laurenhallden – Page 10 – Port Richmond Row

When I was still in college, a friend’s mom bought one of the new cowhide rugs from IKEA, triggering a mini-obsession for me. It was an impulse buy for her and I think she never found anywhere to put it, but for the brief time it lay out in her living room I couldn’t keep my hands off the thing.

For some people I suppose that seems strange — a hide is evidence of the death of an animal, after all — but I’ve always been strange. I like cowhides for the same reason I like peacock feathers and funky plants and skulls and driftwood and praying mantids, and probably for the same reason I studied sculpture in college. The structures and complexities of natural objects are just fascinating to me.

Nature is the best artist of all, so they say.

Anyway, I put off owning a cowhide myself because a) they’re expensive and b) I wasn’t really sure of how to incorporate one into my home without the pattern becoming too dominant. But I’ve been seeing some great examples on design blogs:

Lots of hides, here!

Love the brindle pattern and the angle of the placement. Via The Brick House.

Via Apartment Therapy.

Blog posts mentioning cowhides always seem to attract controversy, with the con people arguing that they just aren’t classy and the pro people arguing that they bring a nice sense of organic irregularity to balance all the right angles of modern furniture.

And although I’m aware that I may someday have house guests who are skeeved out by my choice of floor coverings, in the end the cowhide was also a practical option; hides are easily cleaned with soap and water, and, unlike square rugs, you have more freedom in arranging their placement to suit your space. So I picked one up second-hand on eBay. And for just $80!

The hide is super soft, with really nice patterning. I’m tickled pink.

I’m going to be posting a lot in the remaining weeks of the year. I think it’s the pending party’s fault: a lot of my guests will be seeing this place for the first time, so now when I pass each minor annoyance around the house I think “I can’t let them know I’ve been living with that for a year and a half.” Which is silly. But at least it’s inspiring me to knock out some quick fixes that I’ve been meaning to get to. So, without further ado…

In the last six months or so I’ve been putting together a little collection of artwork for my house. I blogged about a few of the prints before, but the collection has grown again and I just got around to hanging all of the pieces this weekend. On actual walls!

I’ll be working on a lot of house projects this month since I’m hosting my first-ever party on New Year’s Eve. And you’re coming, right? And you won’t care if I don’t own rugs, or serving platters, or holiday garland. Right?

Back to the art. I thought about putting a salon-style collection of prints with gold frames right above my couch. I even had them arranged on the floor in the exact pattern I wanted. But when I placed the first piece on the wall, it looked so good on its own that I scrapped my plans and left it alone.

In decorating as in art, editing is key. Print by Kate VanVliet. It’s an image made from soaked tea bags!

The rest of the prints were rearranged and moved to another wall:

Prints (clockwise) by Melanie Linder, Margaux McAllister, Amy Walsh, and Tory Franklin. Sculpture by me.

Margaux’s piece is actually on a notecard that someone named Laura gave me to me, telling me to have a great semester sometime in 2005. I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t remember who Laura was. If she’s you, thank you very much for the card and I love the image.

The gold frames all came to me through thrift stores — I know they’re kinda kitschy, but I like the way they look in groupings.

And we can’t leave out Nicole Cook, whose woodcut is now in the bathroom due to a lack of gold frameage:

I know it’s really hard to see the details in this piece unless you’re right up close to it, but trust me, it brings the awesomeness. See for yourself by coming to my New Year’s party! RSVP on Facebook, or send me an email if we’re not Facebook pals.

My kitchen is small. Like, maybe 140 square feet small. Tiny. But I spend a lot of time in here, both because I’m starting to really enjoy cooking and because the kitchen is the best spot in the house for picking up my neighbor’s internet connection. For the last year and a half, I’ve had my counter set up like this:

With the dish drainer half-tucked under a cabinet. In theory, this meant that I could dry bowls and short cups under the cabinet, and plates in the slots in front of the cabinet. In practice, the plates prevented me from opening that particular cabinet door. Which prevented me from being able to put the dishes away. Ever.

I don’t know why the solution to this problem didn’t occur to me for, you know, eighteen months, but the morning after Thanksgiving I woke up knowing what I needed: open shelving! So my four-day weekend was absorbed by yet another home improvement project. I even ventured into IKEA on Black Friday. Terrifying.

It was worth it, though. With about $100 and three days, I slapped this solution together:

Now the dish drainer doesn’t block anything. In fact, it folds up when I’m finished so I can reclaim my pathetic four feet of counter space!

The only problem is that now everyone can see my dishes. My horrible, mismatched, half-from-Wal-Mart-and-half-trashpicked-already-chipped-from-an-old-neighbor’s-curb collection of dishes. This is serious broke-ass college student stuff, here. Needless to say, classic simple white dishware is now on my Christmas list.

It’s cold out, yo. Maybe not so much today, but my thermostat told me yesterday that my internal house temperature was 58 degrees (you can tell how much I hate paying for heat). Anyway, it was time to take the garden down, and that’s what I’ve worked on for the last day or two.

I got a few more quirky peppers!

All that’s left now is some lettuce, this crazy mess of sugar snap peas…

…and this one giant tomato vine, which exploded like a plant possessed sometime after the growing season should have ended.

I have suspicions that this one managed to bust a root through the bottom of its pot and through a crack in the concrete below, where it is now feeding on radioactive subterranean Philly waste. I’m leaving it up as a science experiment.

As I was chopping up and composting my dead plants, I kept a careful eye out for mantis egg sacs. Figured I must have one around here, somewhere, considering that I couldn’t pick a veggie all summer long without disturbing a mantis. They’re smarter than to plant their babies-to-be on a flimsy tomato plant, though. I found this thing on my fence:

Looks like the population is secure for next year!

On my last tomato plant, I found the mother mantis herself. She hadn’t really strayed from my backyard all year. And since I’d grown fond of having her around, and it’s getting cold out there (did I mention that?), I did what any true weirdo would do and brought her inside.

I got Carolina some crickets and a black fly, which she caught in about 45 seconds. Damn, these little monsters are quick.

I actually had a pet mantis as a kid for a while. The adults only live about 6 months, and I think my last one made it to January before dying, fat and warm, of old age. Well, I suppose “warm” is a relative concept in this house…

Ellie, on the day we brought her home over 9 years ago. (Also, a rare picture of me as a teenager.)

And Ellie at the end of her life, when she was big enough to claim the whole couch for herself. Not that we minded.

It has been the summer of the mantis around these parts. Maybe because we’ve had so much wet weather, all of the bug populations have gone nuts? Whatever the reason, I feel like I’ve seen a ton of the alien-esque critters. Including these two:

Think the one of the left is a female Carolina mantis, while the dude on the right (obviously checking her out) is a male European mantis. She’s a little bit country. He’s a little bit rock and roll. She’s a little pregnant. He looks like a tasty snack.

Sheila here starts sauntering over to — er, Nigel? — who sees her coming and just stares. Until she’s barely two inches away, at which point he breaks into a full-on mantis sprint in the opposite direction. Love stinks.

Bored, Sheila starts climbing up some iron work on my porch. Nigel, not getting the idea that she’s just not that into him (except as dinner), follows her. As captured in this rare documentary footage!

[flickr video=3984847697 secret=d5cb4153ae w=400 h=300]

When I last saw our two lovebirds, Nigel was staring at Sheila as she tried to hoist her pregnant bum over the roof line of my porch. I will choose to believe this story had a happy ending.

About that Master Bedroom Plan. Uh. I’ve already scrapped it.

Shortly after writing that entry, I went and stared at the giant drywall box that encloses my wood burning stove’s exhaust pipe. The box juts way out into the floorspace in the bedroom; so far, in fact, that it forces me to put my bed up against a wall. Lengthwise, that is. So that one person has to crawl to the foot of the bed to get out of it.

I briefly considered trading my full-sized bed in for a fold-out daybed to save on space. But then I decided, nah, let’s just sledgehammer the box out. There has to be a better solution for the pipe than that thing.

Ah, that’s better. Kinda. Um.

My hope at this point is to get a chimney expert in here to see if we can’t reroute this baby a little closer to the wall. Or, preferably, in the wall.

Apologies for the radio silence. I’ve been traveling. Those of you who follow me on Twitter know what that’s like.

Anyway, I don’t have much of an update; I’ve been spending my weekend doing a little gardening and cooking up some fried green tomatoes. So easy, yet so awesome!

I am, however, about to embark on my next big project: a remodeling of my bedroom. Which looks something like this:

In a word: hideous. In two words: unbelievably hideous. I don’t know why I’ve lived with it like this for a full year. This particular picture of it was taken back in March, because I had anticipated I’d get around to painting it soon. Ha!

Better late than never, though.

I worked on the window trim this weekend, which involved tackling two problems:

The windows are new and were retrofitted to the design of the house, leaving a big plastic border around each window to fill in the gaps between the new unit and the old frame.
They were not installed at the same level. The one on the left is slightly lower than the middle window, which is slightly lower than the right one. At least if you’re judging by the ceiling. And you can’t help but judge by the ceiling when it hits the top of the right window and not the left!

So I’m doing my damnedest to re-cut the window trim in a way that conceals those flaws. And of course, a coat of white paint never hurts.

Master Plan for a Master Bedroom:

Finish hanging the trim for the third window; caulk and prime it.
Prime the rest of the room, including the wacky ceiling. Caulk wacky ceiling panels to their framework.
Die, awnings! Die!
Rip out the shelving systems in the two closets and insert something a little more aesthetically pleasing. My hope here is to eventually remove the closet doors and just frame the closets with pretty pattered curtains, as I think the bay window needs to remain curtain-less.
Yank the light fixtures out and replace them with something that doesn’t look like Granny picked it up in the clearance section at Lowes.
Install a shelf under the right-hand window for my makeup mirror.
Reupholster and paint the trash-picked chair; give it a home under the new shelf.
Pick a room color (pale gray-green?) and paint paint paint.
Install rolling blinds in the bay window.
Rip out the blue carpet. Install a new one in a minimalist neutral tan.
Try to get my bedroom furniture to coordinate, somehow. Paint the bed? New hardware for the bureau? What to do with the bedside table I (also) trash-picked?
Additions? A standing mirror, maybe? A little area rug?

That ought to keep me busy. For a couple of lifetimes.

[flickr video=3214229110 secret=29e08b1e86 w=400 h=300]

In memory of Phineas, who was my quiet buddy for six years, and who outlived his tank mates as well as the store who sold him to me. He wasn’t the best bred Shubunkin in the tank, but he was certainly the funkiest.

OK, guys. If you’re reading this, you’re on notice: no more deaths this year, all right? 2009 has been rough. I feel like wrapping my friends in bubblewrap.