The Ikea Pillows

Source: designGumbo's Blackberry

My $8 Ikea pillow covers were the perfect color match for our living room.  I already have have a number of feather and down pillow inserts, so it was nice to only pay for the pillow cover.  More later why our living colors are challenging.   I'll apologize now for the crappy photos from my Blackberry. 

 Here's what they look like in place on the vintage bamboo sofa:

Source:  designGumbo Blackberry

The rougher texture adds visual interest against the smoothness of the sofa fabric and the lushness of the berry velvet throw pillow.

Source: designGumbo Blackberry

 I like that they're silk, but they have more texture than the usual smooth texture that dupioni silk imparts. Now, our biggest challenge will be keeping our two Grrr Girls off of them.

High end find at Ikea

Source: designGumbo

Recently, the interior design blogisphere seems to have rediscovered Ikea and found a lot to love. We live within 10, 45 or 60 minutes of three Ikeas, and stop in the closest one a half dozen times a year.  Their regular updating of merchandise assures that there is always something new to discover. There's one particular area of Ikea I visit regularly, and within it you'll find a world of affordable accessories, textiles, lighting, rugs, mirrors, picture frames and a regular and a good selection of house plants. Yesterday, I went to pick up a pair of silk pillow covers I saw a month ago. They were $8 each, which is dirt cheap for pillow covers, silk or otherwise.

Source: designGumbo

On my way to pay for my frugal purchases, I passed through the rugs department and in front of me was a display that made me rub my eyes, to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. Hanging right in front of me were large swaths of beautifully colored cowhide. For. $249!!!!

In our store they have the traditional Holstein cow black and white, two chestnut brown versions - one a medley of brown shades, the other a chestnut dappled with white spots. The last one was a solid black hide that was sumptuous in its glossiness. That would look amazing draped across a Hollywood Regency style bed. You can see some examples on the Ikea website but they cannot be ordered online, in store purchase only.

Source: Ikea

Source: Ikea

OMG! Could THAT actually be a kitchen?

After much ado about a lot, my kitchen almost existed and was almost no longer a figment of my imagination. I say almost because the dishwasher, range hood, sink and disposal would arrive and get installed in a few days. The finished product looks better than I could have ever imagined!

In a mere 4 weeks since closing on the house, we:

• Gutted the kitchen down to studs and sub floor
• Tore down the wall between the kitchen and dining room, effectively creating an eat in kitchen
• Installed doggy door for our Beagle so she can come and go as she pleases
• Dry walled ceiling we messed up when tearing down old wall, and leveling areas that once had a wall between them.
• Installed new floor in an attempt to match 80 year old wood floor in kitchen
• Ripped out three rooms worth of 1936 paneling from the master suite
• Re insulated the master suite
• Installed almost all the drywall in the master suite
• Took over a week to move 2 households into 2 storage units
• Sanded, stained, varnished kitchen floor, in addition developed allergic bumps to either floor stain or varnish
• Bought kitchen appliances
• Installed 75% of the kitchen cabinets

Yet to do:

• Finish mudding drywall seams in master suite
• Build storage cubbies to hold all our stuff
• Carpet master suite
• Refinish balance of first floor hardwood floors
• Move all of our stuff from storage units into house
• Install some sort of closet system in dressing room
• Install return and registers for kitchen and upstairs
• Paint - EVERY ROOM
• Have driveway poured
• IMPORTANT NOTE: By the time you get to this finished product, (photographed almost a year after purchase) we'd painted the kitchen walls three different times:
  • first a blue gray (a la Pottery Barn)
  • Palm Green (a la the den color)
  • The inside of an avocado (ceiling and walls) - final color

And on the second day

  With a flourish of a hammer and the relentless yammering of a sawzall, the first wall met its death on the second day of our ownership. The loss of the wall opened the space between the itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie kitchen (83" x 80") and the rather minuscule dining room (90" x 156") to create a slightly larger L-shaped eat-in kitchen. Other kitchen items sacrificed to the renovation gods were the 1936 metal sink cabinet, the painted in place wall cabinets, the 18" dormitory stove and 6+ layers of old flooring removed down to the wood plank sub-floor. The only things left standing were the refrigerator (which was only a few years old) and the beautiful oak floors in what was once known as the dining room.

We'd already ordered our counter tops and cabinets, all that was left to order were the appliances. Ongoing work would consist of putting up drywall, installing overhead lighting and new electric outlets, as well as deciding whether to do hardwood floors in the balance of the kitchen or something else. Oy, the decisions that needed to be made - it was enough to make a girl's head swim.

Looking back, this was the start of a month-long "get a new kitchen" project - it was a lot of work but well worth it. Until the kitchen was completed we used a microwave in the living room to cook food (when we didn't order take out) and the utility sink in the basement for dish washing (when food required actual dishes.)

My House - the AS-IS Purchase

Doesn't look like much, huh? I know, its small (less than 1500 square feet) and it looks like it needs a lot of work, and four years later it still needs a lot of work. But its oh so much better than when we first purchased on August 1, 2006.

The history of our home:

• Originally built in 1936, it was the first home on our street
• The first floor was the primary living space
• Built with two bedrooms, one bath
• An unfinished attic
• A 7' x 7' kitchen
• A small dining room
• A quarter basement
• White oak hardwood floors throughout the first floor
• No driveway
• A small fireplace in the living room

When we purchased it, the house had been used as by the second owners' son while attending the University of Maryland and three of his buddies. Their upgrades included:

• Added two bedrooms and a full bath to the unfinished attic
• Linoleum floor and particle board vanities in both bathrooms
• Sheets of plastic wall tile in the upstairs bathroom
• Central A/C
• New windows
• Steel beams in the basement to remedy a clay foundation that had shifted over the last 70 or 80 years of its life.
• Entry level washer and dryer in basement
• Clay, gravel and grass driveway
• Chain link fence in the backyard
• Unfinished lapboard knotty pine paneling on all walls in the attic

On move in day, our kitchen featured:

• Green metal farm house style sink with matching base cabinet
• 18 inch wide stove
• 5 foot tall refrigerator/freezer
• 7th layer of linoleum flooring

This will give you an idea of where we started.

First Post

Here it is – today is my first blog post. designGumbo is my attempt to write and interact with the world that has fascinated me since I was just a little girl. My significant other would tell you, by his definition, I have no hobbies, but he is wrong - my hobby is decorating our home. It started innocently enough when I received my first Barbie Dream Home at age 6 or 7. While other little girls were pondering how to dress Barbie, I was trying to find the perfect bedspread for Barbie's master bedroom using my mother’s good washcloths. When I was old enough to choose the colors for my room, I began a love affair with color and painting walls. The walls of my childhood bedroom have been lavender, celadon green, chocolate brown and bright turquoise. My room had the distinction of the only room in our house that had never been painted white.

In my teens and early twenties, my interest in interior decorating was spurred on by the gorgeous interiors featured in shelter magazines. Like many, I clipped and saved pages of beautifully designed rooms, ideas and objects that would someday (I hoped) manifest themselves in my own home. As a renter, I tried out many looks and styles until 2006, when I bought my first home.

Your blogs have inspired, energized and helped me in renovating the handyman special we purchased. Each day I eagerly await your new posts. My hope for designGumbo is to have a richer conversation with you. I’m not a professional designer/decorator, or even writer, but I have almost four years of stories about renovating our home to share, along with some other flotsam and jetsam that seems relevant to decorating/shelter/living blogs. There is still so much work to be done on our house, which means I still need your help and advice. This blog is intended to show how much you have contributed and influenced my home. Ultimately,my home is my test lab, and I hope you’ll join me in my experiments.

In the beginning

I've been planning this blog for months now, trying to figure out how to fit in the world of interior design blogging and then struggling with the design of the blog. The first part of my struggle, the “where do I fit in?”question, wasn’t quite so vexing as the second part, the design of the blog.

Answering “Where do I fit in?” came to me pretty easily. Like most folks, I’m not just one thing, I’m a bunch of things, so I looked to find a name to describe what this blog would be about. It’s mostly about renovating and decorating the 1936 Cape Cod we purchased in 2006, but knowing me as well as I do, I think there’s other life stuff that I’ll most likely share. And then, I love a good gumbo. So that’s how the name Design Gumbo for the blog came into existence.

The design part, well, that was a whole ‘nuther story. My day job is as a web projects manager, and I’ve been designing websites since 1994. This isn’t the first blog I’ve had, and it isn’t even the first blog I’ve designed.It is the first blog where I had to play by someone else’s design rules (Blogger) and that’s been tricky. There’s a good reason why the cobbler’s children have no shoes, and it’s not because the cobbler is too busy or too tired to make the children their shoes. The cobbler, when it comes to his/ her own children, is just too damn picky. Yes, that’s right, picky, as in pain in the butt, gotta be pixel perfect, a perfectionist. The catalyst for getting started, came from my favorite blogger of all time, Valorie Hart, aka the Visual Vamp. She asked why I’m not blogging about our house. It was that query that made me decide to just go for it. That and the fact that I’ve been laid up all week with a torn ACL from rock hopping last weekend, but that’s another story.

So, this is it, my first blog post. Ta da! It only exists because of other bloggers like you, who shared your wisdom, knowledge, sources and sometimes the comic relief. I’ll say thanks now for the ongoing support, wisdom and great ideas.

Carollynn