So simple

I really REALLY love this simple rod attached to a wall displaying clothing (or a collection of scarves, blankets, art clipped on pant hangers...)

via Dos Family (blogged back here)

My dressing room

I FINALLY completed work on my dressing room and I thought I'd share it with you all now...there was a slight sense of urgency to this post because if we do the renovations on our house that we're planning, that room is going to be demolished. *SIGH* For that reason I did not quite finish this room as I would like (ie. I wanted to dip dye the bottoms of the curtains, considered mod podging vintage wallpaper over the table in the center etc.) What's the point since I have no clue what I'll do in my new dressing room (which will have more space). So it's as done as it's ever going to get. And I'm so happy to have the space for my clothes (and my husband's), although it does mean we cannot have overnight guests because it's the only other bedroom besides the master. But a girl has got to have her priorities straight (particularly when it comes to clothes/shoes). LOL

Here are some before/during photos I had to show as this was a quite a bit of work, slowly over about a year. This first photo is the only one I have that shows most of the fairly small room (6'11"x12'6"), taken right after I moved in.

After that I decided to paint the room teal, which turned out to be a dumb idea in such a small room because it became very dark, despite the fact that there's a fairly large window (I blogged it once here - it was so hard to photograph I don't have many photos of that first transformation - but some are on Flickr here). With the newest version of the space, the closet was torn out (the doors were heavy pieces of wood that drove me INSANE), the walls were patched up, ugly-ass laminate floor was removed and new maple hardwood was installed (clickable - so thankfully we can reuse if we want in the new space). Here are a couple photos of the closet and floor demo:

  

And here is a photo of the new floor right after we installed it:

Some new baseboards, paint, rods and shelving installed, curtains (to close off the clothing storage; I kept my existing windows curtains), accessories and voila, a useful and kinda cute dressing room. A whole bunch of photos of the new room are after the jump. But here's a quick peek:

Click to read more ...

Reader request - closets

We recently received this request from reader Judy: "Hi! I'm moving into a new space with my boyfriend after the summer. We realized that the closet space was going to be an interesting dilemma to solve - and was hoping you could post some inspiring photos of other people's tasteful yet non-boring closet sharing solutions!". Now, this request was a bit tough as I don't have many closet photos in my stash, and then many are not exactly in keeping with this request but I figured I'd post whatever I could find as I am going through the exact same scenario at my house. Jeff is moving in this weekend and I have got to get the damn dressing room finished in time for both of us to be able to fit all of our clothes. Luckily I have a tiny bedroom (12' x 7') that is basically useless for any other purpose but to be a closet. The plan is to hang 2 rods on one end of the room and wall to wall shelves on the other. I'll buy some baskets for socks and unmentionables, and the rest can be folded or hung. But enough about my space - here are some closets I found that may or may not be useful non-boring solutions for Judy's new space. (The first one is my all-time favourite, and I've used it a few times already on the blog but I can't help it. It's perfect. And there are many more closets after the jump.)

Country Home

Canadian House & Home	Lagerlings
Ulrika Ekblom	Lori Dennis
Family Living	Family Living
Sunset	Better Homes & Gardens
Caitlin Moran	House Beautiful
Country Living	Country Living

Click to read more ...

Closet ideas

I'm puttering about my house today, cleaning and rearranging furniture (see my Flickr photos for that). At one point I happened to be IMing with my "mother-in-law" and I mentionned that I've been thinking about tearing out the closet in my bedroom since I don't really use it (I use the second bedroom as a dressing room and it has a decent size closet). She, being the intelligent person that she is, mentionned how that wouldn't be such a great idea for resale. Sometimes I like to forget about resale and think about ME, but she had a point. She then sent me these photos she scanned from the magazine she was reading, because she had thought of our conversation about closets. This got me thinking. I'm still leaning towards getting rid of the closet, but these are GREAT ideas and got my creative juices flowing. So if you're doing some spring cleaning too, and have a closet that just collects junk, why not turn it into a cute little office space? Or even a little reading niche?

Photos from April issue of Ladies Home Journal