This week is week one of the Apartment Therapy Fall Cure. It’s no secret that I’m way into the cure and I think everyone should do it, no excuses (that means you, my dear). Not only am I determined to actually finish it this year, but I’m going a little further: I’m doing a “green” cure, which, in addition to my usual modus operandi of limiting what I buy new (if anything), using recycled materials where possible, choosing environmentally-friendly paints and cleaners, and reusing what I have, I’m also going to reduce or eliminate as many animal products as possible. I could get really preachy and give you dozens of reasons for going vegan, but instead, I’ll just say this: animals raised as livestock take up an inordinate part of our natural resources including water and plants made into feed, their waste pollutes our water supply, overfishing for human and livestock consumption is depleting our oceans and destroying their ecosystems, cows release more atmosphere-destroying gas than cars, and jammed feedlots produce mutant strains of flu. There are lots of things you can do to help the environment, but few are as profound as adopting a vegan lifestyle.

Okay, end rant.

To this end, all the meals I cook at home during the cure (and for like ever) will be vegan, and if they’re any good, I’ll share the recipes. Here’s one to get you started:

Hearty Vegan Chili

1 tablespoon oil (olive or canola, whatever)
1 small yellow onion, chopped
1 leek, chopped
1 stalk celery, also chopped
1 carrot, diced (optional)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 red bell pepper, diced
1 tablespoon chili powder (or to taste)
2 teaspoons ground cumin (always better to use whole seeds, toast them, and grind them yourself)
1 teaspoon salt
(see below – spices are added twice)
pinch of cayenne pepper
pinch of chipotle chili powder (optional)
3 cups vegetable broth (or so, depending on how thick you want it)
2 tablespoons chickpea flour (or your favorite flour, that was what I had)
2 cups white beans (I used dried and cooked, which I’m pretty sure is better than canned)
1/2 cup fruity, tart white wine
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
1 tablespoon chili powder (or to taste)
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon salt
pinch of cayenne pepper (yes these are repeated)
1 28-ounce can stewed tomatoes
2 teaspoons tomato paste
2 cups prepared polenta (so start with 1/2 cup or so dried cornmeal)

Cook onion, leek, celery, and carrot in oil over medium high heat until just beginning to brown. Add red pepper and cook for another five minutes or so; add garlic and continue to cook for a couple minutes, and add the first round of spices. Let this get nice and brown and develop a fond, and then add a half cup of the vegetable broth to deglaze the pot. Add flour and let it boil down and brown again, and deglaze it again with another half cup or so of the vegetable broth. Simmer, stirring often, until most of the liquid has evaporated, and add the cooked or canned beans with a little salt. And yes, another round: let the beans get browned (you may need to add a bit more oil by this point), add some more of your spices, and just when you think you can brown no more, kick in the white wine and let it simmer down to reduce. Add half the nutritional yeast gradually and let it brown (again). Finally, add the canned tomatoes, deglazing the pan with the liquid. Bring to a boil, stir it up, reduce heat and simmer for about 30-40 minutes. Add the tomato paste and remaining vegetable broth. At this point, taste and adjust your spices accordingly -you may need much more chili powder and cumin – and play with the ratio of vegetable broth to nutritional yeast until you have your desired thickness; some people like really thick chili and others prefer more of a soup.

Serve with a generous spoonful of polenta.

I’ve written briefly about WHBS before, but this past weekend I took a few pictures of the magic that is a Northern California salvage yard, grown organically (so to speak) around trees, chicken coops, makeshift warehouses with plastic roofs, and ad hoc shelving.

Whole House is an incredible find, and it makes me wish I had a project just so I could search there. They have discount wood paneling, moulding, doors ($35 for a solid wood door is okay with me), shutters, and more, as well as sinks, marble slabs and tiles, chickens, ducks, bricks, lumber, lighting fixtures, doorknobs, toilets, bathtubs, cabinets, desks, shelves, glass, and mirrors. And more. At extremely reasonable prices.

Whole House Building Supply is located in East Palo Alto, just off 101 behind Ikea, at 1955 Pulgas Road. Open Monday – Friday, 9 to 5pm, Saturday 8am-5pm, and Sunday 11-4pm.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, and use your dining room!

Another task for week one is to look into eco-friendly cleaners for our homes. Since the book was written in 2006, there has been an explosion of “green” cleaners available in mainstream sources, and even Clorox has thrown its hat into the ring with the introduction of their Green Works products. There is so much controversy surrounding what’s “natural” or what’s “eco-friendly” or not, that it can be very difficult and confusing to choose or make cleaning products.

Vinegar, lemon juice, salt, and baking soda have been used for generations to clean just about everything. I use salt and a little warm water to clean my seasoned cast iron, and a mixture of vinegar or lemon plus baking soda makes a great scrub for tile and grout. For more recipes, see:

• The Green Guide household cleaners
• Household cleaner recipes from doityourself.com

Most everyday household cleaning can be accomplished with these simple ingredients, especially if using nontoxic pantry staples without artificial scents is very important to you.

Some sources cite Borax as a stellar ingredient, while others point out its toxicity and caution its use in household cleaning, especially around kids and food prep areas. I get the feeling that you can probably go ahead and use it in the bathroom with caution and keep well out of reach of children and pets, if you don’t mind the fact that it’s a mined product. Bon Ami is also widely cited as an effective powdered cleanser, and a good less-toxic alternative.

Commercially available cleaners are great if you want a little (and I mean little, Mrs. Meyers) fresh-smelling scent as you clean and want the convenience of having something pre-mixed with some additional cleansers you wouldn’t necessarily have around the house. Unlike five or even two years ago, more and more “green” cleaners are becoming available in chain stores such as Target and Albertson’s. Personally, I like Ecover and Seventh Generation – their products are affordable, safe, and work well.

For in-depth reviews of environmentally safe cleaning products, Sustain Lane has a large product review section that covers just about everything you might need to clean your home, so you can research products before making any commitments. Which are some of the highest rated?

• Ecover’s toilet bowl cleaner. Reviewers say they “love the smell” and it’s “excellent for soap scum and mildew.”
• Bac-Out Stain & Odor Eliminator from Biokleen. “It’s truly safe for our environment & effective at removing most any kind of stain.” “Smells fantastic too!”

Head on over and find your new favorite cleaner, and maybe even chip in a review or two.

Sometimes, you need to hang things up. Maybe it’s your dog’s leash, or keys, or your fanny pack. Instead of buying a mass-manufactured coat rack from Restoration Hardware or Anthropologie, consider the following:

There are plenty of these screw-in wire hooks (below) available on ebay, and if done right they could add an authentic rustic farmhouse touch.

I also love this idea:

A discarded drawer front – ostensibly lurking in alleys accompanying discarded dressers nationwide – can be used to mount hooks for a coat rack.

If you prefer to see things in the real world and are in the LA area, it’s worth a stop to Liz’s Antique Hardware at 453 South La Brea. It’s not exactly thrifty, but if you’re just looking for a small piece instead of outfitting an entire kitchen, it can be affordable. The selection is astounding, and it’s a lot of fun to just take it all in.

Have you ever had one of those nightmares where there are a lot of people who are depending on you to do things but you can’t do them or you forgot and then everyone gets really upset and there’s no one to help you and you panic and freak out? Or is that just me? Whatever. Anyway, the last two weeks have been one of those nightmares and I’m so glad to have awakened from it.

To ease back into the swing of things, I’m going to cheat and talk about what other people do. First, to wrap up my little “green” “week”, is Sarah, who studies Environmental Science (why didn’t they have those kinds of classes when I was in college?) and runs a blog about eco-friendly furniture and home design ideas located at, appropriately, www.furniturehomedesign.com (how was that not taken? I was just as surprised, by the way, to learn that catsonchairs.com and retroshit.com were both available, so I quickly bought one – guess which). There are a lot of products there, so if you *gasp* get sick of buying vintage and want to check out some modern sustainable options, head on over there. Thanks for the tip, Sarah!

Next, I sort of can’t believe I haven’t featured a ton of stuff from vintage*goodness yet. I feel like Mitzi’s vintage wonder business exploded overnight – she has 600 items for sale on ebay alone at this moment, in addition to her etsy shops, vintagegoodness and vintagegoodness too. Yeah, I’m a little jealous. Here are some of the things she’s selling that I covet:

The shape of this lovely bowl is from Homer Laughlin’s Rhythm line, which was designed by Don Schreckengost, who was (among other things) HL’s Director of Design during the 1940’s and 1950’s. The Rhythm line was originally produced as colored dinnerware (like this or this) without additional patterns. This pattern is called American Provincial. If you ever find a Rhythm spoon rest at a flea market, garage sale, or thrift store, you’ve found a treasure!

Really, there’s too many wonderful things to mention. Check out her etsy shop here, and vintage*goodness too (you know, for kids) here.

Thanks, ladies!

I think the real point of being environmentally responsible is consuming less and reusing old things in new ways – using something you may already have or that someone else may throw away instead of buying something to suit your purpose. To that end, kitchen pots, pans, cups, glasses, mugs, etc. that have reached the end of their first useful life (or are just pretty enough to reuse), can be easily transformed into pots and planters, saving you some money at the plant store.

With some holes drilled for drainage, this found pot becomes an ideal container for succulents and elephant ears. For plants like these that require less saturated soil, fill the bottom of the container with a 1-inch layer of rocks and/or pebbles to ensure proper drainage.

Even if you’re not willing or able to drill through a piece, rocks under soil should provide enough drainage for most plants – these Harlequin teacups, found at thrift stores for 50 cents, were too pretty and fragile to put holes through, so a thin layer of pebbles and careful watering keeps the soil from becoming too moist.

The best candidates for little pots like these are inexpensive pieces with a durable finish – the soil can be too damaging to Jadeite finishes, for example, and if you find a Fiesta medium green mug or creamer, for heaven’s sake don’t put a plant in it. Come to think of it, if you find a Fiesta medium green anything, just go ahead and package it securely and mail it to me.

If you have pets (especially cats, if you’re placing them up high), make sure to check your plants against a poison database (like this, this, or this with pictures) before bringing them into the house. Although really, what houseplant isn’t on one or all of these lists? I find a combination of inconvenient/difficult access to plants and some tasty cat grass that is convenient enough to keep mine away from them, although I’ve heard that bitter apple spray works too.

A while back I asked about resources for inexpensive yet high-quality orange towels. Over the weekend, I ran across these 70% bamboo towels from Amazon:

Uh, $8.45 for a bath towel? The reviews were generally positive (except for those reliable naysayers who miss the point or complain about things about which I do not care), and because the other colors are so much more expensive, it makes me think that these are perfectly good towels and nobody wants orange. Well, fine with me. My sets should arrive in a couple weeks (thanks, super saver shipping!), so we’ll see how well they really stack up.

And, when it rains it pours:

Though these are a little more expensive ($36 per bath, hand and washcloth set), they’re 100% bamboo as opposed to the 70% above. Bamboo is “green” because it’s a sustainable material – it can grow more than a foot overnight – and because it’s naturally antimicrobial and hypoallergenic.

JC Penney, through their new simply green line, carries very affordable ($5.99 – 9.99) organic cotton towels in some pretty earth tones.

For more about environmentally responsible fabrics, Canadian clothing company Lela Designs has an excellent overview.

Update: these towels arrived yesterday, and they are incredibly soft, and incredibly heavy, but it looks like it’s going to take a couple washings before they’re absorbent. Our cats also decided they were soft enough to use as a bed, and doing that kitty-kneading thing they do, with their little claws we actually just trimmed, the towels came unraveled a little. So, yes, they were a bargain, and yes, I think they were worth what we paid, but I’m not sure they would be worth $20 a towel – there are much nicer options that are 100% bamboo or an organic cotton blend that may be a better value for more expensive colors.

Normally, I wouldn’t be able to afford Yolo Colorhouse paints on a whim (it runs about $40-45/gallon), especially right after finishing another painting project. But here’s a smart and thrifty tip: if you’re willing to be a little adventurous and carefree, always check the mistint section of your local paint store, or ask someone who works there if they have some mistake paints that aren’t out on display. At Livingreen (I know, what, do I live there?) I found a Yolo mistint in Water 05:

Unfortunately, it’s the darkest blue they make, and I was really hoping for something lighter, but for $10 a gallon, I can’t really complain.

Still, I’m very happy with the results. The satin finish is superior to both the AFM Safecoat and the American Pride paints I’ve tried; it has a wonderful subtle velvety texture, although it did splatter more than the American Pride (similar finish and tools used).

The downside (maybe) of Yolo is that they do not color match, but their limited palette is made of up of some really beautiful colors. I couldn’t find a lot of information on their website about just what makes them especially environmentally responsible, save for this paragraph about VOCs:

VOCs (volatile organic compounds) are the solvents in most paints that evaporate and contribute to the depletion of the ozone. VOCs are also a part of the stinky odor in paint that is offensive and continues to off-gas which contributes to poor indoor air quality. YOLO Colorhouse® is formulated without the use of these solvents, as a result it is a 0 VOC and low odor, premium interior paint.

That’s great, but I did notice a stronger paint smell with Yolo than I did with American Pride. Or maybe it was because I was in a tiny bathroom in 90 degree heat with no ventilation. Actually, I think I’m pretty much done painting in the house. Until winter. Or fall.

Update: Yolo now does color matching, so if there’s nothing in their line that matches exactly what you want, you can get your color mixed in their paint.

If you spend any time at all looking for furniture on Craigslist in Los Angeles, you have seen ads from Street Faire Antiques in Torrance. There’s a small flea market held in “historic downtown” Torrance on the last Sunday of every month, where you’ll see a few familiar faces if you do the flea market thing a lot; it’s small, just a few blocks long and wide, but there are some treasures to be found. There’s at least one permanent store worth checking out there if you can’t make it on that Sunday, located at 1317 Sartori Avenue. It’s sort of between a thrift store and an antique store – the prices are reasonable and they have some great pieces.

This adorable bookshelf is only $55. This table below is listed on CL for $45, although the Picasa page says $75:

Street Faire Antiques’ for sale list on CL

Pictures of items for sale on Picasa

So what makes this part of green week? First, you’re only going to buy furniture if you need it, and if you’re replacing something, you’re going to recycle it by giving it away, selling it, or reusing it. Second, you’re going to pitch the idea of going there to the friend whose car gets the best gas mileage, make sure their tires are inflated, and get them to take you, unless you’re that friend, in which case, congratulations (I considered adding that you’re going to take public transportation, but it’s hard to carry a dresser on a bus). Third, if it’s a piece you’re going to refinish, I highly recommend checking out some alternatives to traditional stripping and sealing materials. When we finally refinish this table, we’re going to try a couple of less-toxic products:

• Soy gel paint stripper – this non-toxic, biodegradable stripper is made from soy, and rumor has it that it works amazingly well. About $26 per quart, you can order it online or find a local retailer – Livingreen in Culver City and Santa Barabara carry it as well.
• AFM Safecoat’s Polyureseal for a clear finish. AFM’s finishes are not non-toxic, but they are low-VOC and seem to be very durable so far – I used just two coats to refinish a floor and it’s holding up very well.

For more green refinishing options, check out these resources (links will open in new window):

• Green refinishing
• GreenHomeGuide
• The Green Guide
• Soy Clean Paint Stripper
• Treehugger’s ‘How to Green Your Furniture’