Little Black Guidebook

The Apartment Therapy Spring Cure hits week 5 this week and oh my goodness they picked our worst room, the office. I never did our week 4 post so count this one for both.

Week 4 To Do List:

Deep Treatment (Living Room):

• Clean up living room and related closets.
• Repairs are being taken care of this week.
• Declutter books and all media.
• Cancel 75 percent of the catalogs you receive. – Catalog Choice let’s you unsubscribe en masse.
• Empty outbox this week. – Freecycle is so much more convenient than driving to the Salvation Army.
• Confirm what you need to increase or decrease color in each room.
• Identify what you need to increase or decrease softness in each room.
• Cook three meals at home this week.
• Send out your invitations to your post Cure Party.

One-Room Remedy (Laundry/Workout Room):

• Begin shopping list and enter all prices into a spreadsheet. – We’re trying to do everything ourselves without buying too much new. Hubby has asked for a circular saw so he can make me a bench himself and spend less than the $249+shipping that the bench I want costs. His hope is to use it on enough projects versus buying new items to ultimately justify its cost.
• Decide on the total scope of work to be done. – Breaking the room into 3 seperate areas: landing strip, laundry and workout spaces.
• Consider hiring a professional organizer. – Nope.
• Visit a paint store this week to find samples. – Sherwin Williams thought it would be cheaper to give me a fan deck than to keep giving me paint sample strips.

Week 5 to-do list:

Deep Treatment (Office):

• Take care of repairs this week. – Closet doors fixed.
• Clean office area and related closets.
• Vacuum, dust and mop throughout.
• Declutter files.
• Tackle the cord octopus.
• Try a one-day media fast.
• Buy fresh flowers.
• Choose at least one hard or soft thing to add or subtract.
• Cook three meals at home this week. – Chicken Parmesan, Zucchini Strand Spaghetti, and Pizza, it’s been a very Italian week.
• Go to bed early and read before sleep. – It’s like an extra weekend day.
• (Optional) Look into wireless technology. – We’re totally set up wirelessly with our router. I would like to also get our printer setup to wirelessly print from our laptops, but that would cost money that isn’t in the budget right now.

One-Room Workout (Laundry/Workout Room):

• Order from your shopping list. – We hit up Lowesfor coat hooks and to look at counters and organization for the laundry area, we’ll try and make the rest ourselves.
• Try paint samples in the room and finalize paint choices. – Choosing the right shade of green which was both energetic for exercise and calming at the same time was hard. I’m still not sure that what we have is right. From time to time it looks like mint chocolate chip ice-cream instead of zen green, but maybe after the room is finished we’ll feel differently.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Our house is sparkling thanks to the sun shining through our new triple pane windows. This has cast the cleanliness of the inside of our home into sharp focus and put me on a Spring cleaning fritz. I have signed up to do the Apartment Therapy Spring Cure, which if I follow through should have the house looking amazing in about 8 weeks. Right now I’m doing Week 1 which is essentially creating your vision. I am putting together Polyvore mood boards of the rooms I want to work on, which has been quite fun. Of course I’m trying to reuse almost everything we have rather than buying new. Creating my own home with its own style out of someone else’s inherited furniture and thrift finds has been a challenge. Right now the house still has the feel of two college students, nothing matches and it all feels very temporary. I’ve been out of school for over 2 years now so its about time to get rid of the dorm look. Bye bye wire cubby shelving. Please bear with my seasonal madness and nesting instincts.