Monday, June 27, 2011

Spaces: Ceilings, Walls, and Windows.

I thought it might be nice to update you on some the goings-on in our interior redecorating process.  Even though it seems like I've only got bees on the brain lately, I've also been at work here behind the scenes (and by me, I mean Yousuf, mostly - because I've had bees on the brain!).

A few things have gotten updated since my last "Spaces" post, some small, some not so much - but all have made a big difference to the way our house looks and functions.

Just a couple of days ago, we finally found a home for this fantastic piece of art. It was made for me as a thank you gift by the incomparable Carla of hat-and-scarflette fame. It's been sitting on top of the piano in our dining room (doesn't everyone have a piano in their dining room?) for months because we wanted to repaint the house before we hung it. Well, the house hasn't been repainted, but the kitchen has been. It's a very pale blue that picks up the colors in the poppy pods and contrasts with the vivid red of the lacquered frame.


I think it looks like this piece of artwork has been living in my kitchen all along, and it makes me happy whenever I see it as I'm washing dishes (we don't have a dishwasher, so I spend a lot of time at the sink!). The best part about the piece, other than the fact that it was made by my dear friend, is the background. You have to look closely to see it...


Closer....


Do you see? It's made from the pages of a vintage math textbook! Which is so appropriate for my math professor hubby. I love that we can both stare at this piece and get something different out of it. I get smiley happy thoughts, and he gets formulae. We're both at bliss. Carla knocked it out of the park with this piece, don't you think?

Yousuf says this is his favorite equation, it's something having to do with solving something else about integrals. He tried to explain it to me while I was taking this shot, but all I could think was, "ooooh...pretty poppy pod!"...


...which is why this piece is so perfect for the both of us.

We also hung not one but TWO ceiling fans. Again, when I say "we" I mean Yousuf because honestly, who am I to interfere with my husband's handyman talents? Mostly I just stood around and watched him up on the ladder while I said, "Are you okay up there?", and then he grunted down at me, which I took for an affirmative, so I got back to washing dishes and zen-ing out while I stared at some gorgeous artwork (see above).

Ceiling fans are a necessity for us because in addition to having a piano in our dining room and no dishwasher in our kitchen, we also have no central air! And now you know why we never have guests! (Ba-dum-bum-CHING!)

But the problem with most ceiling fans are that they don't give off adequate light, or if they do - they're usually quite hideous. We didn't want a ceiling fan with lampshades or exposed bulbs. We wanted a modern fan with clean lines that wouldn't overwhelm the entire space. We also wanted adequate lighting and a high quality motor (read: not so loud that it sounds like an airplane flying overhead). We (read: Yousuf) searched high and low until we found this fan - and I didn't run away screaming in terror when I saw it online, so we bit the (very expensive) bullet and bought two of them.

Check out the ring around the collar where we took down the old light fixture. The whole ceiling definitely needs a repaint. Hope Yousuf doesn't mind!

They have been worth every penny. Each fan takes four 13W CFL bulbs (equivalent to four 60W incandescents), and that's more light than I had with the old fixtures. Most of the fans we looked at took halogen bulbs, and I love that these ones are less heat-producing (it seems counter-intuitive to me to make fans with halogen bulbs, but I'm not a ceiling fan designer, so what do I know?). I now have TONS of light in the kitchen and dining area, and I'm not sweating to death as soon as I come down in the morning to make breakfast. And they're nice to look at. Bonus!

Lastly, I finally dealt with the bathroom windows. Remember my last post about the bathroom, where I was looking for something private but that still gave us lots of natural light? Well, we decided to put up frosted vinyl window clings to solve the problem. And then, I decided to paint some dandelion flowers on the downstairs window cling, because it looked very sad and lonely and undecorated.


What do think? I'm semi-pleased with the end result, I always feel like I'm too nit-picky and can see the spots where I messed up. Yousuf keeps telling me to please shut up they look gorgeous and I love them. And he means it, he's not just saying it to make me stop complaining (I loves my man). Do you like the way it turned out?


I used a paint pen - you can get them at any craft store, and it wasn't too hard...just hard in the sense that you only have one shot to get it right because it's permanent. Not stressful AT ALL.

(I would actually be happy to do another post about the whole window-clinging process, which nearly drove Yousuf and I to tears on more than one occasion, if you are at all interested. I have pictures to prove it!)




And that's what we've been doing around the homestead. Our next project is to clear the back corner of the backyard of all the kids' toys and sad-looking scrub. We're getting a HUMONGOUS shed delivered at the end of the week, and it's going to go right THERE.


It will cover up that hideous fencing (which is not on our property so there is nothing we can do about it). We'll move the kids toys to another location, paint the shed a cheery red, and all will be right with the world.

And then we shall go inside and bask under the cool breeze of our ceiling fans while we lose ourselves in the splendor of math equations, poppy pods, and painted dandelions.

Trippy.

There's still time to enter the V2B/Honey Girl Organics Do Something Good Giveaway.You have until 5pm EST on Wednesday to enter, and it's SO EASY to get in on the goodies. Go check it out and pass the info along! xoxoxmahreen
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