Magazines

Spring cleaning is going . . . slowly.

Friday I tackled "the stash" - shelter magazines dating back to when the World Trade Towers were still standing.

So many beautiful places. So many stunning images.

So I wrote them all down.

I will find them online and share them with you.

Go in peace, my pretties.

(This is only half the stash.)

p.s. The ruffle rose pillow giveaway is about to end.

Spring cleaning

Has anybody started yet?

Me, barely. Although I did throw out my body weight in magazines last week (which, since my interests have drifted from fitness to blogging, is 10 pounds more than previously.)

Here are a few of my hard-learned lessons:

Choose your battles: You only have so much time and energy, so focus on the areas that are driving you nuts. The fine china in the upper cabinet can stay dusty another year. The junk drawer at waist level needs help now.

Spend time on areas where you will be ditching items: Cleaning and putting back what you have is nice. But real results come when you clean and get rid. The only reason not to dump 1/3 of the items in any area you are cleaning is if you plan to do absolutely no shopping during the upcoming year.

Do a little at a time: This is especially helpful for boring areas like the kitchen. Do one shelf or one drawer every evening. Tip: Start with the liquor cabinet.

There's always next year: Don't make yourself crazy. The older you get, the faster spring comes around again. Whatever you skimped on this year, you can hit hard in 2011. And if you skimp again, the Mayan calendar says it's all going to wash away in a global cataclysm anyway.

Fall Cure 2009: The pantry and more ikat

I've been busy making more fake ikat storage things. For such a dumb cheap project, the boxes are working out well.

To make an ikat tray, do basically the same thing as for the boxes, except cut your box down to the height you'd like.


Wrap in your handmade ikat paper and tape it down.

The pantry only took a few hours to straighten up. For the first time ever, my sewing machine is now in reach (off to the left), along with all of the craft junk I've been accumulating lately. And the floor is blissfully bare.

I found this discarded basket, glued it, cleaned it up and filled it with more craft junk.

I've been making excuses to get things out of the pantry - offering crackers, forgetting to close the door, etc. Come on over; we'll hang out in the pantry.

Fall Cure 2009: Bedroom

I've been quietly working on Apartment Therapy's Fall Cure. My goals were modest - clean the bedroom closet, pantry, and bathroom cabinet. The two big areas are done. Here are a few pics of my closet - first the 'before', second the simplified 'after.' (Note: There are actually gaps for additional shoes!)





My little jewelry vignette is made with a thrifted blouse stretched over a piece of cardboard for wallpaper. The jewelry tree is, well, a tree - a stick from the park that I did not even bother painting. All the jewelry is courtesy of mom.


You can get a complete tour of my closet organizing techniques here (I know you're fascinated.) Also my Spring Cure after is here. (I actually gave away those red shoes. Sigh.)


Anybody else doing the Fall Cure?

Photo gallery and partial foyer makeover

Here is our photo gallery, finally. Making over our foyer was one of my Spring Cure goals, but it didn't entirely happen. The foyer makeover plan was:

• Make a photo gallery
• Improve the lighting
• Add a soft rug
• (Some day) have low white book shelves.

Out of four items, I only got the first one done. But it's a start. Below is the foyer before.


Here are the frames I used. I got every one of them free, and it took a couple of years to collect them. (Then they became a nuisance and I realized I was becoming one of those people who keep stacks of ugly pictures around because they always intended to do something with the frames. NO LONGER!)



Don't let anybody kid you. Hanging randomly sized frames is a huge pain and has got to be a primary reason people with bucks hire a decorator. It took me awhile to figure it out until I remembered photo essay layout from the journalism school days - big stuff in the middle, white space to the outside.



Next up: what happened to that soft welcoming rug.

Spring Cure - the last of it

It's the last week of Apartment Therapy's Spring Cure, and we are supposed to be having dinner parties and celebrating our newfound tidiness. Instead, Tom and I did pretty much everything we were supposed to do over the eight weeks and packed it into a day. Tom's closet now looks like a display at a men's store.

I got completely obsessed and actually "styled" the pantry.

Saturday we had a breakfast party with friends in our building. We made our fancy coffee maker portable and rolled it into our friends' apartment.

They made bacon-wrapped eggs with polenta. (Recipe here.)

Office makeover before and after

Part of Apartment Therapy's Spring Cure involves cleaning up your home office. I don't have one, but I did clean up my office office. My work cube often ends up being a dumping ground for found items, unfinished DIY projects and computer hardware. It was starting to make me crazy. Here's the before.

Here's the after. Still plenty of bizarre stuff (all of it free from one source or another.)

I made the memo board. The cards are from friends or from art galleries in DUMBO.

Finally found a restrained use of shoe decorating. (Some of you may remember my unfortunate first attempt at this.)

Spring Cure foyer style file

So much has happened since Apartment Therapy's Spring Cure started seven weeks ago - a trip to Maui, swine flu, Queen's Day in Amsterdam. So I haven't exactly been keeping up.

My goals were to do a deep treatment of my closet and kitchen, and do a one-room makeover of our foyer. I got my closet and half the kitchen done, which, following the law of entropy, has since reverted to chaos. When one is discouraged by one's own clutter, there's no better solution than to go day dreaming on the Internet. So here is my style file for the foyer makeover.

The image up top is my inspiration photo. Alert readers may observe that this is not actually a foyer. What I like here are the photo gallery and the bookshelves.

Below is my actual foyer. I give it high marks for tidiness. However, it is also dark, stark and boring. I feel like Igor shuffling to the entrance to greet visitors.


I want to create a photo gallery in the foyer, improve the lighting and add a soft, welcoming rug - all for almost no money. Future improvements would include adding bookshelves.

Here is another photo gallery inspiration. This is from a Banana Republic store display. I like the mixture of frames used.


These bookshelves ($330) are from The Door Store. They come in two sections, which allows you to change the length of the shelves, which is handy for folks like us who seem to move every other year.

This Ikea Barometer track lighting is only $50.

Here's a selection of rugs from about $20 to $50 from Urban Outfitters, JCPenney, World Market and IKEA.

How to organize the closet

My closet 2.o

There are already tons of resources to tell you about how to organize your stuff. To that tidy pile of wisdom, I will add the Bromeliad perspective - which is how to organize your closet in a way that is cheap and fun. If it's not cheap, we can't do it. If it's not fun, why bother?

My personal closet organizing breakthrough came after moving from a shared spacious walk-in closet to having my own closet that was about three feet wide. Surprisingly, I had a much easier time getting dressed every morning from the tiny closet than I ever did from the large one. All that I owned was visible and within reach. Any item that didn't pull its own weight had to be tossed - I couldn't spare the square inches.

The lesson I learned was that being happy with y0ur closet has little to do with the size of your closet or the amount of clothes you have. (Don't believe me? Have you ever noticed how the paparrazi always manage to catch some celebrity going to the supermarket without her stylist? And she's usually wearing something schleppy and awful like jogging pants and tennis shoes? Why is this? Because she stood in front of her giagantimous closet and could not find a thing to wear. )

So, here's my Monday tip to help anyone along the way to closet trimness:

Easy come, easy go. It's a lot easier to get rid of a $3 pair of shoes than a $30 pair of shoes. So buy cheap in the first place.

My closet organizing secret

I did a little inventory of my closet and discovered that everything in it was second hand with the exception of 12 items and one pair of shoes. The "new" stuff was all purchased on sale. A lot of the second-hand stuff was free.

My Spring Cure purge pile

As long as the global garment industry keeps pumping out billions of tops, slacks, skirts and shoes, you can afford to let go of that too tight pair of white capri pants. Let someone else have it.

You will find another pair eventually. Trust me. And it will be at least half off.

How to organizer your containers like a Marxist

Well, it's a new year, and everyone is offering personal organization tips. So here's mine.

Organizing the "Tupperware" drawer seems to be a big issue for people. I know it was when I was a wee bromeliad. Mom had many a meltdown while trying to find a matching lid for the container she had just dumped food into. We had a whole drawer just for plastic containers, but sooner or later, half of them would end up on the floor while mom riffled through the pile looking for a match. To this day, I associated plasticware with hopelessness.

I now live in 500 square foot apartment, and I can find a top for my bottom with my eyes closed. That's because I run a communist dictatorship.

Here's the solution for Tupperware and many similar organizational issues: Complete uniformity. All of my containers are absolutely identical. (And, because we are cheap, they also all happen to be reused snack containers. )

This works. Don't knock it.

Or as Karl Marx might put it: From each according to his ability, to each according to his lid.