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…
There’s a cardboard box in our kitchen filled with sandpaper and paintbrushes, scrapers, screw drivers, putty, primer and paint. It’s topped with a folded up drop cloth and every day for the last week,…
If you’ve been reading these tea leaves for any length of time, you might recall that our family currently uses a small, high loveseat as a couch. It’s a simple piece of furniture made…
We have a new table in our kitchen. It’s not really a table and it’s decidedly not new, but it’s a surface we’ve recently unearthed and put back to use. James and I exhumed…
In old house stewardship and making slow progress, sometimes it really just feels like I’m waiting for the stars to align. And then sometimes they do. I was struck by a bit of restlessness…