Little Black Guidebook

So here is the “After” floor plan in progress. We are changing the orientation of the bedroom. Changing the exercise room into a guestroom and our catchall laundry room into a workout space. We also plan on dividing the living room and dining room better by positioning the sofa between the two.

Part of week 2 of the Spring Cure is to start working on a floor plan. In order to visualize what is working and not working I sketched up what we currently have as a layout. The Floor Planner website is a good way to kill a few hours. While not as sophisticated as Autocad, it is still tons of fun to play with and free to boot.

2233390578_2fc98b4c80_b, originally uploaded by designspongeshop.

So lovely I had to post it, even though it isn’t Friday.

Guest/Craft Room Inspiration

My office is also going to be the craft room and guest room. Currently it is a pile of boxes and miscellaneous items from other rooms. We have guests so rarely that it isn’t worth keeping a bed made up in there full time. I’ve been on the hunt for a nice reading chair which can convert into a sleeper bed and think that this one from Crate and Barrel may do the trick.

Een gewone brug in Amsterdam, originally uploaded by Breno Peck.

I am currently looking at plane tickets for a trip this summer for our fifth wedding anniversary. Wow, I can’t believe its been that long. I am daydreaming of Amsterdam, Paris, Zagreb and Barcelona, but we’ll probably narrow my list of like 40 places down to 2 based on airfares. I’m finding tons of fantastic fares. Some business class seats are less than coach, just because NOBODY searches for them assuming they are thousands of dollars. Well they are usually. But I can get me and hubby to Amsterdam from New York business class on British airways for less than $500 which is pretty amazing. And I can get us to New York on miles. Soooo tempted… I found even better deals through delta which is having 57% many of their European routes right now for economy class, but I really hate flying American owned airlines for more than 12 hours, the service just isn’t the same.

One airline I won’t be flying is Alitalia. Even though I can get San Francisco to Rome for $89! Long time readers understand my beef with the Italian train system. I have only posted so far about Me vs. Trenitalia and their booking system. The actual trip was even more of a hassle and ended up costing me a chocolate tour of Paris we had booked! Maybe I’ll tell that story later. Well here is further proof that nationally owned transportation systems aren’t always the most reliable, because honestly, they don’t have to make a profit, they are bureaucracies that aren’t accountable to share holders. Famous traveler and photographer/journalist Michael Totten has a blog where he posted just 2 weeks ago about his joys with traveling on Alitalia. My jaw was on the floor from nodding so hard. Cheap is good, but do your research, fare compare may get you a good deal, but go to the Flyer Talk forums to get real advice from the road warriors who aren’t trying to sell you anything.

Have a cup of tea. It revives you. Take the time and brew a pot. To brew the perfect pot of tea, you need to warm the pot first. When the kettle has boiled, pour a couple inches of water into the teapot, put the lid on and wait till the lid is warm. Discard water. Fill teapot with more hot water, add four tea bags (for four people) and let steep 5 minutes—for a really strong pot—before serving.

Kitchen Inspiration

I’m really attracted to this orange, blue, silver and black color scheme and have no idea why. Stainless steel and blue just go so well together and orange makes a great accent. I have used it sparingly with the main orange feature being a roman shade. It also shows up in a dishtowel here and a wine rack there. My main challenge will be the seating area and dealing with recycling aesthetically. I want a little built in bench and table seating area in my breakfast room and can’t find any nice trash cans for the glass, cans, paper and plastic. Oh and hubby, if you’re listening, I want this bag to keep my plastic bags in and could you throw in this blue teapot too?

Grass is starting to bloom (is that the right word?), and I love the combo of blue and green in this photo by prop stylist Jen Everett. Have a cup of tea. It revives you.

I’m a bit behind doing my week two Spring Cure post, mostly because I’ve been having so much fun gathering my inspiration from week 1. Also, most of the actual work on the house happens over the weekend so this is what we were up to this weekend.

Focus Room of the week: Kitchen

Tasks:

• Mini-clean: wash and put away dirty dishes, wipe of the counters, and empty the trash.
• Deep-clean: Pick one major area to begin (the food pantry, the dish cabinet, the fridge, etc.) and remove all of its contents to begin cleaning it inside and out. If you focus on one area/appliance per night, you should be cooking a delicious meal in your sparkling clean kitchen by Saturday! We started with the refrigerator and were amazed at how out of date some of our condiments were. When it came to doing the cabinets I set up the same system as when I go through my closets. Three piles, keep toss and donate. I also added a fourth category for the kitchen: relocate, its amazing how many non-kitchen items have crept their way onto the counters.We took all of the kitchen gadgets and put them in a shoebox and are taking them out one by one as we use them. So far we have several knifes that I don’t think we ever use, but have stayed on our knife magnet for years. We’ll be making a run to the food bank and Salvation Army soon.
• Invest in a good water filter: Or, in our case we are going to change out the one in the refrigerator which is about a year old now. It took the place of our Brita pitcher, which had non-recyclable filters to change every few months. We have saved 4 filters and numerous water-bottles over the past year with our in-fridge filtration. If you don’t have a fridge with this I would recommend an on sink filter rather than a pitcher.
• Cook a homemade meal: After your kitchen is pared down and clutter-free, it’ll be begging to for a delicious mess. I’ll be making an Italian meal for a friend’s birthday.

One room remedy: Our one room remedy is our bedroom. We ordered some items from my inspiration board from last week which should be arriving soon. This week we are ready to map out our floor plan. As engineers we like to cut out all our furniture to scale on graph paper and move it around the room on paper first and then do the actual furniture move. I also like drawing things up in Autocad. Here is what Apartment Therapy has to say about mapping out your floor plan.

• begin by using a pencil and graph paper to sketch a birds-eye view of the room you’re rearranging.
• then take the measurements of the walls, windows, doors, and fixed features (ie- radiators), and jot the dimensions into your graph paper sketch.
• next take the measurements of all the furniture you already have in the room.
• drawing on your vision for how you’d ideally like the space to be used (ie- a living room that will double function as a home gym) pencil in only the furniture that you deem essential for achieving that vision. You may realize that you don’t need a sofa AND a love seat AND a big chair.
• if you’re having trouble envisioning how the rearranged furniture will look in the actual room, use blue painter’s tape to lay out an outline of the furniture dimensions on the floor where you’d like them to be placed. Once the outlines are in place, walk through the spaces around the blue tape to see if there is the right kind of flow. This will save you the energy of arranging and re-arranging heavy furniture multiple times.

I doubt we’ll get to working on the Living Room during this Spring Cure, but if we do I’ve got some inspiration rounded up. Of coursem I’ll have to make some of our existing pieces work, even though I would love to get some new ones. I would love to have this gray wing back chair and gray sofa, but I’ll stick to recovering our recliner in gray fabric and taking comfort that our current beige sofa is cozy and can be dressed up pillows. I would like a new media stand, but I could probably paint our current one and just replace the knobs. Hubby likes traditional looking furniture too much to go for my choice of coffee table, but hey its my inspiration board so I’ll post what I like on it. I have made one step towards creating this look by ordering the pattern for the Amy Butler poufs (shown below) and will go fabric shopping this weekend.