bohemian hellhole

The William Morris Project: $5 to fill the void

"Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."  Welcome to the William Morris Project*, happening again, in 2013.

*Pancakes & French Fries started this whole business a while ago, and I have been trying to keep up ever since!

One of my favorite things is the free section of craigslist. Admittedly, it's hit or miss, and I have to say, Portland's list is usually full of misses. This week I found a free chair. We have been looking for chairs ever since we moved into this house {with two living rooms, or, a living room and a parlor}, and had settled on a pair of mismatched but friendly leather armchairs. The two of them flanked the fireplace, connected by an ottoman. This worked well for a few weeks until a friend came over and we were short on seating. I pulled in a rocking chair from the living room to do the job temporarily, and we decided that another chair was in order. The urgency was gone from my search though, there were two wonderful places to sit, and a third seemed rather superfluous.

Then I saw this. {above is the picture that was in the craigslist post} What? It looks disgusting? Yes, it does. But I had a hunch that it was a good piece of furniture, under the dust and poor photo quality. I emailed the owner and asked if they had another image. They sent this:
The second photo wasn't much better, and honestly it was a little more creepy, but one look at the arm and leg structure and I was sure it would be worth it. The most amazing part of this story is that the owner of the chair was able to text in complete and coherent sentences, and the chair was actually at the promised location when I went to pick it up.

See, it is happier already! The slouchy blob of a back pillow will have to be redone someday, but for now I put a sham on it and called it good. Cost=$0. Time to pickup=20 minutes round trip. Finding a third seat for the parlor=not priceless, but really nice. Really useful, and rather beautiful.

{Wonky sham alert! But, I wanted you to see the chair from the front. Also, that pillow? Restoration Hardware, down, cost about $.25 at the bins.}

Speaking of the Bins, I picked up this rug, or should I say 3/4 of a rug there for a whopping $5. Sadly, one end of this hand tied vintage Karastan rug had been badly damaged, cut off, and bandaged with a strip of duct tape. When I saw it, I knew it would work in my bedroom, which isn't really that big, so the 3/4 size was actually perfect. Two shampoos and four vacuums later, here it is in my room, looking just a tad Derelicte.

All in all, for about $5, a few places in my home that were feeling a bit drab and empty are now full of stories and color {as well as seating}.

Eating leftover pancakes, Alice

Painting Restoration Update: The final stretch

Ok, that sounds a little more exciting than it actually is. There is no end in sight at this point for the painting itself, but I am wrapping a few things up. To be specific, I am all done ironing the crap out of the painting and lining and am ready to attach the newly lined canvas to the bars. So, while I was out this afternoon I decided to buy a new set of stretcher bars*. This was a long waffled over decision, since I am trying to keep all the original parts of the painting and frame intact, getting new bars was kind of like mixing old and new wine skins or something. The new bars were only $7 though, so it wasn't really a big deal. {I can always go back to using the splintery, cracked, nail bitten, and skewed original stretcher.}
I feel like if the word 'stretch' is in this post one more time, in any form, I will explode.

Back to what I was trying to get at in the first place, I am ready to move on past the lining phase of this whole project. There are mistakes and imperfections in what I have done so far, but I am ok with that. Overall, the painting is in better shape than when I started on it about a year ago. The holes are mended, the grime is significantly reduced, and structurally the canvas is more sound. There are a few places where the beeswax and damar compound just didn't want to create a good bond between the two canvases, but I think I can spot repair them while I am cleaning and mending losses. This whole process is partly stressful, because I don't want to ruin anything, and partly fun, because I am learning about something new. I will never get a chemistry/art history phd, so I am out of the running for any serious conservation work, and actually, that is a relief. I cannot imagine having Eli Wilner breathing down my neck as I work on some civil war era military portrait for Martha Stewart and accidentally spilling my red bull all over the project. Yikes! I am not into high level pressure. {hello blogging!} So, if I ruin this odd paring of art and frame, so be it. At least it won't have taken YEARS OF MY LIFE. {oops!}

$7 and a free coffee later, I am ready to put this canvas to rest on it's new home. 22" x 36" of totally ridiculous labor. 792 square inches of Oregon swamp at it's finest, painted by some european dude a hundred years ago. {hello mental illness?}

Researching Earle Bergey, Alice

*a nerd note on the stretcher bars: the rounded lip on the edge of the new bars will help the canvas's surface tension and appearance, as opposed to the old one that had sharp corners, cutting into the fabric, and causing it to tear.

**second nerd note: the pins around the edge of the temporary stretcher in the picture are there because I was testing out this method, while trying to relax some of the wrinkles still in my painting. It helped a little, and after using the pins, just pulling the canvas tight with my hands, I am confident that using the stretching pliers and canvas tacks will do a better job at smoothing out the painting {as much as it ever will, at least}.

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Painting Restoration Update: studio progress

Painting Restoration Update!

Ten things Alice taught me, #3

#3: Use your head to save your feet via and her glow has warmed the world

In other words, if there is an ice cream bowl in the bedroom, I should carry it down with me to the kitchen rather than run up just to retrieve it when doing the dishes.  If I pass by my coat on the back of a chair, I should hang it up. I have a friend who scrubs her shower while she's in it {showering, of course, and also not using comet or bleach or anything like that.}  This seems like rather bonehead advice, but seriously...{there are so many people in my house, doing so many different things}, if I am not always working, the snowball gets really big, awfully quick. Her phrase 'use your head to save your feet' is probably not her own, just one of many grandmother-isms, wise old sayings or borderline Anne Taintor quips, but it makes a good point.

Making extra trips around the house helps no one.

I am contemplating a pedometer*. Some days it feels like a marathon, although I doubt I walk 50K steps, it would be interesting to see how many there actually were. The best part about moving to a house with four floors is that there is no way to avoid climbing stairs. I keep promising myself it will pay off, someday. Usually by dinner, I am wiped out, and there is still work to do, so I am endeavouring to really put this to use this week, and see if it makes a difference. I would love to carve out some more time to just sit, or call a friend, write a card or actually watch an entire Fringe episode without falling asleep. via apartment therapy {in a post on nearly the same subject}
There must be untold numbers of time organization methods out there that try to combine jobs to simplify tasks, slim down the hours of housework, or work work or whatever, but I feel like they all take too much time to learn how to use them. I don't have a spare month burning a hole in my pocket to try out the Pomodoro technique, or to dizzy my way through the Fly Lady website. {and even when I got her emails, I didn't read them....oops}... This is much more my speed. It covers nearly everything, and I don't have to have a binder to use it!

Cleaning my room, Alice

*also, I would like to actually walk, outside, in the fresh air, not doing work...walk for enjoyment. The goal to lessen my running around the house is in no way to say that I want to be less active, or would like to get out of exercise. Ok? Ok.

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Ten things Alice taught me, #1

Ten things Alice taught me, #2

Moving on, Moving in.

When we left Seattle, it felt a little like dying. To leave behind nearly everyone I knew, loved, spent time with, cried with, leave behind graves and babies, it was like closing the door on my life and jumping into the abyss. That abyss was Portland. I knew I was slowly disappearing from people's lives, fading a day at a time. I knew it, because they were fading from mine. After nearly two years here, the darkness is lifting bit by bit. The deep trench of life has glimmers of hope ahead. Right about the time that I started feeling like I might be ok here {temporarily, of course} I received news that some of our new and dear Portland friends were packing  up and leaving town. 'One more reason to road trip', I told myself. 'Another family to visit in CA', I would reason with my sadness. In the back of my mind, I was never planning on staying here anyway, right? My house in Seattle is still there, the renters are taking good care of it, and we spent our tax return on a spankin' new sewer line. All ready to move home. Then, I found out that my BFF neighbor in Seattle was moving away to the eastside. WHAT? Now, my little block family is broken. {did I mention that we moved away first?} Everything was supposed to stay the same, like a room at home after you go away to college. It's not supposed to be your mom's scrapbook room, or the workout/fitness/yoga studio. My home was meant to be waiting for me when I returned.

But, what if I never return? There are days when it seems we are on the road to nowhere, that the future is unwritten. I bet Portland is like some sort of holding tank, and we are circling the drain. At the same time, the friendships that I have made here are beginning to stick {at least it feels that way}, the house we live in is slowly taking shape as home, even though I have no idea how long we will be in it. Each new piece of furniture, each new friend, is waging war against my refusal to actually live in Portland. 'You DO live here', they say. My friends moving away would have happened regardless of my city of residence. My neighbor moving up to a bigger house was only a matter of time. It still breaks my heart, but maybe now there's room for something new. If all this change is inevitable, shouldn't I be making the most of where I am?

I am trying to move on {not from the people, just the idea of living in the past.}, and trying to move in. To inhabit a place and make it home. To live here on purpose.

Hoping that the newest chair I am picking up today isn't a pile, Alice

 

Ask Alice: How can I preserve my Skull?

Dear Alice, I have a set of deer antlers and  skull that I have hanging in my yard. I am wondering if there is any way to weather proof the skull, and protect it from mold, or bugs? Thank you! Jane

via Vintage Printables

Dear Jane,

I have a longhorn skull on my porch, and I have been wondering the same thing, it has been exposed to the elements for years and is starting to show some age.
via Etsy

After reading up quite a bit on the subject, the easiest and most common method would be to coat it with polyurethane or lacquer. This shouldn't darken the skull or change it's color much, unless you got a poly that had tint in it. {interesting maybe?} Glue in any loose teeth, and coat with a few coats of finish. I would suggest checking in on it each summer and touching up any places where the finish has worn thin through the winter.

via Montana Skullworks

Another cool idea I read about was bronzing. Remember baby shoes? I might have to figure out how to bronze mine...Immediately!

Sewing curtains, Alice

*If you need instructions on preparing a raw skull, read this, or this. {I like the beetle method of de-fleshing as opposed to boiling. I imagine it would be less stinky.}

The William Morris Project: Tool Free Pantry Shelf

"Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."  Welcome to the William Morris Project*, happening again, in 2013.

*Pancakes & French Fries started this whole business a while ago, and I have been trying to keep up ever since!

Even the most serene cabinet exteriors can house a black hole of grocery rubble. This is that cabinet. It seemed certain that the biggest kitchen I have ever had would also contain more storage than ever before. Maybe that is technically true, but on a practical level, this cupboard was falling short in the useful department.
Yes, it holds food and supplies, but the space is merely containing a pile. {not to mention the scummy contact paper beneath!}
Now, perhaps I have read one too many issues of Country Living, or it could be my woodworking father's influence on my formative years, but I almost left the wood as I found it. Then I touched it, and it was sticky. Tacky with that oily contact paper residue that instantly attracts all forms of dead bugs and sand particles. The Laura Ashley shelf paper my mom gave me came to the rescue!


After all the bubbles were squeezed out, and the leftover bubbles were ignored, I set about putting together my tool free shelf. The rebuilding center had {and probably still has} a big pile of funny orphaned drawers on one of my visits. My first instinct was to go all Rupert Blanchard on them, but sadly they have just collected dust in the basement. So, I took two and set one on either side of the cabinet space. They just happened to be almost exactly the same depth! I love it when that happens.

Next, I took two Ikea shelves that were also collecting dust in the basement, and which also happened to be just the right size, and laid them across the tops of the drawers. Voila! Usefulness achieved!


Now I can array my Costco purchases with pride. {and find things without digging!}

I suppose the same type of structure would work in almost any closet or cupboard, with the right shelves and drawers. You could also tack a few nails in for good measure just for kicks.

Making smoothies, Alice

Painting Restoration Update: studio progress

To recap for those of you who just dropped in on my painting restoration posts and wonder, "what are all these boring and almost identical photos of a dirty old picture all about anyway?", I am documenting the slow restoration of a nearly 100 year old oil painting, frame and all. {you could also read this.}

Welcome to my basement! The photo above will give you a little insight into how the whole place looked when we first toured the house. I was really hoping to avoid it, but as it turns out the basement is the only suitable place for any sort of studio or workshop, and it really isn't that bad, now that I put in some lights.

Last week I made a few goals for myself, and I truly thought I could finish them all, but I am one giant standing easel short of completing them. {I think getting a wisdom tooth pulled yesterday but a bit of a halt on my plans...}

A good friend and craftsman who owns The Woodsman Shop is skipping town and moving to San Francisco, and generously gave me a whole pile of pallet wood. You know what this means? No scavenging the backsides of warehouses and grocery stores! Hooray! I have enough to build myself a nice second worktable to add some much needed surface area to the studio.

It was fun getting a start on organizing my tools and projects, I have a bad habit of being terribly distracted when I am supposed to be cleaning. I stop and look at every little thing that I unpack, I might as well be five. There are enough little framing and restoration patients in my workspace to keep me busy for quite a while!

Look at that wonderful laundry sink! I love it. I have plans for this area....in my imagination.

This picture was one of the only things to break in the move. It is actually a good thing, since I drew his hip bones more like a tool belt...he needs some work.

After all this time I finally found my dry iron with NO HOLES! And it was only $3. My stinginess paid off. Plus, this one has a cool name, the Franzus.

My dad's tobacco pipe. I just like to look at it.

Ok, what is the update? I set up a table, put the frame on it, and collected some wood to make another table. Then I got a tooth pulled and slept. Hey, it's better than nothing! I'll take it.

Taking vicodin, Alice

Ten things Alice taught me, #2

via this post

via this post

#2: Your bedroom is a secret haven

Alice's bedroom {my great-grandmother} was always dark and off limits, or at least that is how I remember it. I can imagine walking down her tiny hallway, the bathroom on the right, the guest room on the left, and her door, partly open, straight ahead. There was enough light to see that it was lovely, well ordered, full of self administered hospitality. The dresser was appointed with perfume, jewelry, hairbrushes and combs, the kind of thing that gets photographed and pinned these days. Back then, only a few ever really examined the contents of her bedroom. It was beautiful, with a private quality to it that made it intimidating. Her room felt like a place I would need to be invited in, otherwise it was just for her. She had a bedside table, a lamp, a well made bed, and a tidy closet. It was always clean.

Now, I recognize that life pulls from one million directions in a different way than it did then, but truly, I can't say that we are so dissimilar that our bedrooms should be as they are, day and night. Mine at the moment, is a heap of unknown laundry and leftover ice cream bowls. I know where my phone charger and the tv remote are, but as for any matching pairs of earrings? No hope. I had a bed sheet tacked to one window until earlier today when a small person pulled it down, and in the other window? Half a curtain stuffed into the tracks of the window to sort of keep it in place. Half a curtain isn't nearly enough to block the lights from Monday Funday, I am sorry to say. The bottom line is that my room is a sorry mess. What I have learned from Alice is that it doesn't have to be.

My room can {and probably should} be a secret haven. A place to retreat at the end of an exhausting day that only promises to be followed by a morning at the dentist's office. The one room of the house that is set aside and prepared, for rest. Its easy to put off working on my own room when there are so many other things begging for attention, but I have been taking steps.

*Today I found a hefty bag full of donations today under the mystery clothes pile. {I took it out of my room!}

*I have been making a point of making my bed, even if the room is a wreck, because it is so comforting to get into a bed where the sheets are flat,  the blankets are heavy, and everything smells like Bounce.

Alice had many years to perfect her bedroom haven, so I will cut myself some slack, and soldier on through the years of small people pulling down my curtains tacked up sheets.

Clearly, my goal for the week should be to find some suitable drapes, or blinds, or something, and clean up the laundry pile.

Eating my Mother's Day Payday, because I won't be able to chew for a week after tomorrow morning, Alice

 

 

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Ten things Alice taught me, #1

Happy Mother's Day!

via Straight from the Garden
I hope all the mothers out there have a lovely and stress free day! In order to avoid awful crowds and public meltdowns, we are making lunch at home...big salads and smoothies! This is the menu I picked yesterday when I was totally overheated, and of course when I woke up I wished we were making brunch...oh well. There's always dinner.

Opening a gift of Delft pottery from my mom, Alice

The William Morris Project: A free solution to an ugly porchlight

"Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."  Welcome to the William Morris Project*, happening again, in 2013.

*Pancakes & French Fries started this whole business a while ago, and I have been trying to keep up ever since! Who out there likes a bare buggy compact fluorescent porch light bulb? Not I. At first, I was confident that I could just switch out the bulb and find a new glass shade for the fixture, until I realized that it was a really {really} odd piece of metal, and there is no identifiable way to put a new shade on it. A closeup of the strange fixture. {Please excuse my blurry phone photo!} You can see that the wood underneath the paint is lovely, and it makes me want to immediately start stripping the ceiling, but it is so huge, and expansive that I know I would never finish it. Sigh.

I was stumped, and still am. A totally new porch light isn't in the budget right now, and even if I found a screaming deal at the rebuilding center, I honestly don't know if I have available bandwidth for dealing with the weirdness out there on the porch. So, I went back to my younger self and asked 'what did you do in 1997 with your first porch when you had no money, but wanted it to look fun?'**. Simple! Big Christmas lights.
Don't worry, those planters will have plants in them soon!

Actually this solved two problems, a) new look for the porch, and b) the lights were in a gross hefty bag on the basement floor and using them meant cleaning that mess up! There are a few dead bulbs, but I plan on replacing them one at a time with round white ones so that they look a little more {ahem} all-season.
Regardless, I am totally pleased with the result, even if I got a wondering eye from people walking by as I hung Christmas lights on my porch mid-May, in my pjs at 8am. I like to keep my neighbors guessing.

Making banana muffins, Alice

**I will try to dig out a photo of that for y'all!