Is it true?

Did you hear that the gallery wall is dead?

Me, either.

Not exactly. Just some internet grumbling. Stale. Overexposed. That sort of thing. If it is under assault, I can’t sit still for it. I will single-handedly fight to keep it alive. I could do that in the #newoldhouse, just with covering up the WPFH. We’re like the Louvre on Marion, we’ve got so many galleries. And y’all know there’s gonna be a gallery of sorts in The Office - that magical space that time forgot, though I don’t suppose you’ll believe that ‘til you see it.

Check Pinterest and you’ll know for sure that the gallery wall is alive even if, in some cases, we might wish otherwise.  I don’t think that’s because the concept is stale or overexposed, as much as it is overwrought. It’s a case of taking a classic method for displaying art and making it uber trendy. Now it’s like the word uber…you can’t spit without hitting somebody who’s saying ‘uber’ while demonstrating how to make a gallery wall.

People did as people do, they got carried away and started hanging all sorts of crazy ish on walls - without regard to scale, proportion or context. Start with context. If you just want to fill a wall with stuff because all the cool kids are doing it, you’ll probably end up with a less than artful installation. You have to give thought to the why, then the what and the where and the how.

Case in point: a gallery wall I did for a client a while back. There are lots of styles for gallery walls, I chose this project because it’s a super-easy-paint-by-numbers example. Also, I had some pictures of the process. It was completed over five years ago, and I think it holds up pretty well over time.

Here’s my step by step process:

1) Find a client. Be your own client, if you must. In this case, I had a wonderful client I’d worked with previously and bonus - she had a room in dire need of intervention.

2) Be the wall, Danny. Be the wall. The client didn’t plan to stay in the house long term, so the plan was mostly cosmetic – make it happily livable, and set the stage for potential buyers a few years hence. I gave her a detailed design plan to implement (undoing some unfortunate design choices, upgrading lighting, replacing counters and cabinet hardware, painting, and so on). When the messy stuff was out of the way, I scaled the wall.

3) Spend a fair amount of time considering what to do with your new blank canvas. If you’re staging to sell, you might pick up something large scale and colorful at Pier 1 or HomeGoods. For a more personal statement, you could format and apply a meaningful quote with vinyl lettering. Or ding ding ding: gallery wall! As it happened, while the work was being done on the shell of my client’s kitchen, I was experimenting with kitchen photography. I suggested a gallery wall, using some of those photographs, framing them with Wood Gallery Frames from Pottery Barn. These are my Go To: nice quality, inexpensive (as compared to custom framing), readily available in multiple sizes and finishes, with free shipping. Can’t beat a classic. It’s also super easy to change the mood of the room by swapping out photos or whatever you’re displaying – art, fabric swatches – you’re limited only by your imagination. (Note: uniform frames are called for in this application - where consistency and alignment are part of the overall aesthetic. You can mix and match if you’re going free form.) I mocked up a couple of gallery plans on the computer, but…

4)      …if you’re trying this at home, your first pass should be making an arrangement in some open floor space. Use a white sheet or drop cloth to provide a neutral background for your art pieces. This will give you a better sense of what works together, both for color and scale.

5)      In this space, having made the decision for precision, I mapped the area the collection would cover, arranging and aligning within a defined space, keying it with frame and photo sizes. You have some wiggle room in a free form gallery, but when you go with a tightly aligned arrangement, precision is key. The center or focal point of your collection (or a single piece of art) should generally be at eye level. In a dining space, because you’ll mostly be sitting to view, adjust it a bit lower. Keep in mind that ‘eye level’ in art gallery-ese, is 57” from the floor.

6)      Make patterns. What? Make Patterns. Do not skip the patterns.  I’m talking to you. If your wall surface is out of the ordinary, like a brick wall, you have to be extra diligent with arrangement: make sure hanging points fall within mortar joints. Or cross your fingers and hope brick clips will work with your bricks. We’ll be testing brick clips in the Lab next week.

7)      Stand back and admire your work.

Whether you need to fill a vast expanse on a less than vast budget or you have a treasured collection you want to display, thoughtful curation and ruthless editing are the way to achieve a gallery wall worthy of the name.

Yes sir, as long as this girl is in the business of rearranging other people’s stuff, gallery walls gonna survive the haters.

Vive le gallery wall!

Legacy

A random comment about blogging yesterday morning led to an inquiry about my office progress, which led me to look up from my desk to survey the situation in my corner of the world. Acknowledging a closer resemblance to the tortoise than the hare in the Race to My Office, I thought a progress post, in the Keeping It Real genre, might be in order. I spotted the clock. “Hey! It’s only 7:20?!  I have some time to write, right now!”

Um. What’s that battery for?

Oh. That’s the battery that fell out of the clock when I kicked it over while working on the install of the last rod. At, as you can see, 7:20 the night before.

Escaped my notice, because if a girl has installed rods, 

…she just wants to hang curtains.

And when she hangs the curtains, she’ll see that they’re too long.

These would be the 63” panels.

To the naked eye, you’re thinking maybe she should have gone with, oh…perhaps…62.5” panels? Yeah. They don’t make them. And the truth is, the panels labelled ’63 inches’ actually range in size from 63.5 to 64.5 inches. I knew that going in, because having done this a time or two, I assumed some variance and did a quick check beforehand.  In a perfect world, they would all be 63” long, they would fit perfectly in the space allotted to them by hanging the rod as high as the crown molding will allow. And they would not have become blog fodder. Yet, here we are.

The adjustments I had hoped would be minor and accomplished by fiddling with the ring clips, are calling for a different solution. Such is the nature of inexpensive panels purchased on a super Cyber Monday sale. In 2016. Returns are not an option. If the panels are to be hung without digging out the sewing machine and taking up 576 inches of hem, options must be explored.

And that’s how I found myself in the basement, foraging for drapery hooks in the bags and boxes of tricks still waiting to be unpacked. Nary a hook to be found, but hey! Look at this!

A refresher course in Irony: 

Having come up short in the drapery hook department, our girl determines that a trip to the fabric store cannot possibly be squeezed in within the next day or two. It would take at least an hour. Assuming focus could be maintained. In a fabric store. Right. So, drapery hooks are added to an amazon order and we’ll wait to do the fine tuning until the glass tops are installed on the counter, at which point we will know, without question, what the required adjustments should be. Moving right along…

Wait! Did you see that ornament kit?!

This kit has existed in its half completed state for more than twenty five years. My mother was pretty famous for starting needlework projects. When she moved on from this mortal plane twenty five years ago, we went through her things and found more than a few of them. Since I have four kids, I took this one, planning to finish the ornaments as a loving legacy for my children from their grandmother. That was the plan.

My mom had finished the Cowardly Lion, so he made it to the big ornament box. He graces our tree every year. I thought the Tin Man was waiting for his loop, but after careful scrutiny, see a finished ornament. Alas, the Scarecrow and Dorothy haven’t even been cut out. I don’t know when exactly my mother started the kit, but as noted, I’ve been sitting on it for twenty five years. It brings back happy memories of my mom and how she’d swear a blue streak when her French knots got knotted. And, I don’t know, maybe it’s my visit from Christmas Past. Christmas is, by all accounts, right around the corner.

Do you see what I did there? I spent two hours examining and waxing poetic about an unfinished needlework kit, when I could have been, I don’t know…taking a trip to the store for drapery hooks?

The Wallpaper From Hell and other office gossip.

I don’t know how it works at your house, but around here if there’s an aspect of design that offends my sensibilities, I’ve been known to resort to vandalism. So, if the color of the family room offends me, I might splash a few paint samples on the wall. I’m not discreet about it - focal wall, about eye level is good. You can really move a project up the food chain that way. Don’t like the wallpaper? Start stripping it in a very conspicuous place. Oh. Bummer, honey. No way we can salvage that paper.

While the technique has worked for me in the past, I’m a little off my game. It’s unfortunate that the sick peach undertones of the wallpaper haven’t grown on me in the past year, because while I was able to get it on the Hit List, I was also assigned to get it off the wall. Let me tell you, this stuff was applied with perpetuity in mind. This is what I’ve accomplished in the past year…

There’s about a million square feet of this stuff and since chewing it off an inch at a time is not my idea of a good time, I opted for a cover up - covering as much wallpaper as possible with every photograph and piece of art we own.

Not a long term strategy, but enough of a diversion that I was able to start another project, my office, which is also unfinished. 

But the skeletons have come home to roost in the closet next to my office.

And though I can live a while longer with the wallpaper from hell in a state of suspended animation, my office situation has become untenable. It’s been waiting to be sanded, caulked, primed and painted for several months, and in that time has become a wasteland of stuff I can’t put away because, keep up! -  the room needs to be sanded, caulked, primed and painted. The skeletons have me thinking maybe I can tap into the Closet Mojo. 

Since the Closet Exposé, harmony and balance are almost as easy to find as my clothes. Could an Office Exposé - metaphorical paint swatches on a wall - bring similar results to my office space? I’m a little afraid that pictures of my office in its current state could go viral. In the design world, you don’t want to be famous for ‘Before’ photos, but if I hafta throw down to represent, I’m willing to be the lab rat of design research. 

The following images are graphic and disturbing. How does she live like that?!  How can she find anything?! That, my friends, is what I’m sayin’. 

This is the here, this is the now.

Game on. Watch this space.

Good gourd.

You might wonder what possesses a person to go out in search of gourds at 9 pm on a Sunday night.

Or, you might not wonder.

I’ll tell you why anyway - because the Gourd Incident correlates to writing a blog, or not, while hip deep in home renovation.

Home renovation shares a few similarities to childbearing - having done at least four of each, I feel I speak with some authority. Not the least of the similarities is the amnesia endemic to both: once you see that shining face or space, you forget the blood, sweat and tears that went into delivering it. Such is the delight in this new being, that the pain and discomfort of the previous months fade into the mist, and before you know it, you’re talking your husband into another one.

And that’s why renovation and childbearing are not like rodeos. Lessons learned can’t carry over: “Not my first rodeo” does not attach in the blissful, amnesiac ignorance of reproduction and renovation.  The type of ignorance that can lull you into the belief that, not only will you be able to form a coherent sentence at the end of the day, but that you’ll do so with style, grace and high quality images over multiple social media platforms. You know…capturing the glory and the glamour, with wit and wisdom, of a yearlong renovation or the average gestation and neonatal period. (First pass on that sentence was ‘the gory and the glamour’, which is at least fifty percent closer to the truth. For either process.)

My hat is off to the scores of design and lifestyle bloggers out there who manage to do it with stylish professionalism, producing blogs that are engaging and informative, ripe with polished tutorials and photo essays of various projects. They make it look easy and effortless.

I’ve been hoping to find my place among them. I’m a designer. I like to problem solve spatial and aesthetic issues. I like to write. I like to take pictures. ‘Easy and effortless’, however, are elusive. It’s a challenge to follow many of the directives you might find in a ‘How To Blog’ blog. For instance, if you want to develop a following, you’re supposed to blog regularly. With a frequency measured in units smaller than years. You need to create quality content, identify key words, develop a calendar, et cetera, et cetera. I find that all much easier said than done. This stuff takes a lot of time.

In an effort to jump start my stalled blogging career, I hopped on the Instagram bandwagon, where images carry more weight and you don’t have to string too many words together. I still fell short on the ‘regularly’ thing. Looking for some structure to address that, inspiration arrived via the youngest member of the household, my grandson, Jack. Jack is into rainbows. Big Time. Everything he’s colored for weeks has been a rainbow. “Grom, what color comes next?” ROY G BIV is indelibly etched on our collective psyche and once it occurred to me that  I’d posted photos of pickled sour cherries and then cherry tomatoes on my counter…R…O – Insta Inspo! The ROY G BIV #counterproposal Protocol was born. Framework! Structure! I had at least one, two…seven weeks of a plan! I could do it any day of the week, preferably keeping the photo shoots at the same time of day for consistent light levels and maybe even do a few ahead to have in the InstaBank.

That worked until we got to Indigo. Indigo inspo was elusive. And, you know…life happens. All of a sudden it’s Sunday night and I have no Indigo. No daylight.

The #counterproposal was about to be tabled.

Until I remembered the paint for The World’s Smallest Powder Room which was custom matched to my Indigo Batik (SW7602) cabinets!!!

What to paint?

Another glance around the room and my eye fell on Jack’s little tiger pumpkin. But seriously, I want him to like me still.

And so…a quick trip to the grocery store, a coat of paint and before you know it there’s a trio of indigo mini gourds on my counter, waiting for their close up. I took photos as I painted, with the idea that maybe this is what they mean by ‘creating content’. Not unlike the thoughts I had as I cleaned out my closet last week. Write what you know. Sure, I could write you up a list of my Go To Living Room paint colors, but there are a lot of people doing a really good job at that. I’m still working on finding my niche, but I think there’s room for someone who can pair the proper wine with an indigo gourd project.

I was going to share a link to this post with my photo of the Indigo gourds on Monday morning, but…me. 

Still some skeletons rattling around in my perfectly imperfect closet.

My Closet: The Naked Truth

I couldn’t sleep last night because I cleaned my closet.

For a lot of people, that might actually contribute to a restful night’s sleep.

Not for me.

Was it the excitement of finding my jammies on a designated hook, rather than on the floor among the detritus of quick changes, gym shoes and the container-of-toiletries-looking-for-a-permanent-home-since-we-moved-in-December 21, 2016?

Compelling, but I don’t think that was all of it.

If we were to do a quick walk through, and trust me - it’s a ‘reach in’, not a ‘walk-in’ - quick would be the operative word, you’d conclude that it’s a designer closet only by virtue of the facts that, A) I am a designer and B) it is a closet. No Instagram love, no crazy pinning, nobody checking my bio for how to shop my IG account. There is nothing compelling about this closet. Save the fact you can now see the floor that was so beautifully refinished last November.

Anyway, some context so you can keep up: We decided to relocate to our hometown. I found this house online. Dan looked at it. I looked at it. Five minutes later we bought it. Dan had the dumpster in the driveway before the ink was dry on the papers. He’s wicked smart, excels at a lot of stuff, including demo, and is really good about trusting me to put a design together.

There was a lot of design happening in a very short time, as our multi-generational household packed up and shifted states. We’ve done major renovations on four houses in the past several years, with twenty some closets before we got to the ones herein. I’ve also worked on more than a few for clients, so configuring a few more at easyclosets.com and waiting for the UPS truck to fill the garage wasn’t an issue for me. I was more focused on making sure there were toilets and a kitchen sink than customizing closets.

We’re blessed with plenty of closets in the #newoldhouse and while they’re spacious, none of them are candidates for a photo spread, because they’re…closets. Functional. Utilitarian. Also, I’m not a clothes horse. I don’t need a walk-in with dressing room. I just need a place to put my stuff. A hook to hang my jammies. When we moved in, after living out of a duffle bag in a rental for four months (with most of our clothing stored in a POD for half the year) I just shoved my stuff in, forced the door closed and hoped for the best. And that’s how it remained, causing me no small amount of anxiety when I need to find something to wear besides the yoga pants with the hex shaped grout lines embedded in the knees. There’s always so much other stuff to do, I just throw stuff in and close the door quickly before anything falls out.

Am I alone?

Yesterday I’d reached my limit, so using equal parts Swedish Death Cleaning and Marie Kondo, with the voices of my mother and my Use What You HaveTM mentor, Lauri Ward echoing in my head, I took everything out, tried, tested, tossed and then regrouped what remained into something I can keep organized.

I found some hooks in the basement and a towel bar I’d salvaged from one of the bathrooms we demo’d and mounted them inside the closet door. I hung some command hooks on the walls, and ordered some clear boxes for the shoes worn so infrequently they require dusting. Inexpensive solutions I can tweak, if necessary, and perhaps upgrade at some point. As I worked, it occurred to me that there are probably more closets like mine in this world, than there are the aspirational spaces found on Pinterest and Houzz – the palatial spaces lined with wallpaper, coordinated storage solutions and Anthropologie hardware.

While they are lovely things to aspire to, they’re not really me. And while I confess to a bout of closet envy now and again when I see them, the investment in such a space doesn’t make sense for me. Having an organized and functional space is more important, and it doesn’t have to be an expensive build out - it’s something anyone can manage with some careful thought.

I had been waiting for the perfect time to ‘do’ the closet…like when I’m at the ‘perfect’ weight, with the ‘perfect’ clothes. But what has become a recurring theme for me of late, is that perfection is the enemy of good. It’s not friends with ‘finished’, either.

I couldn’t sleep, because of the excitement of this life changing exercise - simple organization and the perfectly imperfect are enough. My closet isn’t perfect, but I think it will work. And at the end of the day, I know right where to find my jammies.

hey, yews guys.

I’m in the midst of planning a curb appeal intervention on our new house. Oddly enough, it had a fair amount of curb appeal before we started messing with it. 

We’ve pimped the new crib up a bit with some copper gutters - to go with a much needed new roof. Next up: paint and landscaping. I’ve terrorized the neighborhood with some rather ‘out there’ paint samples (noted above).  They’ll undoubtedly sleep better when they see the color that made the cut. The lawn suffered from an inoperable sprinkler system (recently repaired) and a lot of trampling by various trade peeps, but not to worry, it needed to be regraded to address the water issues.

Insert smiley face and a 'isn’t reno fun?!’ here.

I’d like to create less lawn, more easy maintenance beds. Maybe plant a sugar maple in the front right corner… which will probably provide shade from the afternoon sun beating in the front window. In about 20 years. We’re going to reuse everything that’s there, with the exception of the overgrown yews that flank the front door and the little stragglers by the walk.

Yews, guys, gotta go.

Stay tuned.

coincidence?

I don’t think so.

In one of those odd, Twilight Zone meets ‘Be Careful What You Wish For’ moments, the very same week that I lost my heart to the little house, we received a letter of inquiry from a local Realtor.

Yeah, yeah, form letters. Everybody gets 'em. But this one had our names on it. Spelled correctly even.

In the letter, the Realtor explained that she’d been working with a couple relocating from out of town. Touring around the neighborhood, our house had appealed to them on some level. If we were interested in selling in the near future - would we call her?

Hel-lo Kismet.

Fate. Serendipity. Insert preferred cosmic force here.

Even my beloved husband was intrigued - the letter coming, quite literally, on the heels of the realization that I really meant what I said about downsizing.

Adventure ensued.

In the few weeks between that day and this, first the Realtor toured our house and then - ah, timing - a week later… at the end of a four-day family celebration - a mere hour or two after the last guests were dropped at the airport, she brought the prospective buyers through.

That experience brought us to the conclusion that whether these people were seriously interested or not, all signs pointed to 'Sell’.  I gave us a Resale Ready ™ consultation and we got serious.

But it turns out that even the detritus of one of our family parties couldn’t scare the prospective buyers away.

After a second tour, that nice young couple made us an offer. It was accompanied by a lovely letter which made note of the unusual way in which we had arrived at this point. It was quite moving. By the time I reached the closing, I was torn. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me how important it would be to have the new owners feel that this place was home.

Closely followed by the thought that we’d be crazy to leave it.

And yet the siren song of fewer square feet to clean calls, and leave it we shall.

Where we’ll go is another story.

Stuff that makes me happy.

One year, I got a little overzealous with the pruning shears.

And maybe the saw.

And before I knew it, there wasn’t much tree left in front of the window. Which I was really hoping my husband wouldn’t notice since he might have asked me not to do that before he left on a business trip.

My brilliant idea to fill up this suddenly barren space was window boxes.

Probably it’s better to put some effort into planning and planting window boxes, but with just 2 days till my husband came home, I bought the only window boxes available, painted, hung and filled them. With about 30 minutes to spare.

If he noticed the missing tree limbs, he kept it to himself.

Later that season…

you could still see where I sawed the branches off, but gosh the window boxes filled in nicely.

It’s spring and I cannot think outside of the box. I am all about the box.

I go to the nursery and wander till something catches my eye. I check the growing requirements carefully: I am strictly low maintenance. No dead heading, no extra special care. And if it wants to live at my house, it better be ready to bloom all summer.

It should come as no surprise that three or four trips to the nursery and a bazillion dollars later, I might have an extra plant or two.

Today it was the lobelia, which is seriously close to being my new favorite flower.  She may let me down in the All Summer Long Department, but for now, she’s pretty awesome. I threw the extras into a basket and dropped it at the base of the old maple on the shady side of the house and snapped some photos to capture the delight I felt when the sunlight peeked through and danced over the basket.

I’m strictly an entry level gardener. I love playing in the dirt and the satisfaction when stuff I plant beats the odds and actually thrives. I love to watch as the plants grow from spindly starters to filling up and spilling over.  I try to take weekly pictures to chronicle their progress.

I get a little thrill when I come up the drive and see my window boxes. I see the basket of lobelia when I walk through my dining room, and from the top of my stairs, and it makes my heart sing.

And that makes me happy.