Like A Trip To This Islands: Tropical TV Lounge!

Listening to The Arteries....fantastic UK punk that will rock the hell out of you!

I have not posted for 2 weeks because I have been busy with our office re-vamp and have not finished it yet, of course. We tend to work reeaallly slow but I will post the office makeover when it is totally done and you will be absolutely amazed! Until then I thought I'd share our Tropical TV Lounge.

The hula dancers and guitar player, below, are cake decorations. You get your inspiration where you can!

I am not crazy about tv's in living rooms or bedrooms. I know many many people disagree with this but I find a tv in the living room to be a big ugly black hole that grips your brain and sucks you in, and it's always a design challenge. The best solution I have ever seen for a living room tv was placing the tv in a no-longer-used fireplace. This is smart because an unused fireplace is a big black hole in itself. This is a good solution. And if you have one of those videos or dvd's of a roaring fireplace fire to pop in so much the better....it's almost like having a working fireplace without all the mess! Additionally, a tv in the bedroom is forbidden in my book. I like our bedroom to be a quiet, calm and relaxing place for winding down and maybe reading before falling off to sleep. I cannot sleep with blue tv light and all that blaring noise.

But I do like tv, and Dan likes tv...I just don't want it in my face. We decided that one of the 3 bedrooms in our house could be turned into a tv room/guest room. We have some Hawaiiana collectable stuff that we wanted to get out of boxes and display, so voila, we created our TropicalTV Lounge!

The first thing to figure out was our color scheme and furniture. The typical Hawaii beachy colors that came to mind are greens and blues, but we thought that color pallette would be a little cold for a lounge-y vibe. So we looked to our collection of tiki mugs for color inspiration. They are mostly brown, yellow and tan. We thought of the colors of driftwood, sand, palm trees, flowers and natural fibers. Our color pallet choices became yellow, brown and green with pops of red and orange.

We chose a warm gold for the walls: Behr in Soft Gold. And we wallpapered one wall with a warm toned grassy wallpaper. Dan and I had never put up wallpaper before but it was really pretty easy with the two of us and with Dan's long wing span. We measured the height of the walls, and cut it 2 inches longer. The wallpaper was pre-pasted so all we had to do was dampen the back with water and a paint brush, position it on the wall, and smooth it down with a big sponge to get all the air pockets out. We trimmed the top and bottom edges with a razor blade. Very easy and we think it adds some nice grassy texture and interest to the wall.

We wanted some kind of tv stand that would also give us storage for our dvr, cable and dvd equipment. We wanted some glassed in shelving to display all out tiki mugs and collectables. We were not real keen on a big entertainment center thing because we find them too big, ugly and $$$. So,we turned as we often do to IKEA. We ended up getting 2 Billy bookcases with glass doors, a cabintet for the tv, and some of those floating shelves for various goodies to live on. The result gives us lots of storage with out the heavy weighed down look of a big old entertainment center.


Here, above, is our IKEA Billy and shelf combo. And here are some of our tiki mugs. And speaking of tiki, if you are ever in San Francisco and want to get a drink with an umbrella in it, climb Nob Hill and go to The Tonga Room at the Fairmont Hotel. It will be worth it and you will burn a few calories climbing the hills. The Tonga room is way rad, you will like it!

The daybed is also from IKEA and can accomodate a sleep over. The cover is made out of some of that stretchy fleece fabric I snagged at the fabic store. This stuff is great for furniture covers because it's really sturdy, is stretchable, soft, washable, cozy, and comes in a zillion colors and patterns.

I made the drapes. I ordered the fabric from www.hawaiifabricmart.com. They have literally thousands of colors and patterns and are very reasonably priced. If you ever want Hawaiian fabric this is the place to go! They also have a store in Honolulu that I was lucky enough to visit a few years ago (crazy, I bought FABRIC on my Hawaiian vacation!). Drapes are actually pretty easy to make. I measure the length I want, add 10 inches for casings and hems, and double the width I want. Do the simple math, and figure out how much fabric you need. This fabric was 36 inches wide and I ended up buying 11 yards. And I made 2 drapes since there are 2 windows. I lined the drapes with 100% cotton muslin. They turned out great and are washable. And, we got exactly what we wanted, "custom" if you will, for cheap. We added a couple of bamboo shades from Cost Plus to help with the tropical feel we were trying to achieve. The drapery rods were old ones from IKEA that I had laying around. I sponge painted them brown and added some rattan finial things at the ends.

We live in (usually) sweltering Texas and have ceiling fans in almost every room. I like ceiling fans but the existing one in the Lounge was a hideous combo of brass with white blades. UGLY! It was the perfect size and worked great so instead of scrapping it we overhauled it. Dan took it down and I sanded the daylights out of brass, coated it with a couple of layers of white spray paint, and there ya go! All the ugly brass is a memory, and cost us nothing except for a can of spray paint. The glass bulb covers where ghastly, too, but again I could not talk myself into tossing them and buying new ones (especially b/c the new ones I really wanted were $15 clams a pop). I thought about how to overhaul the ugly "tulip" style glass shades and came up with this: I went to a craft store and bought a few sheets of brown and yellow tissue paper and cut it into strips. I took some plain old Elmer's glue, watered it down and applied the tissue strips to the shades with a paintbrush. After it dried I hit it with a couple of layers of clear coat. Now observe the magnificent outcome: they look sort of tortoiseshell-y. Not too shabby for about a 50 cents worth of tissue paper!

These suitcases have been floating around between me and my sister for years. I actually bought the bigger one at the Ashby Flea Market in Berkeley a million years ago for like 5 bucks, when I was going to Vegas for the first time and needed a suitcase. My sister had it for a long time after that and stored all her tools in it. I re-inherited these things and love them so much I thought they would make a nice side table in the Lounge, and give a little bit of the travel vibe to the room. The basket on top houses the remote controls.




The other end table is a jute storage cube that holds extra blankets. I got the lamp at some discount store and thought it would work perfectly in the room because it looks like a big piece of bamboo. The shade is vintage, scored at one of the City Wide Garage Sales here in Austin a couple of years ago. We got a matching pair for $50. (the other is in the attic right now waiting for a lamp to call home).

The Hawaiian prints on the wall are from a couple of different calenders that I was saving, the frames from Joanne Fabrics for really cheap.


The pendant lamp was a birthday present from Dan. There used to be second hand store a few doors down from one of our favorite Mexican restaurants, Picante, in Berkeley. I had my eye on this thing for a few months and suddenly it was gone. I was happy to find out it was gone because Dan went and got it for me..it is one of my favorite things.

The Barbie and Ken are ready to luau. I think every house should have a Barbie and Ken.

Dan and I went to Mazatlan about a year ago and found the wood swordfish and marlin at the mercado. We have always liked the fish-on-the-wall look but didn't want the real thing because 1) we do not like dead things on our walls and 2) real marlins and swordfish are endangered. So when we saw these we got them. We had to check them at the airport but they arrived safely.

And of course, record albums. We have a bunch of these and they look just right on the shelves above the tv. Yes, we do still play them. I got the ceramic mermaids from my grandmother who used to work as a painter at the famous Betty Lou Nichols Ceramics in La Habra, California. She told me that these 2 figures were from a line they made for a seafood restaurant in Los Angeles in the 1950's. The mermaids were used to dress up their seafood platters.

















So, there it is, our daily trip to warmer climes! We love our Lounge, especially on cold days like today. Cheers!

We are punk rock martha stewart

Love Gun

The wood trim in our house has about 10 layers if paint on it in every hue imaginable. This is not a happy fact. I can't understand why someone would add yet another layer of paint to woodwork and mouldings that are already so thick with glopped-on paint you can barely see the details of the wood itself. Some people even go so far as to paint over hinges and window locks - this is utter insanity and is the lazy man or woman's way of doing things. Of course, this too is one of the abuses our house was subjected to before we moved in and rescued it. But let's face it: there comes a time when decades of old paint has to be removed. So, any room makeover we tackle entails taking off all door and window hardware, stripping it and reusing it (they just don't make door hinges the way they used to so we try to salvage the originals, 10 layers of paint or not). If we wanted to take the easy way out and do a crap job the woodwork in our house could just be sanded before painting, but we decided that we wanted to get down to the bare wood and start fresh.

Thankfully I discovered an indispensable product that I can not live without. I call it my Love Gun. I kid, it's really called a heat gun. It has changed my life.




It kind of looks like a blow dryer but do not get this thing near your hair - or your skin or anything plastic. This thing gets fiery HOT! It will singe, burn or melt just about everything. So when I use my heat gun I also make sure this is nearby:



Better safe than sorry! And since I was working today with the Love Gun I thought it only appropriate to listen to this:


We are currently re-vamping our home office. The first thing I do when I take on a room is to strip all the baseboards, moulding, windows and doors of the offensive layers of paint. This is not an easy task since this room has 4 double-hung windows and 2 doors, and all that moulding, and all those baseboards. This is not the cheap ugly new crap that you find in newly built houses but rather is old and original to the house, so in keeping with our aesthetic, it must be kept. So, out came my toy, the heat gun.

Here is a shot showing how damn hot this thing gets, and how it bubbles up the many layers of old paint:


Here are a couple of shots of me scraping away the paint. It comes off pretty easily, but keep on the lookout for smoke and sparks! Seriously, I could start a fire if I don't keep my eyeballs peeled.





















This is actually a pretty labor intensive good upper body workout, but it is much easier than sanding! And you will get down to the lovely bare wood.

By the way, the song "Plaster Caster" is pretty hilarious. It's a fact that none of the guys in KISS ever got cast by the famous Plaster Caster herself, Cynthia. They wanted to but she said no dice. She apparently thought they were jerks...imagine that!

And here is an art shot of the door trim that I finished today. Looks nice. Bare wood!





When all the woodwork is stripped I will paint the walls (still planning on going with the goth dark gray Valspar color called "Sled"), and will then prime and paint the mouldings/windows/baseboards/etc with Valspar "Ultra White" high gloss. All the trim in the rooms we have already re-vamped are this color. We figured that since we have gone to all the trouble of removing the million layers of paint we do not want to repeat this exercise in hard labor! So, we will keep it all white, forever, and will only have to touch up the paint periodically. No more pesky layers!

"Plaster Caster (plaster caster)
Grab a hold of me faster (faster faster)
She calls me by the name of Master"....hilarious!



we are punk rock martha stewart

The Dreaded Screen Door Project

Listening to Pretty Maids.

Why are the simplest tasks so often the hardest to accomplish? Why can't a 20 minute project actually take 20 minutes? I ask myself this a lot.

We hired a well-recommended guy to put in a new door on our cottage apartment, and had him put in the screen door as well while he was at it. The old metal door was ugly and dented and had to go, but we were a little freaked out about putting in a new frame and door because 1) we didn't know how to do it and 2) if it isn't done just right it won't close and will come off the hinges. This is why we hired a guy to do it in the first place.

So, the door went in without too much trouble, but the way this guy installed the screen was ridiculous. I wish I had taken a picture of it. It was not flush, did not close well, and the latch didn't line up. It was verging on falling off when I realized that it had to be re-installed the right way. The new door and frame seem to be ok but so often if you want something done right you gotta do it yourself.

Here is a picture of the door before I re-installed the screen. I got a thing for aqua colored doors and black trim..

Putting in a screen door is pretty easy. We put them in on the front and back doors of the house with no problem, but this one was another story.
Normally a screen door fits into a door frame easily if you get the right size. This screen door was the right size but it didn't sit flush against the door jam. It stuck out about 1/2 inch and there was no way to put on the hinges. Check out this picture and you will see what I mean. Notice how the screen door sticks out? It should be flush.






I thought about this for a couple of days and here, right, is my solution:
I screwed a piece of wood 1/2 inch thick to the door jam resulting in a flush surface, and that means flush installation of the screen door!


















Here is the screen door with the hinges. The damn thing actually worked! And painted black it's hardly noticeable.










But let's not forget that I never get off easy with any project. I found that the screen door had a little sticking problem resulting in having to give it a swift kick to get it open. I thought about this for awhile and remembered that I am the owner of plane! So, down came the door again, out came the plane, and with a little elbow grease the sticking problem is but a memory.

A little sanding and a paint touch up and the door was ready to hang for real this time.

I then installed one of those door closer things: very easy per the instructions that come in the package. I did a little measuring, drilled a couple of holes in the door jam and a couple in the screen door and, voila, the door closes all by itself with out banging. It is pretty cool. Then I added a hook lock and a handle.


























And here it is, all done, finally. All in all, this re-install took about 5 hours....that's 4 hours and 40 minutes longer than I thought it would take. I kid, but seriously when the weather is as nice as it has been lately I happily turn off the AC and open up all the windows and doors and enjoy the fresh allergen air of Austin - with screens, of course, I am not crazy...this is Texas after all where we grow the biggest mosquitoes in the country. Aaah, fall elm!








We are punk rock martha stewart

New Trees, Dirty Fingernails

Listening to Factory...I love that song "Gone".

There is a guy in our neighborhood who organizes our yearly tree planting program. Something like 400 trees have been planted in our 'hood over the last 12 years. Pretty amazing. This year we joined up and got two Burr Oak trees (are young trees called saplings?) for only 40 bucks. He dropped them off a couple of days ago and today I planted them. I had never planted trees before but the guy left detailed instructions and it wasn't too bad. It took me about 2 hours to plant both trees and a Pride Of Barbados plant.

Here are the trees. They will grow to be about 20 feet if I do not kill them.

We decided to get the trees because during the 9 months of Texas summer we boil in the house from the evil merciless sunshine that beats down from the west starting midday and not letting up until 9pm. The trees will give us the shade we crave in 10 to 15 years.

Here is one of the holes I dug and here is a picture of the compost and mulch I used. It's from Texas.




















Texas Native mulch and compost!








Here is a picture of our cat Burton Cummings. He sat and watched. He never helps and is a camera hog.



Here is a picture of my lawn flamingos, and a picture of my lawn gnome. Will I ever stop liking these things?



















Hole as deep as the root ball and twice as wide. Compost 1/3, dirt 2/3's. Here are the trees all planted and mulched. And here, too, is the Pride Of Barbados plant. These things get really pretty orange and yellow flowers in the dreadful 103 degree summers. Gotta wait a year which is fine with me.





















I need a manicure. Maybe someday I will learn to wear gloves and take off my rings when I do this kind of stuff.
We are punk rock martha stewart !

The Day Dan Made A Box Of Dirt

Listening to The Dogs from Detroit. They rock!

Dan is the vegetable gardener here at the Casa Concordia. We have been growing tomatoes each year since we moved in to the house but this spring Dan decided it was time to plant a real vegetable garden behind the cottage apartment. And we started composting. Things did pretty well and we were looking forward to home grown organic corn, tomatoes, carrots, beets, green peppers and cantaloupe. We also have a fig tree behind the cottage. I don't like figs at all but I was impressed with the hundreds of tiny green figs that were emerging. I do like squirrels. In fact I love squirrels. If I was an animal I would want to be a squirrel. Squirrels love vegetable gardens. They really loved ours and they loved all those figs, too. It was so hot, dry and dreadful this summer that the squirrels were starving and eating anything that had a little moisture in them like geraniums and succulents in hanging pots on the front porch as well as corn, tomatoes, carrots, etc. We didn't get a lot from the vegetable garden but the squirrels did and I guess we did our part in helping them survive the hottest summer since the invention of the wheel. Now that it's cooled off and rained the squirrels are not so stressed out and Dan will now try his hand at a winter veggie garden.















We have a really ugly backyard and don't want more yard maintenance (the front yard is plenty for us), so we figured we would use the backyard for veggies. See the box of dirt above that Dan made? It is our first raised vegetable planter! We figured a raised bed would be hella easy to make and we wouldn't have to do all that rototilling and digging in the nasty hard rocky alkaline soil. Dan layed landscape fabric down on the ground (to stop weeds) and made the planter out of four pre-sized 12 inch x 8 foot boards. Very clever, Dan. No cutting, less labor! This is always good! He then took a 2x4 and cut it into 1 ft chunks to brace the planter in the corners. So there you have it: a very sturdy and lovely 64 sq ft planter. It took him about 20 minutes to make this thing!

What about the soil, you may ask. If you have ever tried to plant anything in Austin you have found that the natural soil in these parts is pretty nasty and rocky and needs lots of amending with pH corrective stuff. We decided to detour this little problem with our new raised bed planter. To fill it Dan made 5 trips to the Home Depot garden shop (you may have noticed we shop there a lot because it's about half a mile from our house...no other reason) and brought home a total of 72 bags of Texas Friendly Top Soil and Texas Friendly Manure. Here is a picture of Dan in the midst of moving all those bags from the car to the backyard. He is my he-man!
In addition he added all that rich, delicious, home made compost that has been churning away in containers in the backyard for the last few months. So, our recipe for the planter soil is pretty simple and easy - except for all that lifting and horrifying back pain!
















The icing on the cake: Plants! Dan planted veggies that are good for Fall/Winter in Central Texas: Lettuce, carrots, beets and broccoli. He planted everything from seeds except for the broccoli. We shall see what happens.
Stay tuned.....

We are punk rock martha stewart

Desk Overhaul: Stencils!

I have not been a huge fan of stenciling. My dear mom was decorating her house in a country cottage style (appropriate because she lived in a country cottage) and started stenciling everything in site and before you could say "enough already!" she had a row of grapevines wrapping around the bedroom wall and a blue checkerboard in the kitchen. All though her handiwork looked great in her cutesy cottage house, it was simply not my thing, and I had never considered stenciling anything, ever, because to my eyes stencils look for homely and homespun.

But then I saw the light thanks to a stencil project in Better Homes and Gardens of a really lovely repeated design on a wall over a bed, sort of resembling a headboard, but adding subtle pattern and texture to an otherwise boring wall, giving it a that oh-so-right bit of bling the wall needed.

Cut to the the desk I have been working on. Our home office is in make over mode and we wanted to revamp a cool 1950's desk my brother gave us and scrap our old clunky Ikea desk that was too big and had seen better days. We have decided to paint the office walls charcoal gray (Behr in "Sled"), a rather bold and dark color, almost black, that has me a little nervous. To make it not feel too goth we figured we would add a lot of white contrast to play against the dark walls, and as far as I'm concerned there is no such thing as too much of the black/white combo. The window woodwork, doors, ceiling and trim will be painted white, a wall of bookcases will be white, the drapes will be white, and most of the furniture will be white. And those 4 windows bring in lots of natural daylight so I think we will be okay with the dark walls without creating a cave room in our house!

The way to rehab my brothers desk was, of course, to paint it! Man, do I love paint! This desk had seen better days so a few dents were filled with wood patch and it got a good sanding. I then primed, painted with 3 coats of high gloss white paint, and lastly applied 2 coats of clear Verathane. I also recycled our old Ikea rolling cart so it could continue to house all our computer stuff. I removed the drawers, sanded and painted in the same process as the desk. Voila! It actually looks like it goes with the desk!

And, to spruce up the top of the desk, I succumbed to a stencil pattern I found in a magazine. I blew it up to a size I liked on a copy machine, traced it out with a felt pen on a piece of plastic and cut it out with an X-Acto knife. I thought a cream or tan color would be pale but still visible. I think it turned out great and gives the desk a little interest.

This computer has lots of extra stuff attached to it, like a music hard drive, a remote wireless thing that allows us to play our mp3's on our living room stereo, a printer, another box that Dan uses for his laptop, 3 speakers, a gadget for the wireless mouse, and a cable box. Keeping all these wires and cables in order, off the floor, and tucked away out of site is not easy! Yesterday I spent 2 hours trying to make sense out of all of them and came up with a solution using plastic tubing and a metal desk basket thingie from Ikea. So now, the wires are at least enclosed in a tube of indestructible plastic and are off the floor!


So, here is our revamped computer table! We are very happy with it and think the stenciled desk top looks ooh la la, not oh no no!

Next projects in this room to come:
Rehabilitate a couple of chairs, new bookcases, and all that paint to come with lots of white trim....but only after we strip it down to the bare wood. I would like to kiss whoever invented the amazing heat gun. Ingenious! And see the dark gray splotch on the wall to the right of the computer, below? Yep, that's our wall color!


We are punk rock martha stewart

The Bathroom: Reproduction Vintage

We have been living in our house since October 2003. The previous owners had attempted to disguise many flaws with a camouflage of ugly beige paint and left not one square inch untouched! Our house inspector revealed a couple of problems that we could handle, so bring on our first house and all the fixer projects! We were, and still are, thrilled at the prospect and are insanely happy to color the sea of beige, one room at a time.

The house has oak hardwood floors throughout but the scratched and peeling condition had to be tackled before move in. Dan stripped, sanded and varnished the floors, working every night when he got off the job, for a couple of weeks and to this day our hardwood floors dazzle! Love ya, Dan!

Since we now had gorgeous hardwood floors to walk on in the Austin house it was time to tackle our first room makeover: the bathroom. This only makes sense because I have been a bathroom freak since I was a kid. If I was at any one's house, any restaurant, any store, anywhere.....where did Lisa go? She's checking out the bathroom, of course!

So, check out these bathrooms! Pictures were snapped during our days of house hunting:





This green and black bathroom, left, almost had us buy this house! They just don't make 'em like this any more and it is a shame! Check out the pink toilet, tub and sink!











This bathroom, right, is oh-so-right and so PINK! It had me at hello! You can not go wrong with pink and black in my book! And check out the cool Lucite cabinet pulls!









And, left, notice the flower pattern in the tile floor! To die for, or to die ON in sheer bliss! The green shower tile is gorgeous, a color that can not be found anywhere anymore, believe me, I tried!




I have coveted a vintage tile bathroom for years. The coolest one I ever saw was a lavender and black job in a friends old house in Reno, Nevada. When Dan and I were house shopping some of the bathroom tile we saw had me drooling and almost signing on the dotted line, but as I learned a person has to consider the rest of the house too, not just the
bathroom tile, before the big buy.

In our Austin house some Einstein had installed weird metal baby blue 4X4 tiles with navy blue trim. At first glance this weird tile looked deceptively like some of that cool old 1950's bathroom tile that I was looking for but that nasty stuff had to go! The bathroom had ugly white floor linoleum (which I promptly ripped out) over lovely original basketweave tile in blue and white that we planned to keep. The tub, also original to the house, was in pretty good shape. The vanity and fake marble sink were truly ghastly. As it turned out, the only thing we did keep in the bathroom was that tub!
Here is a picture, below, of our bathroom when we moved in. Glued on metal tile...eeeh gads! How deceptive and nasty they really are!
All this had to go, and go it did. A couple of hammers and a crowbar and it was history. We found that the basketweave floor tile around the toilet was in sad shape: very mushy, tiles missing, toilet that wobbled around on the foundation due to years of unspeakable liquids and substances eating away at it. I consulted with a tile expert who told us the basketweave tile was pretty much unreproducable and we would be better off ripping it out and putting in something similar. As a general rule my aesthetic is to fix and keep that cool stuff that no longer can be made like my '73 VW bug, my vintage nurse uniforms, Poole pottery, and this floor....but the floor had to go. Out it came, along with the nasty 2 inch mortor beneath that we removed with a hand chisel and a hammer. Tough job! We took the water damaged walls down to the studs at shoulder height.
We had never put in Hardibacker so hired a guy to do this. Then we had some fun picking tile and a new sink. Since I am truly in love with old bathroom tile from the 40's/50's we decided to recreate it and make a repro 1950's bathroom. We went to Home Depot and ordered a color from Daltile called Flamingo, as well as base cove, pencil stripe tile and trim in black. We installed octagon floor tile and added a black accent pattern. We really like the look of pedestal sinks as they make the room look larger and airier. Our pedestal sink is made by Standard and came from Home Depot. Since counter space is non-existent with a pedestal sink we also installed a glass sink shelf (Pottery Barn, still in the box, $20 on eBay). The round mirror is from IKEA (around $20), and the twin lights flanking the mirror were found on eBay, also originally Pottery Barn, for around $30. The plumbing fixtures are all Price-Pfister. We had an electrician install the lights and a plumber install the sink and toilet but I did all the tile work and painting myself so saved loads of money even though we were without a fully functional bathroom in the house for almost 3 months. Thankfully we have the apartment bathroom!



Was it worth it? Hell Yeah! We got exactly what we wanted and the satisfaction of doing it ourselves. Plus I mastered the tile saw and have learned that I love to tile stuff!

we are punk rock martha stewart