Home Decor - Styling Your Jewelry

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In addition to using my office as... well... an office, I also use the room to store my jewelry and makeup. As a result, I tend to spend a bit of time in there getting ready.

For those of you who are looking to create displays of your jewelry for easy access, here are my tips on doing it in a way that is attractive and not too cluttered.

Mirrors.

I place a lot of my items on a mirror that sits on top of my jewelry table. This really serves two purposes. First, it helps me find things. But, perhaps more importantly, it keeps things light and shiny. I feel like the whole purpose of jewelry is to spice and shiny things up, so why not do it with your table, too?!

Tiered Trays.
This was originally a three-level glass hosting tray, which is perfect for hosting a party with cupcakes and hors d'oeuvres. However, I realized that it would be even better when put to use holding my bright, colorful, shiny jewelry.

It makes things easy to see, and because it is made of glass, it lets light down onto the lower levels so that everything is showing up as its true color.

Small cups and holding trays.

I also like to find other small cups, holding trays, and hanging items that can be used to separate out my jewelry and trinkets. This is a ceramic egg holder that holds lip gloss, earrings, bobby pins, and perfume, among other things.

Picture Frames.

I love using picture frames to hold an oddly shaped necklace or two. I tend to choose frames that are shiny or visually interesting, so that they feel like jewelry, themselves. This allows me to throw them in with my jewelry without making them feel out of place.

WHAT ABOUT YOU?

• How do you display your jewelry?
• Do you use any of these techniques?

Sell My House: Master Bedroom Edition

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Taking care of the floors downstairs was pretty easy and simple. The floor was in decent condition - good enough to show that they are good quality floors and add some character to an otherwise underwhelming interior. 

But, then we got upstairs, and things got a little... hectic. 

This is a saga worthy carpet story (seriously, it was a soap opera at the time), so for now, I'll cover the first 'uh-oh' we endured upstairs, and get to the rest of it in my next house post. Like leaving you with a cliff hanger on Friday's 10am Soap Opera. No, I don't watch Soap Operas. Stop judging.

Anyway, we worked on the front and master bedroom first. While most of the house was covered in a beige colored carpet, this front room had been adorned with a crazy purple color. It was clearly done at a different time than the rest of the house, because it was glued down to the floor along with the carpet pad.  

When we tried to pull it up, it was so brittle that the carpet padding would break off in tiny pieces. Imagine trying to peel up an entire bedroom floor, crumble by crumble.

Underneath, the floor was covered in glue and would clearly need to be re-carpeted. We would probably not have been able to completely remove everything, and even if we had been able to, we would have severely damaged the floors and incurred a huge cost to change them (incurring a huge cost as you are selling the house = not the most thrilling prospect).

In the end, we chalked it up to a success. Let's be real, that color was not going to fly in the resale market... so we were going to need to remove the carpet, either way.

So, we ended up re-carpeting this room with a frisee in a neutral color that would complement the wood elsewhere, but would still be easy on the eye (but how hard is it to improve upon purple?).

Once we had done that, it was time to turn this place into a real bedroom. And that, my friends, is where the staging comes in.

I like that this room has super simple staging that is extremely neutral. If you turn a buyer off with some crazy furniture, you've pretty much defeated the purpose of staging a home.

WHAT ABOUT YOU?

• Have you ever staged a home for resale? Any tips/tricks to share?
• Have you ever dealt with stubborn carpet? How did you handle it?

The Place Where Magic Happens

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Come into my bedroom...

Welcome to today's edition of Decorate Your Apartment In Ten Days! We've got a swell show in store for you today, so don't forget to buckle up for safety. Because only you can prevent forest fires.

Um. But seriously. It's been about 10 days since moving in. Here were my grand plans for this apartment, and here were some nudie shots (OF THE APARTMENT! NO NUDE HUMANS WERE INVOLVED IN THE MAKING OF THAT POST).  The first "done" room (sort of - working on an update post) was the Living Room, which you can find here.

Anyway, when it came to the bedroom, I had to change my plan a bit. This was the original plan:

But there was an issue. Remember how I said I'm part Type A, part Type B? Well, the Type A Carly insisted on making that diagram, but the Type B Carly refused to get accurate measurements because just "eyeballing" should be good enough, right?

Eeeeeht. WRONG. So, initially, I thought this room had a lot more space from Left to Right when you walk in. I planned to have more walking space across from the bed. Ultimately, the room ended up being more rectangular than square.

And here's where we are now. Furniture and all. Hallelujah.

Remember when we made our own headboard? It works even better in this room because there's a small 2 inch ledge on that side of the room, so we put the headboard on top of that, which makes it more visible behind the bed.

We snatched these bedside tables for $40 from the same warehouse we grabbed the Living Room couch from. They're triangular, but rounded (so no evil cuts from bumping them).

The top is glass,with a smaller wooden triangle below. We loved them because they're useful while not taking up too much visual space. Ultimately, we realized, we didn't need the typical bedside table with drawers. I mean, what do you put in there, anyway? With our last bedside table, we just crammed it full with random crap. Candles. Socks. Watches. Etc. And it ended up being a catch all, like a Mary Poppins Bedside Table.  So, instead of giving ourselves yet another place to hide crap, we decided to opt for something more open and minimal. So far, we're loving it.

Let's talk about art, baby. First, we've got two of the pieces I gave bf for Valentines Day. There were initially four, but this time we decided to cut it down to two and use the other two frames for other art projects (coming soon).

Also some black and whites from bf's mom. These are up in Wicker Park near the Damen stop, I believe. 

The pale blue color of the wall lends itself nicely to these black and whites (though I loved them on white walls in the last place too). 

BUT... with a pale blue wall and black and white photography, I felt the urge to add a bit of color. Thank God for these hooks Justin installed, so that I can keep my Rosie the Riveter headband (left) and Victory 70's purse (right) out for some color amusement. Roy G. Biv must be proud

This is the view from the "driver's" side of the bed (you know, like if it were a car, am I the only one who pretends my bed is a magic carpet?). I love it. Can I wake up every morning with the lights on and this bizarre yet wonderful view? Simplicity = key for me.

Dresser top. Still pretty sparse up in here. I will say, I'm in love with that blue vase in the center. We grabbed it at a Good Will almost a year ago, and since then, I've dried flowers a few times when Justin's surprised me with a bouquet. I just think the look of a beautiful glass vase with dried flowers inside is so... well, I can't say hipster, but...

Note: If you dry flowers by taking them out of the vase and hanging them upside down for a few days, they won't get all moldy like they otherwise do.

I've been using that picture frame on the dresser (with a hilarious article inside it that was written about the female lawyer who worked on the Watergate case - it's called "A Lawyer In Miniskirts") as a place to hang my necklaces. Works for now, eh?

This dresser was another find from Department Chicago. It's a Mid Century Modern Stanley (I think?). The clean lines are good for my brain. Simplicity, yet again. At first, I was worried I'd trash it with dirty fingers - after all, it's white as snow - but the finish has a shine to it that makes it easy to wipe, though it doesn't seem like finger marks are showing up on it anyway.

That tall dresser on the left is something we're still working with. It doesn't fit the style we want, but it's a leftover. Thinking a knob makeover could fancy it up just enough so that it no longer sticks out and screams "Look, I'm from Pottery Barn and I belong in the suburbs!"

Any other ideas on that, folks?

DIY Decor | Ampersand & Art

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Remember when we gave Justin's living room a makeover? Well, more to come on that (after more than a few changes-and-re-arranges and a thrift store shelving adventure)... but, for now, I'd like to announce: the decor has spread. To the bedroom.

You might remember that the living room was full of bold colors, of which red somehow became the favored child. Well, this room will turn out to be the calmer, softer brother. We've only just begun...



I’ve wanted to make Ampersand art for a while now but was semi stumped on how to do it in a unique way.

I considered painting an ampersand onto a large scrap of wood or canvas, but it felt very “done before” and never came to fruition.

Then, while walking the halls of Ace Hardware (my personal “Eureka” location), Justin and I found a large sheets of Acrylic Transparency. They’re about 1/4 an inch thick and are pretty amazing. Without a fully formulated plan, we grabbed it.

We ended up spray painting around the Ampersand, so that the “background” of the piece is blue, and the ampersand, itself, is see-through. That means we can swap out what we place behind the art, to fill in the ampersand with any fabric, magazine clipping, or page from a book that we choose.

I'm still pretty obsessed with the idea. Why? Because it will always match. We can put anything behind it and instantly change its color and effect on the room.

How'd we do it?

Start with a transparent acrylic sheet...



Use painters tape (masking tape) to cover the sheet. I had almost covered the entire sheet when I realized I only needed to cover areas which would be used by the "&" we printed out (as that was the only tape we would be leaving on the board).

Choose an ampersand (&) in Microsoft Word, enlarge it to your preferred size, and print. We tried a variety of fonts (really, we had a few pages worth of samples) but ended up going with good old Times New Roman. I was, at first, stern on my sans-serif stance and convinced we would be going with something smooth... but, as we checked out various samples, we decided that Times New Roman had something really classic about it. It reminds me of newspapers and journalism. And, in the end, it just felt like the right thing to do. We made it as large as we could and printed it out.

Cut loosely around the edges (so that there is still white space, and enough room for tape) and then tape onto the sheet where you would like the ampersand to show up.

Use an exacto knife to cut out the ampersand.

Remove the tape surrounding the ampersand. Do this slowly and have an exacto knife handy to do extra cutting in places you may have not fully cut.

Spraypaint the art (leaving the tape on). You'll need to do a number of layers in order to get a solid coat, because the background is see through. We did a whopping 6 layers of blue spraypaint before stopping.

Once the spraypaint has dried, slowly remove the ampersand tape. Use an exacto knife to help lift up the tape.

Choose any fabric, magazine, etc to tape behind the acrylic sheet and show through.

To hang, we hot glued a piece of metal "teeth" we yoinked off of the back of a picture frame.

Here are two final product shots:

And a few shots up-close-and-personal:

So yes, we'll admit, there is much to be done in this room... I'm working on four wall art pieces using silhouettes and some additional shelving... Get excited!

Moving Time!

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This weekend, Chris graduated and we moved him into a new house. Then began the interior design process. Here's what we were working with before getting down to the nitty gritty in this crooked (seriously, guys) home...

Here's another bare bones shot after moving in the most precious cargo (i.e. his Mac Pros)...

Remember how I mentioned this place was crooked? Yeah, I wasn't joking! Please notice the insanely crooked line where the ceiling dips down as well as the crooked line action where the ceiling meets the wall. 

The first order of business was to put up 10 dollar shelves from WalMart.  This isn't the largest room you've ever seen, so we decided shelves were a good way to get some additional decorating space without taking up floor space (and eventually they'll be a good place to house a basket or two, where Chris can stash his techy computer cords and such).

We needed a little help from friends (thanks, Katie & Jonathan) to get these shelves hung and put up some open weave curtains we found (also at WalMart, ten bucks!).

We had a really hard time finding Chris a bedside table that (a) wasn't hideous and (b) wasn't super pricey. And then we found this guy at Goodwill for $5 and Chris pointed to it and said, "What if we spraypaint it white?!"  Seriously? OF COURSE I think that's an awesome idea! Sorry, Chris. You've caught my affinity for wanting to spraypaint everything white... 

On the longer shelf, we added a $1 crate from Goodwill, a painted 70s bus, some candles and a vintage camera. So far, these $10 shelves are turning out to be an AWESOME addition -- because we have added tons of memorabilia and decor that would otherwise have taken up space on a dresser (which he currently doesn't have).

As we were moving Chris out of his old house, we found this random photo-less frame and decided to grab it because, who knows, we *might* end up using it... And we did! Along with a camel, a box from an Urban Outfitters Bonsai tree, and a vase Chris's friend Mikey made... 

Chris fell in love with batman shaped candle sconces at Goodwill (and again wanted to spraypaint them white... it's a disease, people!). To top it off, we added some art I recently made, a lovable monster named Claude, and some samurai swords (to make it manly, you know)...

On a Hobby Lobby adventure (they get me every time), we found a Chess decor section and totally totally totally love love loved a red horse...

So, because it was 50% off, we got it!

And so concludes the bedroom makeover (for now)!

Why "for now?" Chris plans to add a lot of art, I've got delusions of grandeur making a headboard, and we're still in search of drawer knobs for the bedside table, and an entire dresser to stand against the wall by the foot of the bed.