Staple-Gunner-ing.

Tomorrow is my birthday, and my amazing husband may or may not have gotten me a new wallet and a staple gun for the event.


Um. A staple gun, you say?


Best. Present. Ever.


I may or may not have been running around the apartment like a madwoman, cackling loudly, "CAN YOU FEEEEEL THE POWER KRONK!?"


But I digress. What on earth am I doing with a staple gun? Many things eventually, but first and foremost on my mind was making a "headboard" for our bed. Which was largely a part of beginning our bedroom make-over.


Here is what our bedroom looked like when I woke up this morning, give or take a few things since this is an older photo.

Photo arrangement on the wall.

Now, I didn't get any photos of the process of making my new "headboard". This was mainly because I was so excited to use my staple gun that I was almost done before it occurred to me I should be documenting the process.


Essentially what I did was take three canvases (I tend to buy the cheap 2-packs when they're on sale at Michael's since I usually end up hating what I paint) and covering them with fabric samples that I had from my days of interning at an interior design firm. These three canvases had already been used, with paintings on them that I naturally didn't like, so covering them didn't seem like a waste at all to me. That's where the staple gun came in handy. I centered the fabric on the design I wanted, pulled it taut, and then went to town. Awesome.


Here's the result.

It was difficult for me to get an accurate photo of the colors throughout the bedroom change process, but I promise things do match.

To address a few things:

• I didn't buy a new comforter - the previous blue one was a duvet cover - this is what always lived underneath.
• I'm undecided as to how I feel about the shelf over the covered panels, however I was feeling way too lazy to remove it, so for the time being, it's still there.
• The new rug on the floor does not match in any way shape or form, but it's the size of one that I would like to get for our bedroom to break up the constant beige of the walls and carpet.
• The constant beige is one reason we got a duvet cover, so I'm not sure how long I'll last with the original beige comforter, but we'll see.

Also, I did change the photos on the wall. It's a mixture of wallpaper samples and fabric samples...again from my days of interning. (They had tons of outdated samples that were just going to get thrown away so I volunteered to take them. If you love having scraps to work with, check out your local interior design shops to find out when they update their samples.)

I moved a few other things around the wall, but here's the final look of the bedroom for now.

I'm loving it for now, if not solely because it's a change. But also - the total cost of this transformation was the $27 we spent on the staple gun and staples. Not a penny more. Everything else was just shifted around from other locations in the house.

Many happy sighs from Megs today. Nothing like a good re-decoration for my birthday!

Hope you all had a great weekend!

Another IKEA Addition

Surprise surprise, another IKEA item has entered our house.  Since we have little to no storage space, I've been working on paring down a lot of our clutter, so that we don't have to have an apartment full of storage boxes. 


Sometimes paring down clutter fights viciously against my tendency not to waste anything. Prime example: hair products and lotions. Expensive, but I usually get bored with them after using half the product. I don't want to throw them away though, because I do inevitably go back to using them. Thus...a storage problem is born. (I do want you to know that I'm not obsessive about these though - I do throw away things, especially if they're old. Nobody wants to use crusty lotion.)


Our bathroom is such that it connects to the main area of the apartment, but also to our bedroom via our closet. One side of the closet is clothes, the other side is a small dresser and our hamper. Here's the state of that dresser on any given day, as well as a storage tub of miscellaneous bathroom items that I've just never been able to quite find a place for. (Feel free to gasp. SHE'S MESSY!!!)

While wandering through IKEA, we discovered a bathroom storage shelf that made me suddenly grip Scott's arm with the intensity that let's him know that we're not leaving the store without that particular item.

(You can find the link here.)

It almost reminds me of a little alien with it's little feet. It's a little more generic and utilitarian than I would normally choose, but oh wait - it was only $40. For something with glass shelves. Say WHAT? And is also only 11.5" x 11.5", which means it fits in snugly right next to the dresser in our closet.


I'm proud to say that I assembled this bad boy all by myself, to the detriment of my already aching-wrist, but that's beside the point. We all make mistakes right? I won't lie...this makes me feel particularly macho, since it involved the use of my favorite hammer (yes, I have a favorite) and my drill. I may or may not have blown across the end of the drill like the barrel of a gun in an action movie when I was done.


When a full shelf comes in a box that looks like this, you KNOW there is "some assembly required". 

As you can see, I haven't dealt with the clutter on top of the dresser yet, but once the shelf was loaded up, the dresser looked significantly better. I don't have any after pictures of that...sorry! Also...please excuse the poor lighting. If this was someplace we owned, we would have replaced the lighting in the closet a LONG time ago.  

This is actually mounted to the wall. You can see the gray brackets in the inside top corners. I love this aspect, since I always worry a little bit about tall shelves like this tipping over. And the last place I want to die is the threshold between my bathroom and my closet.

Woohoo storage!! That doesn't involve digging a plastic container out from under two shoe boxes and off a top shelf!

I'm sure that I'll probably re-arrange things a few more times, but in the meantime, I'm more than thrilled to have easy access to bathroom stuff that is usually buried so deep that I dread the moment I have to dig for it.


Our closet and our bedroom is my next major project now that we finally have the living area in a set-up that I adore, so at some point I will be posting more photos of this project, hopefully with better lighting!


I'm off to continue munching on something that is no doubt not very healthy and I will regret later, but football is my excuse.


Happy Superbowl Sunday from the house that bleeds Green & Yellow. Go Packers!

Even curtains can be frugal!

A question my dad asked made me realize I should probably mention something about this. I was giving my parents a tour of our newly re-arranged apartment via Skype when my dad paused and asked me to go back to show him our curtains.

"Where did you get those curtains?"


Interesting question Dad...


Everything is from IKEA. The sheer white panels were two for $10 and could be adjusted to whatever height you needed. The red panels are also from IKEA, but you won't find them with the other curtains. Because I may or may not have done something a little different.


I was wandering through the store trying to think of some inexpensive window treatments for our then colorless apartment. Colorless because if we paint walls, we have to paint them back before we move out and that's a step I just can't bring myself to take. And fabric stores are not exactly a bargain lately, as far as making them from scratch goes. And I just couldn't find anything I liked for under $20...a PANEL, anywhere. 


Let me rephrase that. That means it would be at least $80 to put some form of colored curtains up around our apartment. Hmm.


That doesn't fly well with me. 


Determined to beat the system, I started thinking. "Well, I could use flat sheets..." Which I've done before. But all the flat sheets were...eh. And would still have been around $40 by the time I bought each sheet.


And then lo and behold...my eyes landed on a duvet cover. Twin size, with matching pillow sham, for $10.


Have I mentioned I love IKEA?


I LOVE IKEA.


Okay. Anyways. I'm afraid I don't have pictures to document the process of how I turned the duvet cover into curtain panels, since I wasn't blogging at the time that I did this and it didn't occur to me to document the process. However, here are the basic steps, all of which only took me a couple hours on a Saturday.


 It should be noted that these panels aren't meant to actually cover the window, but to provide a visual frame and some interest. If you want panels that will cover your entire window, I recommend using a larger duvet cover, like a full or queen-size.

• Remove and wash duvet cover & pillow sham. Dry, and iron.
• (Here's the tedious part) Rip out all the seams of the pillow sham and duvet cover. Some people are talented enough to do this by an actual ripping motion, but I usually wind up doing more damage so I put on an episode of Friends and sat down with my seam ripper, going to work.
• Once the seams are removed, you should have two basic large panels, and two basic small panels.
• Cut each of the large panels in half "hotdog-ways" to form four narrow panels. The pillow sham panels will provide you with the fabric needed to make your tab-tops.

From here, I leave you with the first video in a "How-To" series on how to make tab-top curtains. Because it's just a bit too complicated to try and type out. Go here to check out this great series.

End result? I'm proud to say that I was able to outfit our two large picture windows with curtains for $30. Now THAT is my kind of bargain! Hopefully this has given you a hope that it's possible for you, too, to find affordable window coverings. 

Have you done anything crafty and frugal lately? Please share!

Re-arranging. My Clinical Disorder and Obsession.

Since I was a little girl, I have been known to re-arrange anything I could lay my hands on at least once a month. My poor Barbies never knew what was going on, their home moved so much. My parents think I might have a clinical problem, but what can I say, I just like the change.


Since Scott and I got married, I've toned it down quite a bit - we've only re-arranged our apartment three or four times in a year and a half. It's a good thing I'm not a homeowner with any carpentry skills, or I'd probably be knocking out walls every six months (although this sounds suspiciously like my dad...hmm. Apple...tree?)


However, this most recent adventure was not necessarily my idea...fully. For Christmas, we got an Xbox Kinect. Normally I'm not a huge fan of any sort of video game and tend to shun them completely, but this gaming system has rocked my world. Scott and I actually went out to buy a game...FOR ME. Although in my defense it's not a game, it's a fitness "game" where you can do various exercise programs and even yoga. Like a glorified aerobics DVD. But I digress. We played it at our friends' house and had a blast...then brought it home to our apartment, only to realize that we couldn't use it because we didn't have enough space. Thus, the need and intense desire to re-arrange was born in both our minds.


Here are some "Before" pictures. And yes, I'm laying my soul bare to you because you are about to see what my apartment normally looks like - mess and all. Don't judge me.

Please excuse Scott in the photo. I was in a hurry when I snapped
these shots and didn't have the heart to ask him to stop his game.

Because I majored in Interior Design, I'm more than slightly anal, and I grew up with a father that drew floorplans every fifteen seconds (again, apple...tree), this is how Scott and I function whenever we re-arrange. A couple months after we moved in, I took a Saturday and measured our apartment down to the inch and drew a scale model, including our major pieces of furniture. The below diagram is how everything was previously arranged.

We were pretty stumped on how to fix the Kinect game-space dilemma. In fact we pondered on it for several hours. After a while, Scott came up with this as the solution:

In the end, we figured out an arrangement that would work, and it worked well with my recent insane desire to purge. 


We had been toying with the idea of combining our desks and working from one for quite some time, since Scott's schoolwork is mostly clinic-work and less homework now. When he does study, he's usually on the couch with his laptop, and his desk was collecting a bit of dust. So that was our major change. And behold, the fabulous result:

We took the extension off Scott's desk to make it smaller, and moved it
where the dining room table / seldom used reading nook used to be.  

We had originally planned to take down what we fondly refer to as "Ugly Mirror" (my dad hates this mirror), but after we moved the desk I was shocked to discover that I loved having it there. Scott has the far end of the desk with the laptop, and the desktop area is my workspace. Like I said before, Scott is usually on the couch with his laptop and doesn't require much of a workspace anymore.

This is my attempt to keep my paper piles at bay. Most of my clutter falls into these three categories, so I've designated folders for everything to fall into. Plus, my favorite little notepad for grocery lists, etc.

My favorite part of the big change is our art arrangement, and the way the afternoon sun hits it.
Happy sigh.

The base of the lamp is working as a sort of "docking station" for us. The speakers can be plugged into either my computer or Scott's, depending on what's going on. The same goes for the printer, that way we can share. The other part we loved about this arrangement was how close I am to the kitchen. No more traipsing back and forth between cooking dinner and checking e-mails on the opposite side of the apartment. Whoop!

 So, what happened to all our eighteen tons of desk stuff? A lot of it got put into bags destined for Goodwill, or bags destined for the garbage. We were able to condense quite a bit, since we had duplicates of a lot of things. Sharing a desk area allowed us to keep most things in one storage area. (The top of the main storage area you can see peeking up behind my monitor in the above photo.) The rest of it, went to our "library". We came to the conclusion that we didn't really need half the books that we kept here, so we boxed up three boxes (with a few more stacks in the hallway that are waiting for more boxes), and then converted the library into a shared space.

Please excuse the liquor cabinet look on top of the library. I'm not a huge fan, but I was tired of the bottles taking up room in my tiny pantry closet and this also makes it easier to make some quick cocktails when we have friends over.

Easy access to blank notecards, stamps, address books, and notebooks.

But enough with the desk area....what in the world did we do to the living area?

Moving the trunk to underneath the window actually gave us the benefit of significantly more sitting area in our living room without overcrowding. Something we've found pretty difficult to do in this small space. When we are ready to use the Kinect, we just swing the coffee table out of the way. My old desk turned into a media center, which was excellently timed, since our old hodge-podge arrangement was on the verge of collapse.

Look at all that SPACE! I can hardly stand it. 

To finish it off, the dining room table went where Scott's desk used to be, and our little recycling can lives tucked away in the corner. Whenever we have company over, we can easily pull out the table to seat more people.

And for inquiring minds...what happened to all Scott's medical equipment and teeth molds? Neatly boxed up and destined for the front closet. 

We are beyond thrilled with this newest arrangement. It gave us the opportunity to go through and finally get rid of accumulated debris and things we no longer needed. I think it's going to be a really good thing for us, and I'm wrapping up this post so I can go check out the Yoga program on the Kinect. Hope you enjoyed your weekend as much as I did!

Holiday Decorating Secrets

I will go ahead and admit that I don't have any groundbreaking, earth-moving secrets to divulge here. However, I have picked up a few new strategies over the years, and one in particular this year as I was "staging" our apartment for the Walk-Through video. 


Staging? I STAGED our apartment? As in, the same thing they do to houses when they're getting ready to be sold? Stuffing things in closets, hiding everything in storage units?


Reality check my friends, and the great secret to all Home Decor magazines. Most houses are NEVER clean all at the same time. They get close, but when being prepped for the camera, I can guarantee you that there are massive piles of crap in the bedrooms not in view. 


Exhibit A: See how clean our house was?? (Crowded, yes, because I'm a clutter-bug and because we live in a tinnny apartment. But clean nonetheless.)


Exhibit B: The disaster zone, while I was filming the majority of the apartment.

Our hallway, during video-taping.

It pains me a bit to share this dark secret with you, but we're friends right? And truth needs to be told.


Everyone has miscellaneous stuff that accumulates in corners, on the floor, and little annoying piles here and there. And ours has been OUT of control lately (as you can probably see). 


So my theory was...just walk through, gather it ALL, and deposit it somewhere else, to be dealt with later.


And what I learned was that I particularly enjoyed this method of search-and-destroy cleaning. Since all the random, homeless objects that had been accumulating around had been gathered in one location, it made it a lot easier to find each object a home afterwards. In fact, it probably didn't take me more than 20 minutes to put all that stuff away. 


Because if you're anything like me, you wander around the house with the intent of gathering all the miscellaneous junk, but instead get side-tracked by about twelve different projects, each with good intentions. 


Since all my junk was piled in the main entryway of our home, and Scott and his best friend were headed home in about an hour, I was forced to deal with it. All of it. 


And I was able to, without distraction. And miraculously, most of it found a home, which means our apartment WAS STILL CLEAN afterwards. I should probably emphasize miracle here. Some of it did pile up by my desk again, since it's the Christmas season and if I put certain things away, I'd forget I even bought them or had a crafty plan for them. 


I'm fairly certain that this cleaning strategy should be featured in major magazines, but it probably hasn't since no one is brave enough to show the world their junk.


So. Decorating Secret #1: Your house will look 10x more festive if the little things are put away, and it's CLEAN. Clean not meaning dust. Clean meaning the clutter has been removed.

I don't have any intention of giving all my secrets away in one entry. So stay tuned. Laugh a little longer at my huge hallway mess, then get yourself a large glass of wine and tackle your own mess in the same fashion. It will make a world of difference!

Thanksgiving Centerpieces

Now...I know that Thanksgiving is over and we're moving on to Christmas, but after my feature on table decorations, I thought I'd share some photos of what my centerpieces looked like this year. 


We shared Thanksgiving at Scott's parents, so I had his parents' amazing yard and other household items to work with. It was difficult to get great shots of them, but here we go anyway!


(Note: 3 centerpieces - 1 for the serving table, 2 for the dining tables....they have a large family!)

Merry Monday!

With Thanksgiving rapidly approaching (can you believe it's next week??), I thought it would be fitting to spend a little time focusing on some simple decorating tips to get your home glowing for friends and family.


My personal philosophy is to make the big four holidays (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, & New Years) all flow together as seamlessly as possible so that you don't spend half your time hauling huge plastic bins from your attic or basement.


When I decorate for Halloween, I tend to do less scary and more of an autumn theme, so this makes the transition to Thanksgiving pretty easy. And when I decorate for Thanksgiving, it's usually with Halloween "leftovers" and a few things for Christmas.


I also don't really believe in intricate decorations that will take you more time than the entire food preparation. For example, I have recently read about stamping your linens with decorative fall designs, placeholders so complicated you'd need to be a surgeon to execute them, and wishbone napkin rings. That's right...you're supposed to SAVE all the wishbones from those millions of chickens that you roast, spray paint them silver, and then wrap them and silver thread around your napkins. Whaattt??


So in the name of simplicity, I'll begin with one of nature's best decorations: gourds. I have a small love affair with gourds, because they are one of the cheapest and easiest decorations for October and November. My apartment is covered with them, in all shapes and sizes.

My only disappointment is that you can't keep them year-round. But it's always fun to find more interesting ones every year!


A lot of websites and magazines focus on doing elaborate centerpieces for your Thanksgiving table, however in my family, all the food was brought out to the table instead of serving yourself buffet style so there was virtually no room for a centerpiece. We think you might as well get a good look at all the delicious food you spent hours preparing! I still think our table looked lovely, don't you? Simplicity at its finest.

At my parent's house in Vermont, with my wonderful grandparents
helping get everything set up.

However, if you're going to do a centerpiece, I have found a couple that I really enjoy, and are designed to last till Christmas. Which I'm a fan of, of course.

Better Homes & Gardens has an incredible feature on
centerpieces specifically designed to last till Christmas. I think
this one is especially beautiful and have every intention
of doing this centerpiece when I have a dining room
table large enough. I think this would look lovely as a
mantelpiece as well.

An adorable idea from Martha Stewart.

I also love the idea of wandering outside, finding what you find, and making something out of it. This is something I put together for Thanksgiving one year at my old home in North Carolina - all from our small suburban yard. (Borrow from your neighbors too, but make sure you know them well first!)

I also love this idea. Such a simple place marker, and extremely easy to find.
At least if you live in the South anyways. (Credit to Martha Stewart again for this idea.)

 One last idea that I stumbled across and I think is brilliant is more of a permanent fixture that could be changed year-round.

Hello, bird-bath table! Better Homes & Gardens strikes again with another great idea. Glass table top on top of a bird bath filled with seasonal goodies. This particular one is florist's moss and a mixture of decorative ornaments. Just think of the possibilities!


And because I could go on and on, one last decor possibility. Another one that I plan on doing as soon as I have a staircase to decorate on! I think this would also be lovely if you had a front porch railing.

Eternal credit to Better Homes & Gardens

Have great Thanksgiving decorating tricks? Send me photos - I'd love to share them with everyone!


Merry Monday everyone!