Now This is What I Call a Preemptive Strike!

As most of my family knows my living room window and heavy winds don't get along very well. In fact, in the year and a few months that I've been living here, my window has popped out four times.

The first was during Hurricane Irene, when my window popped out at 4 a.m. Fortunately my mom was there and (after nearly an hour of holding in place ourselves) we finally came up with the ideal to lean my empty bookcase against a box against my window. That worked pretty well and a few hours later we hit up Lowes for some tape to hold it in place a little less cumbersomely.

It next happened a few months later. This time I was prepared and taped it in right away.

And then two more times after that. . . .

Well, when I heard that Hurricane Sandy was supposed to pound us with mad winds on Sunday and Monday (and maybe even Tuesday), I (with my parents' urging) decided to make a preemptive strike this time around.

Enter the 2 x 4.

For the record, a full 2 x 4 will fit in my car. Who knew?

My window is now taped, braced, and as I discovered today, it's also screwed into the window frame. I guess maintenance got tired of visiting my apartment armed with a caulk gun. However there's only one screw and it's not flush with the frame, so I'm not convinced that it will do much good, except to prevent the plexiglass from falling completely out. I've also got towels packed around the A/C unit to catch all the leaking water that inevitably happens when it rains hard.

So, BRING IT Sandy. I'm ready for you.

Just don't take my power. . . .

I Never Thought I'd Actually Go Looking for Dishes to Wash!

There is something new in my life that makes dishwashing probably one of my favorite things ever.

Pear Ginger Dish Soap 
 Orla Keily for Method

I picked this dish soap up at target the other day, partly because I thought the packaging was adorable, partly because I had a coupon, and partly because I was intrigued by the thought of pear-scented soap.

Best. Decision. Ever.

It smells amazing and officially makes me want to do the dishes all the time!

In a completely unrelated (but strangely so) incident, I was perusing some of the blogs I read on the very rare occasions that I have free time, and I came across this umbrella...

Cross Hatch Stem Minilite Umbrella

...which I'm officially completely head-over-heels in love with. As in if I had $49 to spend on an umbrella, I would have bought it about 5 minutes ago. Guess who's website popped up when I clicked on the link? Orla Keily's!

If I had another large wad of cash around, I'd invest in these too... an awesome laptop case and this adorable mug.

Quilted Acorn Print 15" Macbook Sleeve

Scribble Multi Stem Mug

The Epitome of Up-cycling

I have an old school iMac (well my parents do) that is seriously calling my name right now.... how hard do you think this would be to DIY?

Source: fab.com via Melissa on Pinterest

I'd totally get a cat if it would sleep in this!

Maybe King Louis XIII Had the Right Idea.

The Shower Window

Did you know that King Louis XIII only took five baths in his entire life and Louis XIV only took three?! Eww...

But I'm starting to think maybe they had the right idea, because I witnessed something super awkward yesterday.

I saw one of my neighbors in the shower.

Awkward.

Granted, I only saw the person's silhouette, but still, that was more than I wanted.

Let me explain. My apartment, and all the other apartments in my complex have a window in the bathroom—a window that looks right into the shower. The window is pretty nice, mostly because it lets lots of light into the bathroom and provides an awesome ledge to store stuff on. It's also kind of annoying because it leaks cold air in while you're showering and let me tell you, shaving your legs with goosebumps is not any fun.

Well yesterday's sighting confirmed another big downside to the window... the shower silhouette. It's something I've always kind of wondered about. The shower window is a privacy window, so it has that crazy pattern thing going so you can't see through it, but I've always kind of wondered if someone looking in my shower window would be able to see my silhouette—which while not as creepy as my actual birthday suit is still pretty awkward, no? To that end, I generally try to shower when it's bright outside (morning or afternoon) and not when it's dark (since that would require me to turn on the lights and internal lights + darkness outside = perfect window peeping conditions). But I'd never seen proof that my suspicions were correct. Until yesterday evening, when on my way into my building I looked to my left and saw the top half of my neighbor through the backlit shower window.

I think never taking a shower again (a la Louis XIII and his son) may be a little extreme (and smelly), but I also think I'll stick to my morning and afternoon showering schedule. Besides, then I won't have to worry about going to bed with wet hair and waking up with a crazy mess on my head.

That Was Scary.

About 20 minutes ago, I heard some fire engine sirens. No big deal, right?

Wrong.

They (three to be exact) got louder and louder until they finally came to a stop... IN MY PARKING LOT.

My life flashed past my eyes.

Fortunately, those super scary trucks stopped on the other side, in front of a building that wasn't mine, so I didn't go into full on panic mode, like I did here, when my neighbor's alarm went off or here, when I saw a neighbor's house burning a few years ago.

But they did make me thank my lucky stars that I had renters insurance, just in case those trucks had been responding to a building (or apartment) closer to mine.

I'm not sure what actually happened over there, though. There wasn't any smoke and the firefighters that flooded the building didn't come baring hoses. I did see a person taken out on a stretcher, but I don't know what condition he (or she) was in, and they didn't hurry away.

What an exciting afternoon.

Let's never repeat that.

The Horrible Heat Maker Strikes Again

Last night I decided to give my air conditioner (and electric bill) a break, so I turned it off.

Big mistake.

No, despite the sudden heat wave we seem to be suffering from here on my part of the east coast, that 78 degrees is not the outside temperature.

It is, in fact, the temperature of my living room.

The horrible heat maker strucks again.

Hooray For Pictures!

If there's one thing I hate, it's a blank wall. I don't know why, but it gives me agida. So, you can only imagine how much I've been wanting to fill the huge void above my bed for the past five months.

Horrible blank space...

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I've finally done it. The void has been filled. Check it out.

The first thing I did was lay out all my frames on the floor and arrange them in a fun design. I've been wanting to put a "gallery wall" into the apartment somewhere, and figured that filling this huge expanse of empty wall was the perfect opportunity.

Then, I used a trick I've seen all over the internet recently where you cut pieces of paper to the size of each of your frames, which you then tape to the wall to make sure you actually like what you're doing before hammering in nails (drilling screws in my case) or using up command strips.

It's a good thing I did that because I hated the way all those frames looked up there. It was too cluttered, too big, and just plain overwhelming. I even re-arranged it a few times and took out some of the frames, but I could never quite make it look the way I was envisioning.

That's when I remembered the collage frame I had picked up at Bed, Bath, and Beyond for $3 because it was damaged (no glass). So, I scrapped my original idea, mocked-up the new frame, and put a few frames around it.

Much better. Although, still not quite what I was going for.

But I knew I liked the big frame, so I went ahead and hung that, so I could arrange the other ones around it more easily.

I went though several different arrangement options before I finally chose this. It may not be a gallery wall, but I love it anyway.

I was planning on hanging all the frames with command strips, but I read the box and it specifically says not to do that, due to the possibility of the strips loosing their stickyness, falling on your head while you're sleeping, and killing you. So, I opted for screws. Hopefully I'll have some help with the spackeling come move-out time... oh, mom?

The collage is absolutely my favorite part because it's got most of my favorite kitties. The other nice thing is that since these frames are all hung with screws, it will be easy to switch out the pictures if I get bored or new ones I like better come along.

clockwise from top: Sam, Frisk, Snickers, Skits

Houston, We Have A... Weather Station!

Where did winter go? Apparently it didn't go anywhere, since good ol' Punxsutawney Phil (and the newly crowned Potomac Phil... weird) predicted six more weeks of winter. But it was in the high 60's yesterday and felt downright balmy.

Know where else it's been feeling downright balmy? My living room. Thank you radiator.

This is a super old picture.
I've since shortened the middle curtain because I was afraid that
the crazy heat that the radiator was emitting would hurt it.

I'm not exactly sure what it is that causes my radiator (and sole source of heat in the living/dining/kitchen areas) to turn on, but when it does, get ready to die of heat, because it gets super hot and my living room becomes a sauna.

It's horrible.

It was almost the subject of a fantastic post I was going to write called, "Welcome to my Sauna," but I felt weird writing about how hot it was when I couldn't actually tell you, so, I finally invested in a thermometer. Now I'll know the outside temperature (convienent for dressing appropriately in the morning... yes Grammy and Leslie, you can say I told you so) and the inside temperature, so I can justify running my air conditioner at full blast in January.

I never really wanted a thermometer because I couldn't quite figure out how I would do the outside temp part, since that usually requires you to put a little probe thinger somewhere. But this one is neat because the probe is attached to a super skinny cord that I was able to shove out my window. Very convenient!

I'm pretty excited about this.

Walls O' Happy

If there is one thing I really don't like in a room it's a large expanse of white walls and a white ceiling. 

Well, welcome to my new bedroom.

Normally, this is a problem I would fix by throwing a bunch of pictures on the wall, but I'm trying really hard to limit the number of screws I put in my walls (yes not nails, but screws, thanks to my cinderblock? walls), mostly so that it's easier for my mom to spackle when I move out eventually.

In my room at home I created a border made out of the large amount of postcards I've amassed during my travels across the country. It actually looks really cool and I have a postcard for almost every state (and several foreign territories and countries, too). But I don't have a postcard stash large enough to recreate that here. So that was out of the question.

My next thought was to do something like what my friends and I did in our dorms in college, which was to border our walls with quotes. But I couldn't think of a quote I liked enough, and it felt too collegey, so I got over that too.

And then, during my travels through pinterest and evening of crazy DIY fervor, I got hit with an inspiration. What if I lined my ceiling with words? Not quotes, but words.

So I hopped onto Thesaurus.com and started trying to think of a good word to cover my room with. I finally settled on Happy. It seemed like a good thing to expand on. With the help of my favorite word website, I found about 50 synonyms for happy. Who knew that was even possible?

The next task was trying to figure out how to do it. At school, we settled on our font, printed out one of each letter, cut those out, traced them onto pretty scrapbook paper, and then cut those out and taped them to the walls. It was quite the process. But I had found this pretty script font that I really wanted to use and I knew that tracing the letters wouldn't be able to do it justice this time. So, I decided to print the words straight onto the paper (something we would have scorned in school, since we tried to squeeze as many letters as humanly possible onto that 12x12 piece of scrapbook paper). 

After I'd gotten my words sized and figured out, and the paper cut to size (I had to cut the 12x12 scrapbook paper to about 8.5x12 so it would fit in my printer) it was time to print them. That was probably the scariest moment.

Then, I had to cut them out, a process that took about a day. I did the rough cutting with a large pair of scissors, then switched to small sissors to get the larger small details, and finally switched to an exacto knife to do the insides of the letters with holes and other fine details. It's a good thing I enjoy doing tedious tasks!

This is what they looked like all spread out on my bed waiting to get put up on the walls.

I didn't just want to put up a bunch of words, so I had the idea to use something to space them out. Luckily, I've been collecting paint chips for some reason, and Home Depot happened to make some of theirs in a decorative leaf shape, so I decided to use my stock of leaf shaped paint chips (and a bunch of rectangular ones cut to leaf shape) as spacers.

I put each word up on the wall with a ton of double stick tape and used a loop of normal tape for each leaf. I made sure that I never had the same color word (I had five colors with varying patterns) too close to each other and never repeated the same first letter (ie blissful next to blithe was not allowed). I also wanted to avoid getting alphabetical (ie blissful followed by carefree) but didn't always succeed in that goal.

I also decided to alternate the orientation of the leaf shapes, with the two pointed either up or down, because I thought it looked cooler.

In all, the "hanging" process took about five hours, what with tape sticking and color figuring. When I started this process, I was assuming that I would be able to fill the wall I see from my bed, and maybe one other, but certainly not the whole room. So, I was amazed to find that I did the whole room, and had a bunch of words left over... I'm not sure what I'll do with those yet.

I put this up last Friday and a week later I still love it. It makes me smile every time I walk into the room and I sort of can't wait for a "bad day" because I think it will absolutely make things better!

One side note, at least on my walls, double stick tape didn't cut it and after about three days, words definitely started falling off. Fortunately, Scotch's removable poster tape seems to stick much better, so I reinforced each word with that, and so far, so good!

I Know The Suspense Is Killing You.

It's DONE! (I know, you're like what's done?) And it's been done for a few days now... I'm behind in my blogging... sorry about that!

I spent the bulk of Friday afternoon and basically the entire day Saturday PAINTING WALLPAPER onto my blue/aqua wall!

And I think it looks spectacular!

Here's how I did it...

Like I said last time, I got the idea by trolling through random people's pinterest pages and then googling "painted wall paper." I found out that it's pretty impossible to find any real useful websites that tell you how to do this, but thankfully I came across the Jones Design Company's website which was literally a godsend.

Jones Design Company has a tutorial (and free template!) for painting a medallion design that I really liked, so I settled on that.

Day One: Tracing!

The first step was to make the template. I printed out JDC's template on paper and then traced/cut out a cardboard version. I made a cardboard version of half the template too.

Then, I started tracing. And tracing. And tracing. I found (and it could be different for you) that it worked well to start at the top left corner of the wall and put the template flush with the ceiling and about 1/2 an inch from the edge of the wall. In hindsight, I would have spaced it a little farther over, because I'd have liked to have had room to do a double line on that side, but whatever.

After I traced the first medallion (put the very top flush with the ceiling), I measured 7.5 inches over and traced another one. Then, I measured 5 1/4 inches down from the ceiling and centered my template between the two medallions I had just drawn (you'll have about 1/2 an inch on either side of the top) and traced it again. From then on, I just kept tracing, referencing the medallions I'd already done for spacing (I put 1/2 an inch of space between each). It sounds super complicated, but it's really not once you get started.

I did not use a level, but trusted that by keeping with my 1/2 inch spacing and making sure that I always started my columns flush with the ceiling or 5 1/4 inches down, that things wouldn't get too wonky. It did get weird occasionally, but you can't really tell and I improvised while painting to make things look nice.

I kept tracing until I'd filled up the whole wall. When I'd done all I could do with the full sized template, I used the half template to fill in the holes at the top and bottom of the wall. It took me about 4 or 5 hours (including the time it took to figure out the spacing and stuff) to finish.

Then, I had a wall that looked like this. 

At this point, I was tired and so was my arm, so I went to bed.

Day Two: Painting! 

I did a practice run on cardboard to make sure I knew the right way to paint the lines... JDC does a great tutorial on this. To get the double line effect I was going for, you basically paint around the inside of each medallion (rather than painting in between each one). I used a #4 shader paintbrush I bought at Michaels and a gray paint (Mickey's Shadow from Home Depot) that I thought matched my gray wall pretty well. Instead of getting a whole quart of paint, I bought a sample, which is a small container of flat paint that they tint to your color. Genius!

Then, it was time to do the real thing. It was terrifying. I decided to start the process in the spot that the large picture over my TV lives, since the picture would hide any rookie mistakes I might make while getting the hang of the process.

I think it looks really cool watching the design materialize from afar. Since you can't see the pencil lines, it kind of looks like I was free-handing it!

At this point, I think I texted my mom a picture of my progress and naively told her that I thought I'd be done in a few hours... Boy was I wrong!

All told, I think it took around 10 hours to paint the entire wall. (This does not include the 4-5 hours from the day before).

I thought my arms were going to fall off by the end and was probs a little high from paint fumes... Oh. And, I had huge rash (read: wall burn) on my forearm from moving my arm across the wall while painting. (it's almost gone now)

But I think the end result was completely worth it!

My lease is up at the end of the month and I think that if I had any doubts at all about staying here, this wall has sealed the deal for me. I'm definitely resigning my lease... and probably never moving again.

Coming soon: Pics of THE WALL (put back together and with pictures) and lots and lots of other fun projects I have up my sleeve!

I'm Getting That Crafty Feeling Again.

Well I've done it again. I've decided to take on another moderately intense (in man hours, not necessarily skill) craft/home improvement project.

Actually I have a few planned, but more on that later...

Yesterday I discovered a super cool website called pinterest. Actually, I guess I more re-discovered it, since I have been on it before. Basically it's this website where people "pin" pictures they like from websites onto their galleries (or something like that) so it becomes this huge virtual corkboard filled with fun things. My last foray into the pinterest world was with that apple crate bookcase I posted about a few weeks ago. Anyway, yesterday I happened upon the site because I was looking at my blog's statistics (oddly enough a lot more people read this thing than I realized) and I saw that one of the referring websites was pinterest. So I clicked the referring link and saw that at some point someone had looked at my blog and liked my post with quotables card about everything being ok in the end (my personal fav so kudos to that person for his or her taste!).

But, that simple 30 second investigation turned into an almost hour long search through various people's DIY pins. And boy did I find some fun things to do! All of which I'm pretty sure will be of little or no cost to me (added bonus! and very key).

I was so excited about it that I couldn't sleep last night.

Literally.

I got so fed up with trying that I got up, got my laptop, turned on PBS (one of my only rabbit eared accessible stations in my room and go to late at night channel), and researched/planned my projects some more.

Until 3:30 a.m.

That excited.

And today I put the first one into motion.

Here's a sneak peek.

it involves this wall

and these materials (along with a few more) 

And it better be worth it because, as you can see, it's thrown
the rest of my life (or at least my apartment) in shambles. 

Stay tuned to see how it all turns out! Fingers crossed for a good result!

My Very Own Peeping Tom

This morning while I was toasting my bagel for breakfast, I heard this weird scratching noise coming from somewhere in (or around) my apartment. Now I'm no stranger to weird noises, the acoustics in the hall of my building make for plenty of those. At first, I couldn't figure out where it was coming from, but after a little investigating I decided that the sounds were coming from my bedroom, from somewhere in the vicinity of the window by my bed.

I looked under the gap between my air conditioner and my blinds and saw.....

A Squirrel!

I'm naming him Tom.

I think he's a cutie.

Mod Podge Makeover, Part 1

For the past few months I've been diligently searching Target for fun things to furnish my apartment... particularly things that were on clearance. I've found quite a few things, but this table (and more importantly what I did with it) is by far the coolest.

The first time I saw this table I thought it was incredibly ugly. I think it came in five super bright colors. It was also around $20. Way above my price line. Then, last weekend I found the hot pink version on major clearance for $4.00. Sold. (I needed one last end table.)

But it was still super ugly.

Yay for nighttime craft projects!

I thought that the table itself, and the shape and stuff looked pretty cool, it was the hot pink part that I couldn't quite come to terms with. So I decided that the best way to fix that, would be to re-cover the top.

A few weeks ago, I discovered this really cool store in Old Town called Paper Source. As the name suggests, it sells all kinds of paper products, including cards, calendars, and wrapping paper. Anyway, I went there looking for something to use to cover my light switches and outlet covers, when I found this amazing piece of paper. It was love at first sight. Unfortunately, the pattern on it was way to big to use on an (albeit slightly larger than normal) 3"x5" cover. But I was pretty sure that I would be able to use it somehow, so I bought it anyway. And I found some killer paper to use for my covers (you'll see that project soon!)

Fast forward to my table and craft night at Melissa's house.

To make my amazing table, I cut out a piece of paper to cover each part of the table top, making sure that there was about two inches of overlap on all the sides. Then I covered the top of each piece with mod podge and smoothed the paper over it.

Then, I folded the edges over on the two straight sides and glued them down. To negotiate the curved part of the table, I cut the edge into small sections (about an inch wide) so that when I folded it over, it molded to the curve without making any awkward creases. Then I covered the whole thing with mod podge.

I did that to each of the ugly hot pink sections and covered them with several more layers of mod podge.

When they were dry I attached them to the legs and....

This ☛   plus this ☛  

Equals this!

Ta Da! 

I still can't believe how well this turned out.