closets. Duck Brand funded a study about moving and according to that limited source, Americans take about 6 months to fully unpack after major moves. And there are some major outliers like boxes in storage for 6 years or books in the basement for 3 years. A lot of it points to people owning and shlepping things around the world that they don't actually have need or place for.  This morning I threw out a box of items I had been holding on to for nearly a decade. I perceived it to have some emotional value and some practical value, but the start-up energy to in any way make use of the items in the box was enormous for an, at best, intangible pay off. That box traveled from the Knoxville house to storage, from storage to our Virginia apart...