After a lot of hemming and hawing, Matthew and I have decided that we’re going to get rid of the grass in our front yard, and if it goes well and we like the result, we might get rid of the grass in our backyard, too. A lot of the homes in our North Portland neighborhood have eschewed grass in favor of gravel, cedar mulch, flower beds, bushes, and evergreen perennials, and I love the look of it. Whenever I pass a lawn-free front yard as I’m walking to the park, I am compelled to stop and admire it, no matter how many times I’ve passed the home before. Cute rock gardens! Hardy perennials! Japanese maples! No mowing! No dandelions! Yes, please.

The previous owners of our home did absolutely zero in the way of landscaping, so we have a clean slate: 1700 square feet of potential. While I should find that kind of freedom exciting, I’ve just been intimidated by it, because the sheer work required just to have an organic, weed-free yard was daunting in and of itself. However, if I lay down a carpet of anti-weed material and then put gravel and mulch on top of it, I may never have to shovel out another dandelion in my life.

Let me know if you’ve done away with grass at your home, and if you have any advice or tips!

Here’s the dilemma of taking photos of your new curtains: it’s winter in Portland, so if you want to take an indoor photo with natural sunlight, you have to throw open all the curtains to let in what little sunshine is available. If you do that, you can’t really see what the curtains look like—and taking a photo of the sunlit window washes out the rest of the room, anyway. I guess that if you spent more than $150 on your digital camera, you might be able to work around that, but I am a cheapskate, so forgive me for the overhead light!

This is what the living room looked like (blurry pals not typically included):

lovely friends; boring curtains

Here are the new curtains!

curtains from kitchen

front window curtains

rumply couch and curtains

So what you might be saying now is, “Uh. Hey. Those don’t match.” No, no they don’t.

A little backstory: I have been lusting over Amy Butler’s Nigella line since it was introduced. The combination of the Neo-Romantic designs with the nature-inspired palette makes me swoon hardcore. When I was working on the idea boards for our home, the Nigella line heavily influenced my color choices for the living room right from the start:

living room idea board

But home decorating fabric is expensive—$10-18 a yard usually—and curtains and pillows use up a lot of fabric. To make four window panels for my almost-floor-to-ceiling windows, I’d need 10 yards of fabric. So even if I found a good deal, I’d be looking at $150 just for curtains. That may seem reasonable to some people, but I’m frugal. That number makes me cringe. Thus, I started searching Etsy and eBay regularly for discounts on fabric, and lucked out with some post-Christmas sales. The fabric for my curtains ended up being $55.

Sure: they don’t match. But that’s kind of more of our style, anyway. May I remind you what Matthew wanted to do in our living room?

Potato Champion cart

He wanted to paint big zig-zags on the wall, ala the Potato Champion cart. But, you know, sans lumberjack. I like to think that I got pretty close with the fabric for the curtains behind the couch:

Amy Butler Nigella: Ritzy Stripe Nickel

The beige curtains that were in the living room have been moved into Milo’s room, where they’re picking up a little bit of the beige in his quilt and serving the practical duty of keeping out the draft from the windows, since they’re much thicker than the summer-weight curtains that were in there.

At some point in the future, we’re going to hang double-curtain rods so that we can hang sheer privacy curtains behind these that let in light, but these are doing the trick for the winter weather.

Come over and have a cup of tea on the couch with me!

I am the queen of the quick tidy-up. I have to be, because my default nature is to be sloppy. When I am cooking or doing a craft or DIY project, I create disaster zones. In my 20s, I was likely to leave it that way and just work around the mess for days afterward until I was finally forced to clean up after myself, but now that I’m in my 30s, I’ve identified that my state of mind is strongly tied to how tidy my surroundings are, so I’ve taught myself how to do quick pick-ups.

Milo's room

So here you have it, the 10 Minute Tidy Up:

1. Very quickly pick up everything that isn’t where it should be and put it on the bed.
2. Divide what is on the bed into logical categories. One category should always be “Doesn’t belong in this room.” (If I’m tidying Milo’s room, the categories would be: “Dirty laundry,” “Clean clothes,” “Costumes,” “Toys,” “Trash,” “Doesn’t belong in this room.”)
3. Put away the easy stuff first. (Dirty laundry goes in hamper, clean clothes go in closet or drawers, toys go in toy chest, trash goes in trashcan.)
4. For the pile of things that doesn’t belong in the room, ask yourself if it often ends up here, and so would it thus make sense to have it live there permanently. Think about making a home for it there so that it can still be put away rather than just sitting on the floor. Likewise, if the dirty laundry ends up in the same spot, consider moving a hamper closer to that spot. In the meantime, take that stuff out of the room you’re tidying.
5. Vacuum or sweep. It’s a simple step that makes any room look a thousand times cleaner.

The end!

I know a mom who has five kids and every night right before she goes to bed, she walks around the house and puts all the clutter into a big box and then puts the box in a closet in the guest room. That way, if her kids want to know where their stuff ended up, they don’t need to ask her, they just check the box. If they don’t want their stuff ending up in the box, they can clean up after themselves better. I think that is a genius solution and might use it myself when Milo is older. Right now, he thinks that cleaning and tidying is a novelty, and really loves to help. He evens pick up after me and his dad: if my water bottle isn’t where it usually is, he’ll bring it to me saying: “Back, back,” meaning, “Put it back, mom.” I love this phase, but I know it won’t last forever.

Every time that I paint a room, I am surprised all over again how drastically it changes how the room looks and thus how I feel about my living space.

This past week, I set out to paint our kitchen and breakfast nook. I’ve had the paint in our shed since August, but never got around to actually slap it up on the walls. I wish that I hadn’t waited so long!

Our kitchen before (when we bought the house):

kitchen from living room before

sink and counter before

Our kitchen now:

kitchen from living room today

kitchen from breakfast nook

I’m going to tell myself that you find it endearingly charming that I didn’t bother to stage or style these photographs. Or even clean up at all. That’s charming, right? Not just extremely lazy?

handmade curtains over the sink

These handmade curtains (made from Heather Bailey fabric) set the color palette for the entire kitchen. I am head over heels in love with that fabric. Matthew and I are considering painting our pantry tomato red.

print from The Black Apple

Here is a close-up of that Black Apple print. This is much simpler than most of the work that’s in Emily’s store now, but that’s what I like about it: a girl in an apron, some mugs, a black kitten. What more do you need?

Jen Oaks calendar!

My Jen Oaks calendar up on the wall! We love it, Jen. It fits in here perfectly and makes me grin every time that I pass it on the way to the bedroom.

prints from Abby Try Again

I love these prints from local photographer Abby. I have a few more of her photographs; I’m just looking for the right place for them.

2009 was just pretty much the worst, am I right? I don’t remember discussing this while it was actually happening, but that now seems to be the general consensus among my friends and acquaintances. We’re glad it’s over, and even though nothing changed between December 31st and January 1st, it just feels better to be in a new year. It just seems like we can put all of that behind us now. Right?

I am not really one for resolutions, but I do enjoy goals, so here are a few goals which I have for the coming year or so:

Get more fit. I don’t really mean “lose weight” here, although that would be nice, I mean increase my overall fitness. This is a goal I’ve been working on for over a year now, and have made tiny little micro-steps. Right now, I walk 3 miles on the treadmill 4-5 times a week. Ideally I would like to get to the point where I can walk/jog a 5K without burning out. I have toyed with the idea of signing up for one in late Spring/early Summer just to give myself a goal. Are there any Portlanders who might want to jog a 5K with me in a few months?

Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal

Learn Spanish. I just want to understand what’s being said to me, and maybe squeak out a few sentences in reply. I don’t want to become fluent. Lately I’ve been thinking that I should read childrens’ books in Spanish, specifically the Harry Potter series, and plod through them slowly. I ran this by my fluent-in-multiple-languages, Romance-Languages-degree bestest pal and she said that she thought it might work! It’s worth a shot at least. I don’t live in Texas anymore, where being conversational in Spanish would have actually been handy, but I’ve wanted to learn Spanish for a long time, and can’t afford the cost or time of a class or tutor.

our backyard

Work on the garden & landscaping of the house. The current landscaping of our house is: there is none. None at all. Our house has nothing in the way of curb appeal, and the backyard is sizable but completely vacant. At least we have a clean slate rather than having to undo another person’s gardening decisions.

the morning after Matthew proposed

Finally figure out the wedding stuff. Matthew and I have now been engaged for two years, and we’re no closer to having a wedding planned than we were when we got engaged. The thing is, we are in a really tight spot. We want to pay for the wedding ourselves, but we are broke. We want the wedding to be intimate, but we want our family and friends to all be there, and our combined immediate families alone total over 30 people. We want the wedding to be in Portland, because this is our home, but 85% of our guests would be coming in from out-of-state, so we have to give them plenty of time to order tickets and make arrangements. And finally, we face the ultimate tough point: we want a wedding that reflects who we really are and who we are is…not very wedding-y. Even the weddings on the indie/offbeat bride websites make me cringe—but only when I picture myself in them! I appreciate that they’re the perfect weddings for the people involved, but so far I haven’t seen one and thought, “Oh, that would be totally right for us.” For all of these reasons and more, we have put off and put off making any real decisions. Now we very much need to get married for the tax and insurance benefits, and we have no idea how to resolve any of these issues.

So those are my goals, or at least the ones I feel comfortable writing about on the internet. Tell me what you’re working on!

Our biggest design challenge since buying this house has turned out not to be furniture, wall color, curtains, or any of the common challenges we were expecting, but… nooks.

There are three, and I don’t have the slightest clue what do with any of them. The one that baffles me the most is this one:

the dining nook nook

This is in the kitchen, directly across from the breakfast table. Were it located anywhere else in the house, I would slap a door on it and call it a linen closet, problem solved. However, because it’s in the kitchen, and because I don’t want my sheets and comforters smelling like food, I am at a total loss for what to do.

We considered turning it into a bar, but it’s so deep (24″?) and high (I can’t reach the top shelf at all) that a bar seems like a waste of this potentially great storage space—I mentioned before that storage is at a premium.

Furthermore, like all the nooks in this house, the brackets for the shelves aren’t affixed to the wall with screws or nails, but with wood glue, so removing them is out because I don’t want to damage the drywall. Thanks, previous owners, for locking me into your stupid shelving decisions!

Then there’s the coffee and tea nook:

coffee and tea nook

This one, at least, is functional. I hate the bulky, honey-colored, 80s-reminiscent shelf, but I can paint the bracket and replace the shelf with glass, and I’ll be even happier with the overall look once the wall is painted. Moving on!

This nook is in our living room, goes from the floor to halfway up the wall, features the same terrible shelving and irreplaceable brackets, and is just a total eyesore.

the empty nook

Currently I’m using it to store my cookbooks, but that is just temporary.

nook in living room with cookbooks

My friend Sara has suggested that we put a door with a latch on and use it (again) as a liquor cabinet, and that’s the best suggestion I’ve heard yet, but because of the unsual size of it, we’d probably have to custom-fit a door.

If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them! No curtain suggestions, though: a gathered curtain covering a nook never looks good to me, just lazy and cheap.

We’ve been in the house for a month now, have thrown the housewarming party, have assembled the IKEA, and are just finally to the point where we’re not spending every single spare moment of free time (which isn’t already dedicated to Milo) working on the house.

It took us nearly a week just to unpack and put everything away. One of the challenges of living in a 90-year-old house is that there is hardly ever any storage space: the closets are miniscule when compared to today’s walk-ins, and we don’t even have a linen closet, so all of our linens are currently being stored in zipped bags in Milo’s closet or in plastic bins in the basement.

Right now, we’re choosing to see the lack of storage as a good thing: if we don’t have anywhere to put extra stuff, we’re much less tempted to buy extra stuff.

After a few days, our living room went from looking like this:

holy box nightmare

just looking at this picture nearly gives me a panic attack

to looking like this:

It doesn't fit all of our books, but it will do for now.

a million times better

The living room was the first space I started to clean and organize, since it’s the first sight I saw whenever I came home, and living in a cyclone of boxes and effluvia was making me nuts—not to mention the fact that it was really unsafe for 21-month-old Milo to be running around in, no matter how vigilantly we were watching him. Toddlers need for their homes to be safe spaces.

Milo, it turns out, also needs for his home to be a clean space. We brought home a new vacuum cleaner, and he’s convinced that it’s his new toy. He won’t let us put it away, and his word for vacuum (mum-mum) is now one of the top 10 most frequently used words in his vocabulary.

Milo likes the vacuum, a LOT

And of course, after the living room was sorted out, you know where I went next. That’s right: the kitchen.

The first thing to get organized was the spice drawer:

spice drawer

The rest of the kitchen is… coming along. It’s manageable as is, but there a few things that need to be changed sooner than later for me to be happy.

Chiefly: wall color. The entire house was (and for the most part, still is) painted in a Pottery Barn pallette of beiges and burgundies. Fine for some people, but so completely wrong for Matthew and me. We are attracted to bright colors, and when we do the neutrals, we gravitate towards the greys, accented with cool pale blues and greens rather than the browns and reds.

Because we haven’t had the time to paint all of the rooms yet, we haven’t hung any photos or artwork, and that is what is really keeping our house from feeling like our home just yet. Right now, it still has the feeling of a house that is being staged to sell, and we are just living here killing time. I have spent almost a year living in other people’s homes, and now I’m ready to see my giant Death Cab for Cutie & Dismemberment Plan tour poster hanging on the wall, dammit!

I have managed to get some painting done:

Mama loves Milo Bear

Milo’s bedroom has a chair guard, so rather than paint the walls above and below the moulding two different colors, I thought it would be much more fun for him if the bottom half of the wall were chalkboard paint. I love how it turned out. We are planning to have an artist pal come over and do a small permanent painting on one of the walls, to inspire Milo, but for the time being, I’m leaving up this little testament of adoration.

I have a whole other entry in me (about the nooks, oh the nooks), but this is running long as is, so I will leave you with a photo of my best kitchen helper stirring the maple-ginger root vegetables for dinner the other night:

Milo stirs the roots