Snow Sweetness

 

After our snow (snows, plural, really) this week, Kate went on a walking tour of all her favorite haunts. I love that she retraced her steps so there was only a single path. It's like she just vanished, the swing a portal to a mysterious land.

Quick Fix

How we went from eeeeek, a mouse and a charger and a phone book and that Bed, Bath and Beyond coupon that expired last YEAR to aaaahhhh.

 

Everyone has a junk drawer. Some have junk drawers. Plural. We have an entire, albeit little, corner devoted to our daily minutiae . . . a junk wasteland. It started innocently enough. A forgotten dresser that was found curbside many years back. One of the remaining 2 drawers was for me, the other my husband. A few organizing boxes and baskets to house the never ending flood of papers that seem to follow children home from school and sports. And then an inexpensive ikea bookcase to hold my cookbooks, phonebooks and whatever else landed there. And boy did else land!

The disorder had been building for a while. My need to organize it was becoming more evident as each day hunting for a missing whatever went by. Time for action!

I found some baskets at Target that I liked (perhaps the fact that they had more than one in stock was a selling point), brought them home and left them sitting on the hutch in the dining room for nearly 2 weeks before moving on to step Next. She can stop on a dime folks. Good for Quarter horses. Not so much for home improvement jockeys.

 



Last night finally got around to step Next. Took a bit of time sorting through all the coupons that get lumped around. Discarded many, many items. Then decided how I wanted to organize the important stuff and made sure there was a basket remaining for junk items not easily catagorized.

Basket for each child and their various and sundry items? Check, Check. Basket for note pads and pens? Check. Basket for all things electronic? Check. Junk Not easily catagorized items have a space? Check.

I also tackled the bookcase. I saw on an episode of Nate that if your cookbooks don't have ripped pages or food drips, stains and smears, then they do not deserve to hold primo real estate in your kitchen. So I did some editing of cookbooks, and really, most of my recipies that are not lodged in my noggin are in my portable brain (ipad) so don't really need the books out and about. As I was cleaning up the bookcase a new project idea reared it's ugly head: covering the back of the bookcase either with wall paper/wrapping paper or using color gradients for each shelf area (a la Young House Love book). I decided that I'll keep a watch out for fun paper that I could use.

So the finished product certainly looks sparse. I'm quite certain it will not remain that way, but it's nice for now. Super painless. Super necessary. Super quick. Did it while watching How I Met Your Mother . . . probably wouldn't have taken nearly as long if the tv had been off.

 

 

 

Baaaaa . . .

It looks like a small farmyard animal, perhaps a new pet, but it is my mid-something, vinyl topped bench that I found on Friday. I saw, somewhere on the interwebs, a very similar bench recovered with the unsoiled portion of a soiled sheepskin rug (I think they blamed the dog).  I do have a dog (and a cat) but no soiled, or unsoiled for that matter, sheepskin rug. The fabric store does carry fake fur so we went with that.

I've skipped to the finished product, but I'll rewind and share the steps I took to bring this fuzzy friend to life.

The original bench on Friday:

The bench today after a thorough scrubbing:

 

Of the benches in this style that I have seen around, the button detailing on the top really is quite charming. Although not obvious in this picture, there are several tears in the vinyl so it would only be a matter of time before we had some disgorging of innards.

 

This was such a simple redo that would only have taken about 15 minutes if I hadn't been watching a dvr'd episode (or 2) of Nate . . .

 

I removed all the legs, then the leg hardware. I also labeled each of the leg brackets and where they were located on the bench base. Probably not necessary but I figured they'd been in their spots for a few decades, they might feel happier put back in their original spots.

 

 

 

 

 Got a new staple gun this weekend. E.Lec.Tric!! Yeehaa! So this was the perfect project for me and Stanley to get to know one another.

 

 

I laid the fabric on my table, put the legless bench on top and got stapling!

 

 

 

Once I had the fabric in place and trimmed, I replaced the hardware and legs, and Voila! A new, old bench ready to find its place in our home!

 

 

Currently in the master bedroom. Not sure if it will want to stay or if it will wander down to the guest bedroom . . . time will tell!

 

               

 

Freaky-Good Friday Finds!

And all by 10:30, too! Hit a garage/estate sale that was posted on Craigs List to nab an egg-ish rattan chair that they had in a preview pic. Got it just in time too, because after I paid and was moving my car closer to load it up, two other people asked to buy it! The other wicked cool find at that sale was languishing in a room in the basement. A mid-century stool with it's original vinyl top in pristine condition. The stitching and buttons are really cute, but I'm not too fond of the color. It does look better in the pictures than in person. Other than someone putting it in a corner of a musty basement, it has been well loved. OOH, and the best part was that I got these two lovelies for $20. Total. I think I did well! Can't wait to start working on them!!

Check out Tux getting the 4-1-1 on the stool! Isn't the tuffting (is that a word?) and biggy-buttons cute?

Also scored BIG at my library!! Lots of great inspirational books just waiting to come home with me on this cold, cloudy Friday!!

 

Happy Weekend!

 

 

Today I have linked up with Finding Fabulous and their Frugalicious Friday Party!

 

Chickpeas We Love Ya!

 

Rainy, rainy here today. Perfect day for all the school work that I needed to get finished. Not much time for thinking about dinner. Let alone making it! Had some chickpeas left over from hummus that I made a couple of days ago, so decided to whip up our favorite easy peasy chickpea soup!

 

 

 

Ingredients pretty straight forward:

1 onion, roughly diced

1 clove garlic, roughly chopped

2 T olive oil (you can use either extra virg or fully leaded)

3-4 cups chickpeas (I tend to soak a bag of dried to use for hummus and other great garbanzo recipes, so I don't have an exact amount. Very forgiving recipe.)

4-6 cups veggie broth (I generally add broth to cover then add more later if I want to thin out the soup)

1 T miso 

1 T Tamari (or soy sauce)

To serve:

chopped peanuts

roughly chopped cilantro (I didn't have any tonight; soup was still yummy, but I did miss that earthy flavor)

 

 

Add olive oil to your favorite soup cooking vessel over med heat. Once the oil is heated, add the diced onion and stir to coat with oil. Allow to hang out for 5 mins to soften, then add garlic, stir.

 

 

Give the garlic and onion a couple of minutes together, then toss the chickpeas into the pot. Stir, then add your veggie broth and miso. Adjust heat to medium high and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes.



Can you see the little chunk of miso in the center there? I love the salty richness that miso adds to soups and sauces (have a to die for almond butter curry sauce that is the bomb over rice and miso is crucial to the final flavor).

Take you  soup pot off the heat for a few minutes so that you won't have a steaming hot mess when you are pureeing that golden garbanzo goodness! If you have an immersion blender, dip it in and blend that soup smooth. Before I had mine I used my regular Ooster blender. Just be careful that the lid is held down otherwise the steam/heat from the soup might just blow it sky high! Been there. It's not pretty. Just sayin.

 

Once you are done blending that soup smooth, get it back on the stove over low heat. Add your tamari (or soy sauce).

 

 

To serve, spoon into bowls and top with a few generous handfulls chopped peanuts and the cilantro (oh how we missed you tonight . . . ). We usually have some type of bread on the side. Tonight it was Naan bread, toasted up on the griddle with a wee amount of extra virg olive oil and really coarse sea salt. Yummers!

 

 

 

 

 

Lovely Brasilia

Although I am sure that the capital city of Brazil is lovely, I am actually referring to a line of furniture made by Broyhill in 1962. Broyhill was inspired by the city of Brasilia, especially it's architecture from Oscar Niemeyer. Broyhill debuted the Brasilia line of furniture at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962, representing the city of Brasilia. Pieces in this line were made throughout the 1960's.



Cathedral of Brasilia, designed by Oscar Niemeyer

We stumbled upon this gorgeous MidCentury line of furniture two weeks ago when I found a piece at a local resale/antiques shop here in town. I had no idea what it was, only that it was drop dead gorgeous, in fantastic condition and that I knew if I didn't snatch it up (and someone else did) I would be a very sad puppy.

 

 

The search had been going on for a while for THE piece of furniture to replace our dumpster find we'd been using for years as a TV console. And this little lovely was just the gem to add order to our chaos of cords and controllers, dvds and games. Everything tucked neatly away in the drawers. The original thought was to remove the top drawer and convert to a shelf for the sat box. The drawers are actually locked in. Seriously, we spent at least 20 minutes with the store owner and a flash light and could not figure out how to remove that drawer. So we thought once we got it home we'd pop the back off and see if we could access the drawer glides from there. Worst case, we'd just sacrifice a drawer. Hack it out. Once we got home though and learned more about our Brazilian-inspired beauty's history, we decided that the sat box sitting on top looked just fine! 

 

I can see from this picture that maybe I should gather up the cords in the back somehow, although honestly unless you are a small house pet, you don't really see them.

This is the poor baby that got replaced by our Brasilia. Shabby just couldn't compete with sultry.

Macklemore Challenge Day

picture thanks to YoungHouseLove

Please head over to Young House Love for their thrift shop challenge (that is their unofficial official picture above)! There are some really great links to all the creative and crazy people out there. Thanks YHL for thinking up such a fun link party!