(I know, sounds like too much, doesn’t it?)

Painting my kitchen has made some of my previous bright, kitschy artwork obsolete:

Though they were cute, I’m selling my roosters, which don’t really go with the muted wall color anymore, and it’s time for someone else to enjoy them. That leaves a small space which I have unsuccessfully tried to fill, but I’m wanting something a little more – dare I say it – modern?

I love gocco because it has that feeling of being old in a new way, like pictures taken with a Holga. What is gocco? The savegocco.com website explains:

Print gocco, is a Japanese color screenprinting system developed in 1977 by Noboru Hayama. Resembling a toy, the compact and completely self-contained printer is clean, quick and easy to use. The system works using flash bulbs, a carbon-based image or photocopy and an emulsion-coated screen. When the bulbs are manually flashed the carbon burns the screen into a stencil. Several colors of Ink can then be applied at one time and multiples can be stamped out, as many as 100 before re-inking is needed. Fans of print gocco appreciate its size, cleanliness, relatively inexpensive cost, and the fact that several colors can be printed in one “pass.”

If this sounds too complicated and you lack a modicum of creative skills, there are a lot of very talented artists selling their gocco prints on etsy. Here are some contenders for my kitchen corner (or that I just think are cool):

Summer Song gocco print, $12

Forsythia branch gocco print, $6

tiny village gocco print, $20 from katep

hey hi banana print, $15 from sugarcookie

vintage lamps gocco print, $8 from cindytomczykart

Gold Series 3 by AmyMarcella, $20

pumpernickel flowers by wonting, $10

fish school gocco by kerrybeary, $12

Golden Fruit by pinkbathtub, $10

Double Camera gocco by leighwells, $18

occie orie 1.1 by birdsandswings, $14

Sacre Coeur by LizzyStewart, $25

Gocco Misprint/Fun print by e50e, just $5!

Raindrop gocco print by blancucha, $22

cluster leaf print by meganauman, $10

Shine by deebeale, $20

Doodle Gocco by nateduval, $15

I think I’m going to have to go with katep’s tiny village, but I have to buy e50e’s misprint because it’s awesome and only $5. I’ll find someplace to put it later.

The cat may require a particular taste, but I love the chains and the holders.

I shouldn’t really have to sell the idea of hanging plants indoors. They add an instant lived-in, full of life feeling to a space. And since the addition of Grow on Abbot Kinney around the corner from my house, I’ve sort of got plants on my mind. Hanging plants usually come in plastic pots with wire hangers that are zero steps above what you get at the dry cleaners. You’d probably like to free them from this eyesore state, but how to hang them? Often at flea markets I come across pulleys, tools, and yoke parts that would make terrific plant hangers:

Oh, the potential! I'd love to hang a plant or chair from that pulley.

I see pulleys like this one at just about every flea market I go to, but there are plenty of them on ebay:

$14, no bids yet.

opening bid: $12

Also, how awesome is this:

Current bid: $29

or this one for just $12:

$12 via etsy

And these I found at a flea market and antique store, respectively:

have a great weekend!

Saw an adorable idea on AT today that I would desperately like to replicate: the farm-style screen door on the pantry:

via Apartment Therapy

Pantry screen door via flickr

Indoor screen door via Coastal Living

Another idea from the Why Didn’t I Think of That department.

The first part of this exercise is spent preparing your canvas, and that may include painting. Painting a room is, for me, a very zen and calming exercise because it requires a great deal of concentration around the detail parts but lets you totally zone out during the big parts. Then, all of a sudden, you have this transformed space that often evokes a completely different feeling.

The erstwhile green living/dining room was a little garish and wacky, but the pale gray is soothing.

I tend to paint rooms in our house with some frequency; if I get an idea for a different color, I can’t withstand the old one for more than a couple weeks. So over the course of the last three years, I’ve learned a few things about painting a room.

Painting Rule #1: buying paint without looking at swatches in the room rarely delivers enviable results.

It’s kind of a pain in the ass to go to the paint store, find a few chips or sample pots you like, go home, look at them on your walls in different lights, go back to the store and order the paint. But it’s even more irritating to buy an entire gallon (or even a quart, for that matter) of something you think is going to be totally awesome that the next day makes you want to retch. Along with this rule goes the knowledge that just about any brand of paint will color match any other’s, or, for that matter, any decent-sized swatch of any color you can come up with, so don’t feel limited by the over-saturated, under-cool palettes you see at the store.

Painting Rule #2: Despite simply being more expensive, better paint is, in point of fact, better.

It’s no secret that I have a certain amount of disdain for “category killer” big box stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s. I understand that sometimes you need to paint on a Sunday, and that most smaller stores that sell good paint are all closed on Sunday. I also understand that sometimes an extra $12 is out of the question. But the pain of waiting a few more days or saving up a few more dollars will be mitigated by your results: the finish is just nicer and the coverage is better. Plus, you get to avoid standing in a line ten people deep waiting anxiously for your number to get called by someone who visibly has much better things to do. The first time I painted the bedroom, I used an entire gallon of Behr paint over a primed surface. This time around, I used a quarter of a gallon of Yolo Colorhouse without priming, which has led me to think that Yolo, for $40, covers about four times as well as Behr, which if I recall was somewhere around $26-$30. If you have a large job to do, you will absolutely end up saving money and getting better coverage. I was also very impressed with American Pride, also adorably marketed as Mythic Paint.

Learn to paint clean, straight lines and avoid the need for painter's tape.

Painting Rule #3: Tools matter.

Buy the nicest synthetic brush you’re comfortable with ($8-$10) in about a 1 to 1 1/2 inch width and rinse it out when you’re done so you can use it for other projects. This brush will allow you to skip the bored-sigh-inducing step of taping off trim areas, which is an utter waste of time if you have a good trim brush and can learn to paint straight, even lines (windowpanes are a different story) by using the tip of the brush instead of the face, and spreading out a small amount of paint across and away from the line you’re painting. And you should probably have extra trim and wall paint handy, because even if you’re as stunningly gifted as I am at painting, you’ll still screw something up sometime.

I also greatly prefer smaller rollers – an inch in diameter instead of two:

Smaller paint rollers are easier to handle, cover more effectively, and require less energy to use.

Painting Rule #4: Trim does not have to be white.

I love the idea of monochromatic trim, so I used it in the bedroom:

I painted the bright gold a calmer greige with slightly darker trim.

Already, the room feels more comfortable and calmer. Next time, I’ll solve my storage dilemmas!

A year ago, i redecorated our dark brown bedroom with an adorable little woodsy theme:

I used painter's tape and a craft knife to create these birch-y trees and birds.

which was really fun for a while, but every few months I get the itch to paint or redecorate, or both.
Sometimes on HGTV they have these decorate-on-a-budget shows where they have $500 to redo a room, and I am always close to throwing something at the television, or at least shaking my fists in rage, because of how they’ve squandered their fortune on tacky crafts and chintzy fabrics. It also crosses my mind that I could do better.

So I wanted to see if I could do better than these shows and redo this room for under $300, including paint, lighting, bedding, storage and whatever else it needs. Now, this room doesn’t need any furniture because, well, it’s a bedroom and we already built our own bed, so this will be largely decorating-related. And I’m going to do it in two weeks.

The Apartment Therapy Cure is a great starting point for redecorating a room, but since we’re not going that in depth, I’m going to borrow some of their basic steps for this two-week quickie.

day one: build a vision for your room

Domino’s Deco File tool is a great way to collect images from anywhere on the web into one inspirational file, but it’s also helpful to maintain a “style tray” in the real world with paint swatches, fabrics, photos, and magazine cutouts. For this bedroom, I’ve started a deco file at Domino here, but here are some of my favorites:

I love everything about this room.

I love the maps and all the wood here.

Bedroom from hownowdesign on Flickr, with found swan

A perfect vignette of old and brown things.

Look through your sample photos and come up with few adjectives to describe what you like about them. The words can relate to textures, colors, materials, emotions, places, or anything else the pictures say to you or remind you of that you want to duplicate in your room. for the pictures in my style tray, my words are:

• beige
• rustic
• soft
• wood
• calm
• antique

Once you have you list of photos and words, think about how you can create a room that embodies them:

• beige – paint color
• rustic – sisal rug
• soft – organic cotton sheets
• wood – floors and furniture
• calm – lighting
• antique – wall art and artifacts

All this may or may not be in our budget right now, but we’re not going to worry about that until day two. BTW, it’s best to start this process on, say, a Monday or Tuesday before your favorite flea market if you need to buy anything, to give you a chance to determine exactly what you need. See my thrifty guide for flea markets in the LA area.

Tomorrow: What goes in there? Deciding what you need in your room.

Discarded scraps from Christmas trees, a craft waiting to happen.

This may be my thriftiest moment yet. When Alex and I were buying our Christmas tree, I noticed these wood rounds laying around from where they had sawed off the bottoms of other trees. Never one to miss an opportunity to indulge my obsession with wood (especially fresh cut douglas fir that smells incredible), I discreetly picked up seven or eight rounds and put them in my bag. While some of them – like those above – are too uneven to be coasters or hold candles, others were more level and had holes through them where the tree stand had been.

I'm no artist in tangible mediums, clearly.

As a designer, I work on the computer and not with a paintbrush. So when this turned out a little silly, I was glad I only painted one side. The smaller, more level ones like these could be used as coasters (painted if you know what you’re doing, left alone if you’re like me) as well.

Our Christmas tree is adorned with pinecones and vintage ornaments.

Our characteristically thrifty tree also features grocery store pinecones and vintage Shiny Brite ornaments. Flea market vendors bring out all their holiday stuff this time of year, and vintage ornaments are plentiful.

I bought this perfect set of 12 ornaments at the Venice High School flea market for $20.

I am no Martha Stewart. Sure, I like to make stuff, but it’s in more of a camp counselor way than a David Rakoff way. So when I bought a few evergreen boughs at the Venice farmers’ market on Friday for $4, I thought, hey, I bet I could make a pretty amateur rustic wreath.

Evergreen boughs bought at the farmers' market for $4

See that wire hanger there? That was going to be my mold, so to speak (I found it in Alex’s side of the closet; I could never use a wire hanger, but I’m glad he gets the dry cleaning). The concept is simple: mold the wire hanger into a round shape and a hook, and shape your branches around it. As I shaped my branches, I realized I wanted something a little larger, so I decided to do my wreath freehand, threading thin wire around the branches and under the needles to form a circle.

Threading the wire close to the branch allows the outside of the wreath to appear seamless.

Once you’ve got your circle, you’re pretty much done. I guess you could go in for some ribbon or berries, but I find the concept of the simple pine branches fulfilling enough. Plus, I’m lazy. Merry Christmas!

You know, it actually looks pretty good.

I love holiday time. Frankly, I see no other reason for cold weather to exist than to help set the holiday mood, and only now is the chill creeping into the balmy Southern California air. Even though I’m not hosting any Thanksgiving feasts in our house, a tribute to the dining room and an adventure in refinishing are in order.

Dining room, before and after. Click to enlarge.

Our dining room has been through a lot. First it was painted Kermit green, then it was over-bookshelved, adorned with patio chairs, and graced with a table that was stained black and flaking polyurethane. The paint was replaced with a lovely gray, the superfluous bookshelf was eradicated, the chairs were moved to the actual patio, and finally, this weekend, the table was refinished.

The table in progress

Originally, I wanted to use Franmar’s Soy Gel Paint Remover because I’d heard such good things about it and I knew where to find it – that is, I thought I knew where to find it. Last Saturday I was just about to head out to Livingreen in Culver City, my erstwhile resource for eco-friendly paints, cleaning supplies, and the like, when I decided to check their website for hours. Lo and behold, Livingreen has now closed their doors to the public and is “to the trades” only. Yeah? Fine. It hurts, but fine. Whatever. On to plan B. Since Franmar Chemical has no store locator, I couldn’t easily find another resource, so I asked the friendly folks at Anawalt Lumber if they had anything similar. They gave me a bottle of Back to Nature soy gel stripper for free since they hadn’t put it on the shelves yet, if I promised to come back and give a report. So here it is.

Scraping is neither fun nor easy.

Back to Nature “safer” paint and varnish remover promises to begin lifting in as little as 30 minutes. What they don’t seem to mention is that the spray will probably dry in about 45 minutes. So if you wait longer than say, 40 minutes, the product has dried and is impossible to scrape off unless you apply another coat, which we found we had to do anyway. And it smelled like Advantage, those topical flea treatments I hate to use on our pets.

Eventually, we found that three coats did the trick – spray on, brush to coat evenly, wait 40 minutes, scrape, sand, and repeat two more times, using my trusty sidekick Citrasolv to help get some of the stain out. With the size of the table, we quickly ran out, and I decided to switch it up a little for the other end and try Citristrip, a citrus-based gel stripper. Huge difference. The Citristrip – I couldn’t find a manufacturer or website, but I bought it at Cox paints – was only $12 and went a lot farther than the soy. Just two coats did the trick, and it didn’t dry as readily as the Back to Nature. Scraping was much, much easier and it smelled like an orange grove growing orange popsicles and lollipops.

The finished wood.

After all the old varnish and some of the stain (I wanted to keep it somewhat dark) was gone, the sanding began. I used two grades of sandpaper that the nice guy at Cox paints recommended – one sort of coarse and one quite fine. After a good once over with the coarser sheets, I gave her a buffing with some butcher block oil (I have no idea if this was the right thing to do, but it seemed to work well) and then another sanding with the fine sheets, with the grain, and another coat of oil. Eventually, after Thanksgiving, I’m going to finish it with tung oil, as recommended here. A shiny finish just won’t do for this beauty, and the wood is so soft and smooth on its own that I couldn’t bear to cover it with anything.

The finished product.

Not bad for a free Craigslist find.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, and use your dining room!

I’m kind of obsessed with Alton Brown’s show Good Eats on the Food network. I find it difficult to actually cook anything without first watching a related episode (they’re all on YouTube, but sometimes I’m lucky to find something relevant in the ten episodes we keep on TiVo). In his Spice Capades episode, he points out that the best way to store spices is in generic tins in a dark, cool place marked by date. I also recently noticed that Albertson’s and Whole Foods started carrying herbs and spices in tiny little packages for just this purpose – they’re less bulky than plastic or tin spice containers and are not meant for storage. So I went though our spice rack and realized that we actually had some things up there with a use by date sometime between 2002 and 2006. Gross.

Tiny magnets hold up spice tins

I got these incredibly strong magnets from a stationery store long ago, but found they hold up even full tins well. They’re shown on our fridge for now because I haven’t taken the time to put up magnetic strips on the inside of our kitchen cabinet. For the tins, I ordered from Specialty Bottle because they offered wholesale pricing with no minimum – the 2oz tins seen on the refrigerator above were 50 cents each. I’m sure you could find other companies by Googling “wholesale tins”, but I was happy with the tins I got.

This left me with a lot of glass spice jars. By soaking them in vinegar diluted with water for several hours, I was able to easily remove their labels, and after a turn in the dishwasher, they became neat little pen holders.

Glass spice jars used for pen holders

Oh, and yes, we covered our white refrigerator with woodgrain contact paper. Tropical walnut, I believe.

I admit, this project has very limited appeal. It’s probably only really useful if you have relatively small animals to whom you wish to deny ingress into a very small space, as I happened to need to do. But I thought it was kind of a neat idea, and it’s definitely thrifty.

Canvas stretchers come in a variety of incremental sizes and make affordable frames.

As a commercial designer and not a fine artist, I never had any reason to use canvas for painting. But after stumbling upon an empty canvas frame at a flea market, I realized it had some potential. Canvas stretcher bars are basically the four sides that make up a whole frame over which to stretch a canvas for painting (I got mine at Mittel’s Art Center in Santa Monica, on Lincoln just south of Pico). They come in a wide range of sizes from about 6-8 inches (can be less than a dollar, depending on your source) to about 60 inches ($7-$9), and fit together solidly at the corners, creating a frame in any size you want. Because they’re made of untreated wood, usually pine, they stain beautifully, and because they have this tongue-and-groove design, they allow you to hold on to their Achilles’ heel while staining without adverse results.

Untreated wooden canvas stretcher bars stain easily and beautifully.

Once stained and assembled, I added chicken wire to the back, purchased from my local hardware store for about 60 cents per square foot. I nailed the wire to the back using U-shaped nails (sorry, I don’t know or want to take the time to find a more technical term) and hung them on the outside of my kitchen window using simple hinges at about $4 per pair. Here’s how the almost final product came out:

The final product cost about $40, excluding the stain and finish, which I already had.

I still need to find a little latch closure like this:

vintage hook like I want, but is oddly hard to find

Hey, I bet you could probably also stretch fabrics over these for wall hangings. Fabrics like canvas. Let your imagination run free!