Living Downtown

I have a great friend that just moved away...but this is where she lived while here. I like the simple, uncluttered space, the circles on the red chair, the color palette, the views, and did you notice the bottles in the first photo? She has a blog, too- check it out here!

Home Made Furniture

We needed a low, narrow shelf to fit our overflow of books.  They were literally stacked on every surface, including the couch and the kitchen table.  We had been looking at some furniture stores, and through the ikea catalog, but there wasn't anything that fit the space perfectly (or really at all).  So we decided to make our own.  We went to Home Depot and bought boards and had them cut to size.  We sanded and stained them to match our other bookshelf, and used corner brackets to attach the legs.

The design of the shelf was pretty easy; we measured our largest book and decided the height of the shelves accordingly.  The length was dictated by the length of the boards at the hardware store, and they just happened to fit perfectly.  There are four legs, one on each corner, and two supports in the middle (made up of six pieces, each bracketed to the shelf on the top and/or the bottom).  We were worried that we would miss a measurement somewhere and it wouldn't fit together, but it was surprisingly easy to construct.   The middle supports basically dictated the height of the shelves, and we intentionally left the corner legs a little long to accommodate for any discrepancy in the measurements.

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And look at our new shelf!  I was afraid that the room would be too full, but it works nicely; keeping the top shelf pared down keeps the room from looking cluttered.  

Old Houses

This is where Lock grew up---How lovely would it be to have old crumbling walls like these in the back yard?  Since it was a rainy day, everything was lush; just look at the moss!  Lock's dad designed and built the sculptures (and the red chair!)

I am supremely jealous of that yard!

My Grandparent's house

My grandma lives in a very large house on a mountain in Arizona.   Their house is always a crazy mess full of fabulous eclectic objects and a lot of great furniture, and of course, that Arizona light everywhere.  My grandmother graduated college with a degree in landscape architecture and has always had an eye for design.  They were always going to auctions and buying office furniture and fixtures. I distinctly remember office chairs 'decorating' our living room on multiple occasions.  Paintings, desks--definitely rolling chairs, we even have cubicle walls in one room in the house. They all came from offices or auctions. Growing up, I never realized that this wasn't common.

These were definitely bought at an auction.  I like them.

I love that the painting is sitting on the floor. Next to an Eames eiffel chair.

That dish set.  Those salt and pepper shakers.

They have another similar table in the kitchen.  I love that everything is haphazard and there are piles of clutter everywhere. Amazing, fabulous, old, clutter.  Throwing things away is totally overrated.

My Kitchen

It's not really a secret that I love jars.  When we moved, we got rid of everything and I had this grand idea to only use jars as drinking glasses.  I would (and still do occasionally) buy items at the store because I liked the jar it came in.  Of course, some just won't work as a drinking glass but still can be very useful, and I felt wasteful throwing them away--so I ended up with a large surplus of glass bottles and jars that were accumulating at a fairly alarming rate.  Since then I've found a solution in using them as storage containers.  I had bought some plastic kitchen storage bins to keep things like rice and sugar, but I stopped using them because I like my solution better.  I'll use sharpie to label the contents and it washes right off when I reuse the jar for something else.

Space

This is our friend's house where we stayed in Tucson. There is so much space; more space than I could even fathom.  And the light is always filling the room. 

This, right here, is my dream one day:

Just in case you are wondering, there is also a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and 2 more open rooms for whatever you want.  Sometimes I want to live somewhere where space is a possibility.