Last week I gave away my jammed up sewing machine. It unceremoniously ground to a halt a few months ago and though I took it apart and put it back together again three times…
On Friday nights we order pizza and watch a family movie, which means that for at least a portion of the evening—before dishes beckon from the kitchen or our two-year-old loses her will to…
My dad has been reglazing and painting the twelve-over-twelve windows on my parents’ house on a five year schedule for the past thirty years. He does it for himself, and my mom, and for…
It’s the end of January. A mouse that was scurrying around in our wall became a mouse that was scurrying around in our apartment. Now it is a mouse scurrying somewhere in the underbrush…
What’s the first thing you do when you move to a new home? Besides turning the key and setting down your bag and opening the windows? How do you make your very first mark…
I wrote this piece from my home office with two kids and James nursing the last of their sniffles on the other side of the door. I’m eternally grateful for this little room and…
I realize I’m maybe pushing my luck on reader investment in my window treatments, but my editor is MIA again, so it’s just me over here calling the shots. I made another roller shade,…
In the middle of our tin-ceilinged living room is a tin medallion. It’s pressed into an ornate pattern, an imitation of the fancy plaster medallions you might find crumbling in the parlor floors of…
About a month ago we painted our deeply honeyed kitchen cabinets white. This is not the first rental apartment I’ve lived in with truly lackluster cabinets. But it’s the first time I ever plucked…
When I decided to recover our couch in engineer stripe denim, I did not list among my reasons its ability to withstand human excrement, but here we are. In this little loveseat’s first 12…