Author: laurenhallden

A Tale of Five Floors

My big weekend adventure was to tear our the added layers of flooring in my dining room, in hopes of uncovering the original pine floorboards to match the living room. I’d like to have the floors in both rooms refinished together. (Eventually, I think I’ll tile the kitchen with real tiles, but that’s down the road quite a ways.)

Here’s a pictorial account of my archaeological adventure. It’s like National Geographic. But indoors.

Layer 1: Laminate Flooring
Ugly factor: Moderate ugliness. It’s obvious that we don’t have actual slate, here. As evidence, I present to you the following picture, in which you can see that two “tiles” with the exact same pattern were installed right next to each other. And in more than one instance, at that. Why…?
Ease of removal: Luckily, this stage was easy — all I had to do was remove the edge trim and the tiles popped right apart.

Layer 2: Plastic Liner
Ugly factor: It’s trash bag-tastic! Trashtacular!
Ease of removal: Super easy. It rolled right up and found its way into a real trash bag.

Layer 3: Vinyl sheet
Ugly factor: Vinyl — when linoleum just seems too upscale.
Ease of removal: Moderate. I lucked out in that that this layer was not glued to the floor as I feared it would have been if it were real linoleum. So it rolled up easily, but those kitchen cabinets (pictured below) were actually resting on this layer of flooring. I had to remove them from the wall and go scooting them all over the room from this stage on.

Layer 4: Plywood
Ugly factor: Ummm… well, it is wood. Just not the kind I was looking for.
Ease of removal: None. Nada. Nothing was easy about this layer. For one thing, the plywood was anchored to the floor with a million screws. Screws that I couldn’t find, because their heads had been sealed over with a coat of plaster. Each time I discovered one, I had to clean the top of it with a wet paintbrush and a knife to get enough plaster out for the screwdriver bits to catch a grip.

Once in a while I’d miss a screw, try to yank the board out, and go flying across the room as I ripped the offending screw right through the plywood.

This part of the project took a full day’s work, and was only possible with the help of one of these babies:

Oh yeah. It’s tool time.

Layer 5: Original boards!
Ugly factor: They’re dirty, but in good shape. Refinishing should be a breeze. Especially since I’m not doing it.


My birthday is on Thursday. I’m terribly unorganized about these things (I don’t even know what my plans are), but if you’re trying to shop for me and are scratching your head, here are some suggestions for gifts that are easy to come by but much needed:

  • Citronella candles and/or mosquito repellent that doesn’t contain DEET, so I don’t have to fear using it liberally. Damn bloodsuckers…

  • Pretty ceramic pots for plants. I’ve got tons of cheap faux terra cotta stuff and could use some color variety.

  • Wine. I can’t tell the good stuff from the bad stuff, either, so that’s a plus! Also: Limoncello or Disaronno. Mmm.

  • Art, if you make it!


I have a lot of vintage 1984 friends with June birthdays as well. Wishing you guys were all here so we could celebrate the big quarter century together! Instead, I’ll just post pictures of flowers for you:

Spotted growing from the paint buckets this morning. What a happy June surprise.

I’m feeling motivated to start making artwork again. Look, I even changed the name of the blog!

One thing that’s helping is that I’ve been spending more time checking out other people’s work (and blogs!), and collecting a couple of pieces to hang up around the house. I’m feeling drawn to cheerful prints with a folksy feel — something far away from the “my work is cutting edge and super-serious” vibe of art school. I think these prints are helping to shift my sour attitude.

From top left, clockwise: Melanie Linder, Amy Walsh, and Tory Franklin. Check out their Etsy stores for many more fun pieces.

What I’d really like, though, is some work from my friends to expand the collection. Do you have a print, drawing or painting you can part with? Or a small sculpture? Drop me a line. I can provide a little drinking money in exchange. 😉

I’m blogging today from the great outdoors, if my backyard counts. I finally got patio furniture!

Just wanted to share a little DIY project before the week starts up and I get busy again. It involves finding a second life for the bunches of empty paint cans I’ve been accumulating since I started working on the house. I didn’t really want to chuck them out, so I saved the empties to use as flower planters. Here’s what they looked like back in March:

Inside each can, I inserted a plastic plant pot just small enough to fit inside the bucket, but big enough to leave a little rim sticking out to hold it in place. Figured it was better not to let the plants grow in latex paint water! I punched some holes in the bottoms of the cans for drainage, and filled the plastic pots with potting mix and some wildflower seeds.



The hooks were already there, so I hung a can on each. And here they are today:



I didn’t expect the cans to rust (aren’t they tin??), but I’m glad they did. The color is really nice against the back wall of the house. The plants haven’t quite got this “flowering” thing down, though. We’ll see what happens.

Living room this morning:

Living room this afternoon:



Under all of that smoke-scented carpet, the 89 year-old pine floor boards are still here. Some are painted, some stained, some covered up with a faux wood wallpaper (why?!), and there are several inexplicable drill holes to deal with. But all in all, I think they’re reclaimable. After a little patching, a lot of sanding, and many many coats of polyurethane, they might come through with a nice antique look.

I’m hiring a bunch of dudes to do that part, though.

Tomorrow, I may tackle the stairs and the hallway. Purple carpet, I spit at thee!

House Love

How to do blue, yellow and brown right:

How to do blue, yellow and brown wrong:

Sigh. The first house might just be the prettiest home I’ve ever seen. Lots of art and antiques, but I really like the use of color. I’m filing away its pallet for future reference.

I’m inspired. It’s time to rip out those purple carpets! Grrrrrr!

Back from an eight-day stay in Chicago, where I worked at — where else? — Art Chicago. I rarely have time to poke around the city when I’m at fairs like these, but what little I’ve seen of Chicago in the last two years I’ve really loved. The architecture is astounding, and I think Philly could learn a lot from their approach to having art in public spaces.

I took some video footage of Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain. It’s a piece that’s hard to describe unless you can see it in action. One catch: I took the video in a portrait format with my camera and Flickr doesn’t have the capability to rotate it. So here’s one end of the fountain (there are two of these video pillars facing each other), sitting on its side!

[flickr video=3507504832 secret=bdf2a381e7 w=400 h=300]

This piece, as well as the other pieces in Millenium Park, all have an element of interactivity that, when presented together in such a great public space, makes for an art exhibit like no other. But you know, whatever. I’m not jealous or anything. We’ve got Rocky.

The rest of the week is too much to recap. I met some lovely people, some famous people, and some real jerks. I got hit on, I got yelled at, I got thanked. My faith in art was dashed and then restored daily. I’m exhausted.

One thing keeping my spirits up right now is that I returned to my house after a week of rain to find that my little container garden has really taken off. Here’s a picture from before I left:

I returned to:

So I had a nice side salad with dinner tonight. Can’t wait for tomatoes!

Flickr Pick: 4.16.09

The tree is waking up from a very long nap. I still have to figure out what kind of tree it is. It’s not behaving like any of the others on the block. Tiny little pink flowers and baby orange leaves?

It’s the long-awaited craft room post! My sister used this room as a painting studio for a few months, and we gave it a coat of white primer for her. So this is what I was starting from:



Which is already better than the real “before” pictures.

And now for “after!”:



Lots of major changes. For starters, I removed the door to the middle closet and set my IKEA wardrobe in the space… which was technically 3/8 of an inch too tight. To get the wardrobe past the door jamb I had to take the entire thing apart and reassemble it in place, minus the back panel. But the missing back panel, as it turns out, was the only thing keeping the wardrobe from leaning to one side like a parallelogram from some geometry proof come to life. So I had to anchor the wardrobe’s side panels straight into the closet walls with some 4″ screws. Too much work, but I like the result! Seeing the space behind the furniture makes the room look a bit bigger.



Both remaining closets are lined with cedar panels, which makes for a happy smelling room. The left closet holds linens and I fitted the right one with an iron hanger to go with my brand new full size iron. Weee! I don’t have to do laundry on the floor anymore!



To open things up a bit more, I completely removed the door separating the craft room from the hallway. So it’s sort of like a second floor parlor. The room’s window helps light up the whole hallway now, which is a big improvement by itself!



I decided that the old radiator cover took up too much precious window space, so I got rid of it. The radiator itself received a new coat of spray paint to pretty it up a bit. The hardest part was removing decades of dust accumulation from between the fins. The new “shelf” above it is secretly a defective cabinet door from IKEA’s as-is section: $2.99.



You know how they say dogs instinctively know not to crap where they sleep? Pigeons never got that memo. I like birds, but after months of watching this one particular rat-with-wings happily dozing in the sunlight on my windowsill while perched atop a mountain of its own feces — a mountain that I had to remove with a chisel — I snapped. Anti-bird spikes it is. I briefly considered disguising them in a window planter, but I’m sure the offending bird would figure out how to sit on it somehow.



Over the work table I hung this old blueprint of the library at Penn’s campus. At my last job I worked out of this funky basement office space that used to house an architecture firm, and they left this drawing behind when they moved out. It’s beat up and I’m sure I’ll need to frame it someday before it falls apart, but I dig it in its temporary home.



This chair was the craft room’s first project. I’ve owned it for years, and at some point its seat had an unfortunate run-in with an exploded pen. Even after a good bleaching it was just too dirty-looking to sit on, but I couldn’t bring myself to chuck it. So after months of keeping the chair in hiding I finally took the seams apart and recreated the seat with some contrasting IKEA fabric. It almost looks intentional, right?

So that’s it! That’s why no one has seen my face in weeks, and if they have it’s been speckled with flecks of off-white paint. I will now attempt to rejoin society.

Long time, no blog. I’ve been hard at work fixing up the house’s guest bedroom, which I decided not to use as a bedroom but as a laundry and crafts room — a home for the ironing board, sewing machine, linens, and space for working on “clean” art projects. The “after” pictures are coming, but I’m going to tease you with a couple of “before” shots. These are from the home inspection:

So… some walls are green, some are blue, the ceiling is yellow, and there are 16 different kinds of wood up in here. I mean, wooden blinds? Really?? Did the doors, floor, radiator cover and furniture not offer enough brown for your tastes? Could you not also find wooden bed sheets?