Seriously? Things were bad. I would clean and two days later the piles would return. And after Christmas I seemed to accumulate even more piles of stuff that needed new homes–everything on the chair in the photo either came out of my suitcase or was moved from my desk, agh.

The shame!

The anguish!

(The gorgeous new laptop standing tall above the mess!)

I picked out a Vika Furusund tabletop with two metal legs and a drawer unit (Vika Alex) on the other side, all from Ikea (obviously). The top is shallower than my old desk, which I’m hoping will force me to keep things tidied away in all my lovely new drawers. It was unfinished pine, so I hit it with some white stain to take away the yellow and make it blend better with the drawers.

The drawers weighed a ton (Ben lugged them upstairs for me before he left) and were made up of 900,000 pieces. I’m good at assembly tasks (and jigsaw puzzles) but it still took me a while to put it all together. As soon as I had the new desk in place I realized that because of the shallower depth, the hideous combo of black metal filing cabinet and giant printer/scanner/fax machine is now even more exposed. I will eventually come up with a better solution than this, but for now I covered the side of the filing cabinet with silver woodgrain wrapping paper. I know the cord situation is less than ideal, but you actually don’t see it when the chair is pushed in. Once I get rid of my old laptop there will be a lot less cord to wrangle.

And now the office is complete! I still should completely clean out the storage closet (not pictured), but that lives behind a curtain, so I’ll survive for now!

Wider view, to prove that I did clean the chair and floor, as well:

And my new work surface:

Nice and fresh, right? We also rearranged the living room after taking the tree down. (*cough* Weeks ago! Yeah! Or last night. *cough*) I like how open it feels but we’re left with an awkward situation involving what used to act as a sofa table and now floats unhappily near the window. We’ll get there, though!

Happy long weekend, people! Be safe and have fun.

(BTW, I’m selling the old desk. It’s sturdy and a good size, I just think I need a smaller surface in my tiny, tiny office. Pictures here without the clutter: http://www.flickr.com/photos/katef/sets/72157623093012193/ $25 OBO.)

Bittersweet branches for fall:

photo: Patrick Cline for Lonny. Click here to see the bigger version Eddie posted.

My house is too formal!

(PS: Lonny, the photos are stunning, the content is great, and I can’t get through the magazine on my computer because the interface is so frustrating! Please offer a PDF or something.)

1. An older acquisition: Bridge gave me this awesome hand-printed towel as a birthday present, with a quote from Pride & Prejudice. (Oh, Mr. Darcy.) I couldn’t bear to use it as a towel so I tacked it up above the sink and I love the result. (It’s from the shop Brookish on Etsy, though I don’t see any more towels at the moment. Lots of other P&P stuff though!)

2. I had a lingering credit at Simon Pearce, up in Vermont, and while we were in NH last weekend we made the trip over to the main store. I totally scored! I got a salt pig on sale, and found fantastic Dwell placemats on clearance.

Even the little sheep likes the salt cellar:

3. I checked out Laurie Colwin’s “Home Cooking” and “More Home Cooking” from the library ages ago and I can’t bear to return them until my copies arrive from Amazon. Must make gingerbread. Adore Laurie Colwin.

4. Oh god, a couple years ago I became fixated on dark brown shearling-lined Bean Boots, but I resisted because they seemed like they’d get quite a bit of snow in around the laces. The L.L. Bean gods heard my excuse and now they taunt me with these beauties:

I have perfectly good snow boots. I will love them from afar. (And I do still really love the laced-up ones, too.) But they also have nice-looking Hunter-style wellies, complete with fleece liners! I want those. My rain boots leak a little.

5. In honor of fall, I washed out an old spice jar and filled it with cinnamon-sugar. Happy breakfast days for me.

(BTW, I found a roll of 100 of those round blue labels on clearance at Papersource a month or two ago, and I recently labeled the tops of all my spice jars. They are in a container, so I used to have to lift them out one at a time to find a specific jar. I should have labeled them ages ago, duh!)

6. I found a ring at Forever 21 and fell in love with it, but of course it’s, like, gilded plastic and is already starting to peel. I need to find a real-metal version of it, but somehow hollow (light) and sturdy (non-denting). Love love love.

Misc.
This summer I gave in and bought American cheese to use on burgers. Because, I’m sorry, cheddar goes greasy and I don’t like blue cheese much and American melts best. Anyway, the other place American cheese sort of takes the prize is when you want a plain, non-fancy grilled cheese. And burger season is over so guess what I had for lunch yesterday?

You know you’re jealous.

Finally, in crafty news, I found these earrings marked down to $4 at Kohl’s (don’t ask) and thought they’d be pretty cool without all the extra loops. So I took them apart and put them back together.

Things I must do this month:
-Cook something amazing with the mound of shallots I scored from the farm.
-Re-do my desk chair, which is in sad shape with old foam crumbling out of the bottom and onto the floor. (Ew.) My solution has been a plastic bag taped to the bottom of the chair but that’s stopped working.
-Make gingerbread.
-Walk Lola, the darling dog who now lives downstairs!

And you’ll like it.

When I was home in Oregon a couple weeks ago (catching this cold) my mom and I visited a good friend who lives on a little farm a few miles outside of town. Linda is a fanatic gardener, especially of roses, and she took me on a garden tour that ended with the culling of more peonies than I’ve ever seen in my life. I filled all of her vases and still took home enough to fill my parents’ entire house. Witness:

The water lilies are blooming, and they should be grateful for the chance, since Linda wants to take out their high-maintenance pond home:

The gooseberries are ripening, in their magically glowy way:

It’s a bower:

Our harvest (incomplete):

We saw this man on our way home. That is a…dirt unicycle?

One of the many tagalongs I found in the flowers (one earwig managed to evade us until falling into a coffee cup the next day!!):

All arranged:

Linda also had 4-foot calla lilies, so I arranged some of those in the Orla Kiely pitcher I’d brought my mom:

Such ruffles:

If that isn’t luxury, I don’t know what is.

—–

As long as I’m posting greenery-themed photos, I took these in Rome for the darling Germinatrix, who loves overgrown buildings.

Venture 1: Straw into Gold
I love decorating, especially when I get to be super creative on a tight budget. I think a lot of people in the post-post-college phase of life are ready to move on from the futons and hand-me-downs but aren’t yet able to plunk down a ton of cash. I can help make spaces pretty, livable and reflective of their occupants, even on a shoestring budget.
(Ben gets credit for the name: We were talking about goals and things we wanted to do a few weeks ago, and he said “What you’re really good at is spinning straw into gold.” I like that.)

Venture 2: Custom paintings

I have painted custom art for friends’ babies for a while now, and I finally got around to listing my services on Etsy. The Herbert boys are recent recipients, and I used the photos from their triptychs for the listing.

Maybe one of those something that could be helpful to you? Let me know if you’re interested!

Feeling nervous,
Kate

It seems awfully short-sighted to me, but I shouldn’t be surprised. The rumors have been swirling for months. I do hope Condé Nast keeps the website up, since it’s become a great repository of cool images and home tours, and I love the My Deco Book function.

A real entry will follow soon. About food. And decorating, maybe–I’m helping a neighbor redo his place!

This doesn’t have much to do with food.

I’m not one for resolutions; my attention span is far shorter than a year, and Back to School always feels more fresh-startish than January, to me. But I feel like I slipped into a bit of a funk as the year wrapped up, and I am at a bit of a crossroads in terms of work and health and so forth, so I do want to take the New Year as a chance to re-set and try harder.

For the blog: I did much better in December, but during the fall I really let the blog slide, and only posted a handful of times per month. I want to try putting myself on a schedule (I’m a journalist; without deadlines I can procrastinate until the cows come home), posting on Tuesdays and Fridays at a bare minimum. We’ll see how it goes, but it’s worth the effort, right?

I also want to work on the quality of the photography… Enough with letting the terrible kitchen lighting serve as an excuse, I have little studio lights and a lightbox/diffuser thingy, and I just need to be more consistent about taking stuff into the pantry and shooting it. Not sure what can be done about things I’m actively cooking, but I’ll get there. One day.

Finally, I want to be more specific with recipes. I’m lazy and tend to just say “eh, an onion or so, some olive oil, blah blah blah,” but when I think about the blogs I find most useful, they isolate the recipe so it’s easy to follow, in addition to writing about the process.

For me, I mostly want to figure out if I can freelance full-time for a while, or if I need to go back to an office job. I like working from home, but obviously it’s not the most stable thing. If I stay home, I need to make a major effort to, um, leave the house. For exercise, for socialization, for fresh air.

During the fall I took a drawing class at the MFA’s museum school. It was rigorous and challenging and I learned a ton, but I can’t justify doing something like that right now, so I want to make sure I also keep drawing, get back to painting, treat photography more seriously, etc. I am also hoping to help a few people with some interior design advice. Finally, while I write for a living I’d also like to write something different, for pleasure. Fiction, maybe? I doubt it but I’ll try, perhaps.

[For my class, we worked on a final project consisting of a series of studies and drawings on one topic. I chose ballet, and used a couple books of photos of the New York City Ballet as my subjects.]

The greatest lesson I learned in my drawing class was how to relax. At the beginning of the semester all my drawings were in pencil, mostly of interiors, very literal, very precise, not very dynamic or interesting. I never expected to enjoy figure-drawing and I never thought about charcoal one way or the other, but those two things brought me tremendous joy. Charcoal is messy and it didn’t let me stick to my precise lines. I couldn’t really use a ruler. And drawing the figure made me want to explore movement. I want 2009 to be like that. I’m feeling closed in and limited in a few ways, and I want to break out and try things I hadn’t considered, even if it means I have charcoal-stained fingernails.

Or hands that smell like garlic. I’ve never minded that!

The upside is that while the 45 pounds of Pine Mountain Logs remain in the back of the car, I did get the makings for another batch of those meatballs. Posting about them the other day reminded me of how good they were. I also got one of those half-loaves of bread that come slathered in butter and garlic, hurray!

Since this is an aimless sort of post, here is an aimless sort of picture: The wreath I made out of willow twigs I found on a walk after Thanksgiving!

Have a fantastic weekend, everyone, and be careful out there in the snow!