First off, friends, my apartment was featured on Apartment Therapy today. Abby Cook took photos that are way better than anything I can imagine taking, ever, so you should really check it out.

In the piece, I mention my hall credenza, that I sort of built/upcycled from kitchen cabinets. Thought I'd use today to talk about how I made it. Here goes:

Initially, my front hall (which is also a main wall in my living room) looked like this:

And it was fine, I guess. But it was also busy. And it started to annoy me. I turned the spines of my books backwards in an effort to create more calm, but it didn't really work. How could I store all the stuff I needed to store, while leaving plenty of room for people to walk down the hall? Closed bookcases? A shallow console? What?

I hunted around, but I couldn't find a piece that suited my needs ANYWHERE. Billy bookcases from IKEA (with doors) were an option, but I just didn't want Billys. Traditional consoles were too fat. So I decided to hack something together.

Here's what I used:
3 assembled kitchen cabinet uppers (Home Depot)
8 fence post spires for legs (Home Depot)
6 pieces of linking hardware  (two-screw pieces, 3 across each seam)
Long wood screws (to drill down into the legs from inside the cabinets)
White primer and white paint + a "velvet" roller
6 ring pulls (Lee Valley Hardware) to attach to the centre of each door

Once the three cabinets were linked into one big long piece, and the spires were drilled into and attached as legs, the thing was a behemoth. I needed help to lift it upright. But it sure provides a lot of storage.

I stocked in my books and whatnot and lived with it in its dark brown form for awhile until I settled on painting it white. I should have used melamine paint, but I didn't. I used regular latex paint and primer. And such paint can chip easily. (It already has, in fact.) But oh well. Melamine paint is too hard to work with/too stinky. I didn't paint the insides of the cabinets. Only the outsides.

The final touch was adding brass hardware to the centre of each door.

Here's the end result, as shot by Abby for Apartment Therapy:

SO MUCH STORAGE and it's all hidden away. And in my opinion, it doesn't look like a set of kitchen cabinets anymore.

It's fantabulous if I do say so myself. (And I do. I do indeed.)

Hey dudes... guess what!?

We're getting close to Apartment Therapy day! Apparently, my house tour is set to be posted next week. (Woo woo!)

In the meantime, I have one sneak peek photo to show you, taken by the lovely Abby Cook (who shot our place for the feature). AND, it's a great picture to share because it really highlights one of my recent projects: bright door edging.

I was inspired to paint the edge of every door in our apartment after I saw the September 2001 issue of Martha Stewart Living. The mag featured this project among other easy ways to jazz up your doors and it seemed so simple, I couldn't wait to try it.

I did a different, complimentary or contrasting colour on every door. The guest room (shown above) has green accents, so I chose a bright acid green edge for that room. Our bathroom is dark chocolate brown, and I used a hot pink in there. In our dark blue bedroom, the door edge is now pumpkin orange, and in the dining room, it's teal.

You could use any acrylic paint for this project, and I would recommend you apply it with a plain old artist paint brush. Don't bother taping. The door itself will guide you, and if you slip up, just wipe away your mistake with a wet rag. Acrylic is very easy to work with.

In order to get a REALLY bright look, I went with some of the new colours/paints from the Mantegna line, purchased at Woolfit's in Toronto. (Any art store will have good paints. I went to Woolfit's because it's around the corner from my office.) You only need a little tube of any one colour to do each door, and you'll have paint left over.

_See the "Luminous Green" shown on the right of the top-most line of colours? That's what you see in the first picture above.

This is an EXTREMELY fast and easy project. I highly recommend you try it. When your doors are closed, you won't notice the change at all, but when they're open, you get that pop of colour and it's fun and happy. Think about it.

Over the weekend, I hosted a little crafting get-together at my apartment. I wanted an excuse to work with the pine cones I've been hoarding for the last year. I've posted about these before. When my niece was three, she helped me gather a whole bag full, and I've been trying to think of how to use them ever since.

Here's what I finally settled on:

I got this garland idea from Twig and Thistle. Their DIY pine cone garland is really gorgeous. That said, the Twig and Thistle instructions are a bit difficult. I doodled around with a bunch of different supplies before I settled on a plan of my own that yielded a similar effect, but was less work to execute.

I didn't bother with drilling holes in the cones, using screw hooks, or even ribbon. Instead, I used an old beaded necklace and attached the pine cones simply, with white thread and basic knots.

As a result, my cones hang horizontally, with the florets opening out, as opposed to pointing down, vertically. But I think they look good. Also, using a beaded necklace rather than ribbon meant I could just count out the same number of beads between each cone to end up with an even placement. (No measuring!)

I used an uneven number of cones (so one cone would fall in the centre of the garland) and eyeballed the sizes to make that centre cone the largest, moving out from the centre with cones in decreasing sizes, and placing the littlest cones on either end.

I knocked a couple of new nails into my mantle and strung it up. Done!

What do you think? Rustic and festive, right?

This would be an easy project to do with kids. Even the littlest little ones can gather pine cones, and if you consider paint, there are a lot of different possibilities for pretty garlands to match your decor. Let me know if you try it!

Remember when I wrote about wanting new dining room chairs and about how I'd decided on the (fake) Eiffel chairs from Kitchen Stuff Plus?

I never posted a reveal of how they look! So... that's what this is.

As you know, I'm no great shakes at photography, but what do you think? Good decision?

So. The Apartment Therapy photo shoot for my upcoming house tour has happened and I've finally been able to relax and stop tweaking and rearranging and "fixing" in preparation. The fact that Apartment Therapy was coming really put a fire under my bum to finish some projects, and in the next few weeks, I'll be posting about them. This one, I finished literally less than 12 hours before the photo shoot on Saturday. It's a huge piece of DIY drip art for my living room.

See, I have this big living room wall that I've been debating about. What I wanted for it was something perfect. Some perfect piece of art. And I was willing to wait until something that looked right and affordable came along. But with Apartment Therapy coming, I ran out of time. So last Friday night, I decided to DIY a temporary piece to fill the space instead.

Here's how I did it:

1. I garbage-picked a big square of plywood from an alley in my neighbourhood (you could also buy a canvas, but this was cheaper).
2. I cleaned the plywood with a damp rag.
3. I primed the "front" of the piece with a couple coats of high-adhesive primer, applied with a smooth-finish velvet roller.
4. I decided which side would be "up" in the painting, and turned the makeshift canvas upside down, so the "bottom" was at floor level.
5. I used mat black paint (left over from a variety of other projects such as my front door makeover) to brush a thick black strip along the top (which would eventually be the bottom) of the piece.
6. I filled a plastic measuring cup with the same black paint and dribbled it along the black stripe so that globs and drips would start to crawl toward the floor. I kept doing this until I was happy with the effect.
7. I blow dried the whole thing so I could install it right away (drilled directly into the wall), but even now, some of the globs are a little wet.

No matter. It looks pretty good, in my opinion. Voila:

This is very much a "for now" piece. Something to do duty until I can find and afford something really special, but nonetheless, I'm quite fond of it. It was not a lot of work and it makes a big impact. Consider making something similar if, like me, you're looking for a space-filler, or even just a fun and messy art project.

Part 1: When I was a little girl, I had a lot of keepsakes. Little bits and bobs and things that I kept in an old wooden box under my bed.

The box was one of those 60s-era treasure-chest jewellery boxes. I got it at a yard sale. With my allowance.

Despite the fact that box mostly contained items I'd found on the street (feathers, pennies, broken bits of jewellery), I kept it secure with a discarded mini-padlock from one of my mother's suitcases. You know the kind. The ones you can easily open with a bobby pin, or break with your bare hands. I enjoyed wearing the key around my neck, hanging from an old piece of string.

I was such a little grub.

Part 2: My parents sent me to Catholic elementary school, which was strange considering that my father, at least, is an atheist. 

Regardless, Catholicism - with the whole "drink my blood" thing, stigmata, angels and plenty of other supernatural excess - was a major part of my formative years.

And every year, the littlest kids at my school would gather in the gym for a showing of the animated "filmstrip" version of The Littlest Angel.

I don't remember much about the story except that it gave me anxiety. The little boy angel/hero left his treasure box behind when he died. They didn't let him take it with him to heaven! The box contained "earthly treasures" like butterfly wings and interesting pebbles. In other words... it's was just like mine. And that concerned me, because I didn't like the idea that I might have to go to heaven and leave my best stuff behind. (And worse, that even if a nice angel helped me get it back, I'd eventually have to give all my stuff away to the stupid Christ child! I didn't even KNOW the kid! Eesh.)

Elementary school was a very stressful time.

Part 3: Even now  (into my 30s and for all intents and purposes a "grown woman") I find I have a special place in my heart from all my little treasures. Even the weird ones.

So, I frame them.

I started with a 25-year-old blue jay feather. Got a dollar store frame. Popped in a piece of white computer paper for a mat, and placed the feather in the centre. No glue, no nothing. Looks great. And it's up on the wall, so I get to see it every day.

That's really the point of this post: I get to see it every day. These are the sort of details that make a home happy.

It looks pretty cute, right? And it now hangs with the other oddities in a salon-style display (a new one, which I'll be posting about soon).

Do you like it, or am I a weirdo?

Okay. I know I've dawdled on this, but it's finally time to reveal my new(ish) dark bedroom. If you remember, I was hesitant to go dark at first, but it's now been several weeks since I completed the painting and I have to say... I love it.

Special thanks to everyone who encouraged me to go for it, especially Amy at ABCD Designs.

I know you want to see it, but let's not dive right in. Let's start with my inspiration: the peacock feather. I woke up one morning thinking of peacock feathers and that's where this whole thing started. At first, I wanted to paint the room green. But that seemed impractical, or less livable, so I decided on a deep blue, like the very centre of the feather's eye.

I chose Behr's "Night Shade" #740F-7. On the chip, it looks near-black, but on the walls, it's a lovely, deep blue with a forest green undertone. It looks different in different lights and at different hours of the day, so I feel like it's a living colour. Like it can breathe.

My walls are textured - very old and bumpy plaster - so I chose matte/flat 'paint+primer in one' for coverage that would hide imperfections.

Here's the before shot. (We lived with the room this way for about two years.)

When I committed to this makeover, the first thing I did was reorient the furniture. I moved the bed from the back wall to under the window. Now, when you walk into the room, you see the bed on your left and a straight path to the back wall on your right. Here is the reoriented furniture, before I started laying on the new paint:

Next, I got painting.

Working with a dark colour is emotionally daunting because initially, it looks like... crap. I was terrified after my first (patchy) pass, but after three solid coats, I felt a lot better. Next, I had to consider If I would paint the doors and trim.

I decided to paint everything (except the ceiling) because I wanted the finished room to feel calm. The dark colour made the white doors, baseboards and moldings pop, but I didn't want pop. Pop was the opposite of what I wanted. So on went the paint. (I even painted the light switch  and electrical plates.) The result is a completely uniform envelope. Very serene.

So... are you ready for the reveal? I'm not much of a photographer (as you know) so it was hard to get a shot that does the room justice, but here goes. This is a shot from the doorway:

Next, take a look at the view looking straight in from the hall (which you can compare with the similar before shot, above). You can see the painted doors and frames on the right. Don't mind the cables. Still haven't sorted those out. You can also see the way the sunlight on the wall makes the paint look brighter.

I love how the dark walls make everything feel special. Every piece of art, every object, stands out like a bright spot in a dark sea.

Next, take a look at our bedside tables. They are symmetrical, but not perfectly symmetrical. The paintings are from the late 1970s, and were originally sold by a local artist at the Canadian National Exhibition. The blue velvet drapes are from Value Village. The lamp is IKEA. The birds are a DIY makeover project I posted about recently, and the brass plant pots were inherited from my grandparents.

On Nate's side, you can see one of my Budai figures (Goodwill), a vintage marble elephant (probably a former book-end), a bit of my midcentury orange floor lamp ($5 at a UofT prof's estate sale) and Nate's weird little nose thingy that holds his glasses.

The back wall, which used to house the bed, now features my clothes-storage wardrobes.

On the smaller wardrobe, I've displayed my collection of hand-thrown pottery and unusual vessels. (Plus weird bits and bobs like ceramic birds and marble eggs.)

I've included hits of green (in the throw at the foot of the bed, for example, shown below), and in the plants, as well as some teal notes (in the Birk's boxes on top of the wardrobes) to stay with the peacock theme. As for the orange and rusty accents... that's just what I had on hand.

The best part is that both Nate and I are sleeping better. A cozy bedroom is good for that.

Anyway, there you have it. I went to the dark place and it welcomed me with open arms. The rest of our apartment (with the exception of our tiny bathroom, which I made over in chocolate) is near-white. And this is cliched, but the bedroom now feels, in contrast, like a little jewel. It's currently my favourite place in the house.

So if you're considering going dark, I say: do it. Be bold. It's so worth it.

Back in May, during our east coast road trip, I found these lamps at the Value Village in Fredericton for $1.99 each (including shades). They're a sort of white glass and I thought they'd make for a good (and easy) makeover. Here's the before:

I covered the white bits with tape and plastic wrap and spray painted the shiny metal bits flat white.

Then I hand-painted the paper shades with some left-over wall paint. Notice the brush strokes? That wasn't working for me, so half-way through, I switched to using a small foam roller and had much better results.

Here are the finished lamps. For the moment, they live on the buffet with several other white pieces, and my grandmother's tea set.

Decent little project, right?

I have decided to paint my bedroom dark. You weighed in and I listened and I decide to go for it. I have the colour all picked out. I'm going with Behr's "Night Shade" which, in practice looks like this:

No, not the colour on the left! The colour on the right! The DARK colour. (So dark.) (The image is from the Hostetler's blog.)

Oh man. I'm terrified.

Just to give you an idea of what it's going to look like, I'll show you a couple of things I've got already, like my IKEA furniture (from the Engen line - now defunct):

And here's a before shot of my bedding (or at least, some of my bedding) and accessories:

If all goes well, and I can get the room finished and dressed, I'll have a reveal for you next week. Cross fingers!