A frugal transformation

The neighbors gave our family a lamp and a small side table. We did need the lamp, for a reading light in one of the children's bedrooms, but we didn't need the table.

The table hung out for a bit in the living room, but it clearly wasn't sturdy enough to survive for long. Looking more closely at it, the top was a hollow box made out of hardboard.

I also noticed that without the legs, the top could be turned into a painting, and hung on the wall as artwork. There was an empty section of wall in the family room that had been needing decoration for a long time.

For colors, I decided to go with the existing family room decor colors, which are basically the rainbow colors, plus white. There's also a lot of pale blue, but I left that out of the painting.

For a design and painting technique, I decided to do patterns of dots. I'm much better at placing dots than at spreading paint where I want it to go, and a structured pattern would counteract some of the visual chaos that goes on in the room. The table top was already red, so I left it that way as the background color.

Then I did the dots, in patterns that varied by color. It came out fairly well--I picked a good stopping point and didn't overwork it--but it's definitely an amateur effort.

With the help of some hardware from our hoard, I hung it up. The wall it's on is not well-lit, so the white dots are by far the most prominent, followed by the yellow dots, and the rest are much harder to distinguish from the background, without moving closer to it.

Minimizing the smoke detector

This is the one that is smack in the middle of a wall that is one of the room's main focal points.  The smoke detector is still there, I haven't moved it, but what I have done is to bring in strongly-colored and more attractive objects at a lower elevation, to draw the eye downward, and to let the white smoke detector visually fade into the upper wall.

This approach I would say is partially successful.  There's some empty wall space at a middle height that seems to want to be filled.

On to the walls

The past couple of days I've made only incremental progress in our school room.

First I had various misadventures trying to do touch-up painting on the walls, starting with using the wrong color of paint--not hard, in a house that has three or four different shades of beige on the walls. Then, after I found the paint can with the right color, it was still the wrong color, because the paint was so old.  Those Magic Erasers for walls have been very helpful.

Then, I pulled out the things that we used to have on the walls, and tried them in various places to see which ones I wanted to use. The results were inconclusive, because most of them are too small, except for one or two that are much too large.  Also, the nails in the walls are much too high, and I am very reluctant to make additional nail holes, now that I know that I can't touch them up very well.

Today I did something that I should have done earlier, and moved my homemade coat hook rack into the school room. It fits in well, somehow makes that wall look much more finished, and connects the colors in the school room with the ones in the dining room. It is also needed there, since my husband has decided that parking the car in the relatively warm garage in the winter only makes the road salt eat holes in it faster, so we use the front door in the winter.

I was curious and measured the width of the coat closet, which is about two and a half feet. That is fine for a family of four in California--ranch style house--but not for a much larger family in Minnesota.

The other thing I accomplished was that some small assistants helped me determine that next to the front door would be a good place for a mirror of moderate size. I have one that would work, but I am very reluctant to move it off my closet wall.

Walls and curtains, not now

The next step in "cozy minimalism" would normally be doing the wall treatments (painting or whatever) and hanging drapes, but as a renter, there is little I can do with the former, and nothing that I want to do with the latter; I'm ignoring the wall and leaving the vintage blinds up. Curtains don't make sense either for this particular room, or for my stage in life--where I need to maintain a high level of "monkey-proofing".

Makeup for my wall and ceiling

My bedroom ceiling is white, and the walls are ivory. In many places around the edge of the ceiling, you can see where the person who painted the walls touched the ceiling with the paint roller, leaving a splotch.

These splotches have annoyed me ever since we moved in, especially the ones that I can see clearly from the bed.

Finally I took our last piece of white chalk, climbed up on a chair, and chalked over the worst of the splotches, blending the chalk into the paint gently with a finger--just like blending makeup.

From below, this makes the splotches much less noticeable, and hopefully they are now well below my usual threshold of noticing things.

Some people are actually allergic to chalk, so this is not for everyone. I expect that I will need to renew the chalk occasionally, as it gradually falls off the ceiling.

Hearts

In the quilting fabric I was given were a number of fabric hearts, ready for applique.  The hearts were in our dining room colors, red and green, and there were as many of them as we have children.

I had an empty spot on the dining room wall, where I had taken down some things I was getting tired of.

So I stuck the hearts up there (just with tape), and I'm fairly happy with it.

Adventures in renting: chalk on the walls

 I came across a striking picture of handpainted wallpaper with white flowering branches on a brown background (here, the 11th picture down). It occurred to me that a similar effect could be made by drawing on painted walls with white chalk, and that this would be a reversible and renter-friendly option for dealing with some of my mud-toned walls.

So I've been experimenting with several colors of chalkboard chalk. Chalk is, of course, not as opaque as paint, so there is much less contrast. Nor is chalk anywhere near as permanent; I fully expect some children to come through in the next five minutes and wipe out a big chunk of my efforts. I was able to almost completely erase the chalk with just my sleeve; I expect the rest will come off with a little scrubbing with a damp rag.

The lighting in here is terrible, and my drawing skills are not much better, but here it is:

The two little art projects...

...that I made for the bedroom:

1.  Wood-grained circles:  A while back, we picked up a free particle-board bookshelf that a neighbor had set out by the curb. The back side of it was a piece of very thin corrugated cardboard, with a bleached wood grain pattern printed on it. This back piece had fallen off, and the recipient of the bookshelf didn't want it repaired, but I thought I might be able to use it for a project...maybe. I am getting pickier about my materials as I get older, and I nearly threw this one away.

The bedroom has developed a bit of an outer space theme, at least in its upper half, and I had the idea of using the cardboard to make "planets"...simple circles, which with the wood grain turned sideways would resemble Jupiter. I had a lamp shining up the wall right where some previous owners had made a sloppy patch job, and I wanted something else there to look at.

I cut out four circles, after tracing around a bowl, and ended up using three of them. I burnished the edges a little, to round the edges over slightly and make them look a little less two-dimensional. (Burnishing means to rub something with something that is smooth and harder.) I attached them to the wall with double-sided tape; ours is rather old, so I don't think it will harm the paint.

2. Cloudy night sky in a jar:  I was looking for something that is cobalt blue, to put in the bedroom as an accent piece, and remembered that I had a short cobalt glass jar. Then I thought that it needed something in it, and grabbed a couple of pieces of tissue paper I had saved; white and pink. I stuffed the white piece in first, then the pink, screwed on the lid, and flipped it over. The result looks a lot like clouds at night. The cobalt color is very intense, but so far I like it.

An actual crafts project, and garden thoughts

We have a fireplace, set in a wall of brick veneer. I like the brick, but it sucks up all the light at that end of the room...and the room is painted to match it, so all other walls suck up light too. There is no mantel. I've been thinking for a while about finding something light-giving and lightweight to hang over the fireplace, that doesn't involve drilling into the brick.

I used to own lots of craft books, but at the moment we only have one. In this book is a project that uses coarse sandpaper to transfer crayon designs to fabric in a sort of pointillist texture:  draw a reversed image on the sandpaper with crayon, place fabric and a press cloth over it, and iron on high.

For fabric, I recently picked up a lot of smaller pieces of white fabric at the church craft supplies giveaway. A couple of the children colored pieces of sandpaper, and I colored several more.

With ironing, some brands and colors of crayons transferred more thoroughly than others, and many were light to the point of being washed out; not necessarily a problem in such a dark room. I used string to hang the pieces of fabric across the brick, in a Soulemama sort of banner, from cup hooks that I set into the wood trim. I made it so that I can easily string up something different later.

In other news, we've been planning next season's gardening. Last year, we didn't know what perennials were going to come up in the flower beds, and we had almost no money to work with. We bought a few packets of vegetable seeds, did some indoor seed starting, and for the rest just planted old seeds from our stash (many of which didn't sprout). In a couple of places I "planted" by selective weeding: choose a couple of the friendlier types of weeds (purslane, for example) to keep, and pull up the rest. This year we have a better idea of where we are starting from, and can throw a very modest amount of money into plants and seeds and equipment. I have plans to build or buy myself a hoe. We have a couple of hoes, but I think I need one just like the one Grandma had. For flowers, I am heavily favoring perennials or self-seeding annuals, to minimize long-term seed costs.

Crocheted garland with homemade hook

I recently made a trip to the dollar store, and came home with a ball of cotton twine to play with. The first thing I tried was knitting i-cord with it, which worked fine, but I wanted something with more texture to hang on the wall. So I turned to crochet, and to the simplest crochet stitch:  chain stitch. Then I started joining the chain at intervals to make loops:

The pattern is (after a few chain stitches to start off):  chain 7, do a single crochet stitch into the first of the chain 7 to form a loop, repeat. End with a few more chain stitches, if you want. The chain 7 makes a nice rhythm to the work. Not all of the loops hang down nicely; some like to flip, and some I had to make flip to even things out. When it was finished, I hung it across a wall in our TV room.

The hook in the picture is made from a hardwood dowel, whittled to shape. It is currently the only crochet hook that I have, and is a bit on the large side. It was not hard to make; I have even made hooks from fallen sticks before. I recommend shaping the top of the "head" first, and cutting the "throat" last. I didn't put a finish on it; homemade hooks (and knitting needles) will gradually take on a pleasant polish as they are used.

Many more things for the walls

After painting the mileage sign on a stake, I hit a creative dry spell in ideas for new wall art. But after a couple of days, ideas started to pop up again:

I had an old black frame, with some handwritten words in it, that was not working in the bedroom. I took it down, and replaced the words with the lyrics from a hymn that is (in my mind) our family hymn. I wiped down the frame with black acrylic paint to cover the bare spots, and found it a new place next to the front door, where it works much better.

I made another mileage sign from a stake, this time with the mileage to Grandma's house, and hung it up in the dining room under the other one.

My husband had a large print made of one of his photographs for $10 at Costco. It didn't work where I thought we were going to hang it, but we found another place in the family room for it.  (We hung it unframed with Command Strips.)

I had wide white cotton lace trim from the sheet that I am using to make a skirt. I hand stitched the whole length up into gathers, arranged it into a spiral, and put a hinged ring (office supply) through the top for hanging. I originally made it for the dining room, which is developing a color theme of red, white, and green, but the lace is very white and makes the beige walls look slimy. So I moved it to the bedroom, where the black frame had been, and it works well there--because of the curtains which accept the beige of the walls, but then transcend it into a palette that includes white.

Also in the bedroom, from the free lumber motherlode, there is a white door that I am using as a headboard.

Finally, my husband brought home some old graphic design magazines from work. These often have samples of very nice papers bound in as advertisements. I had the idea of making a garland of paper leaves from The Nester, but with much smaller leaves. I cut leaves, then some of the green twine to hot glue them to. I didn't have a gluing plan in mind, but when I had it all in front of me and started playing, the gluing worked itself out well enough. When it was done, I wound it around one of the curtain rods in the bedroom. I might make one for the other rod, and I am thinking of making something similar with a mix of beige and white paper samples, for the dining room, to see if I can "accept and transcend" my way into making white work on the walls.

The bedroom has reached the point where there is enough going on visually for me. I left one wall completely bare, for visual breathing room.