Secrets Of Redesign

Well Hey!

Welcome to the new and improved Nesting Place.  I’m glad you are here and just like everything I do in life, this blog doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful or useful~or to go live.  Feel free to snoop around.  You’ll find lots of beautiful spaces where we will be able to hang out~once the doors are unlocked.

The goddess geniuses Darcy and Daisy are like brilliant contractors~they build and redesign the blog and then I get to move in the furniture.  So now the rooms are built but mostly empty and some things are still wonky, things will be tweaked and moved a little over the next week or so. I’ll be working hard to move in the furniture {publish posts I’ve been writing over the past few months} today and over the weekend and of course the coming weeks.  Come back as often as you like and thanks for putting up with lots of pretty imperfection as I prepare to introduce Content to Rent, Window MisTreatments and The Nest Files.

The Life and Times of Lego Blocks

Lego blocks. LEGO.  Legos.  That word sounds really weird really fast.

We love and hate them. I only really hate them when I step on their razor sharp hard as steel tiny but you are gonna wish you were dead edges.

Tiny Twig started a little conversation about Legos the other day on twitter:

Then Heather chimed in:

And Caroline added some ideas:

I completely agree with Caroline that Lego blocks are an investment.  You can’t play with them without using your imagination and getting creative~toys don’t get much better than that.  And these days at 13, my oldest has outgrown toys and only plays with sports equipment, and the only toys that our 9 and 10 year olds play with are Legos, and not so much lately.  Did you hear that?  My kids are almost done playing with toys!!! Legos are all that’s left and they are hanging on by a thread.  And it makes me sad.  These boys are growing up so fast and now I don’t mind seeing a few stray Legos.  I might even be guilty of sprinkling a few blocks around the house hoping to remind them to play with them.

While yard saleing {my favorite sport} with Angela on Saturday, we hit a house selling “fill a gallon bag with Lego blocks for $1″~ jackpot!  I brought a bagful home and crossed my fingers that they would work their magic and sure enough, within the hour our two youngest were all about the Legos again.

A few years ago I finally gave in and accepted the fact that the easiest way for the boys to play with Legos is to dump them {the Legos, not the boys} in  a wide mouth container so they can sort through their collection IN the container instead of dumping it on the ground.  We moved from a metal bin to a large lined laundry basket and now it’s so full that they still can’t look through everything but, it’s easier than a tall narrow container.

So here’s Lego central in our house. Nothing all that life changing. The fella up there with Lego on the brain is the one most addicted so he keeps most of them in his room.  We brought in a table so he could have a big building surface and there’s the basket full of Legos.  As they’ve gotten older the Legos are downstairs less and less.  Sometimes when we get in the mood they’ll bring the basket downstairs and we’ll dump it out in the family room and I’ll pick out the rouge marbles and hot dogs ends and used band aids.  Then we have a contest to see how fast we can clean it up.

What about you?  How do corral Legos?  Do you love or hate them?

A Painted Coffee Table

Remember what my $15 second hand table looked like before?  You can’t tell here but the top was really beat up.  And I wanted some color.

My friend Angela {remember, my yard sale shopping partner in crime?} painted it for me. There is hardly anything this woman cannot do.  She has a business called Button Bird Designs and she makes all sorts of art and paints furniture and she’s learning how to reupholster and I just adore her.

And, anytime I stop by Angela’s house, she has to repeat things to me because I am so busy looking at all of her walls, digging my hands in a 2 gallon bucket full of vintage buttons, flipping through her amazing magazine collection, asking how much she paid for an oil painting and it’s always something like 7 cents from the Salvation Army and other tales that in my world are better than watching Entertainment Tonight. She could charge people to come walk through her home and look at all of her collections.

This is supposed to be a post about my coffee table but, I can’t not show you her home.  She doesn’t known I’m gonna be talking about her house and stuff~Angela, hope this is ok!?

Angela is especially gifted in finding wall art and then putting it someplace in her home that makes you want to steal it.

This is one of my favorite walls in her house.  Makes me want to stop everything I’m doing and look for old paintings.  I can assure you she didn’t pay millions of dollars for any of these.  I used to skip past the art section of thrift stores but now, after being in Angela’s house I always check out the castoff art.

Her home is about layers and colors and patterns and collections and story and all sorts of meaningful things.

Angela sees beauty in things that I miss. Like this drawer front. Suddenly I’m looking for drawer fronts.

More paintings grouped together~that’s her signature look.  I’m just declaring that for her.

Her craft room/office/laboratory is amazing. I want to sit down on the floor and play.

I love how she incorporates quilts around the house, and look, more paintings.  After seeing her quilt..

…I knew what to do with a quilt that I loved that always seemed to be hidden up on the guest bed.  I brought it down and put it in a cubby to show it off a little more.  Not near as incorporated as Angela’s but I’m glad it’s downstairs.

Angela isn’t just good at finding art, she’s good at making it.  You can see lots of her work at the Sanctuary of Davidson.

Have you been there?  It’s just a few minutes from BeBe Gallini’s.

They feature all sorts of local artists like these paintings by my friend Angie Moses.

I forget who did this one {don’t you like my fancy art words “did this one”?} but I’m in love.

ANYWAY…this post is supposed to be about my coffee table. I’m thrilled with it and we’ve had it a few weeks now and it’s standing up to all sorts of male abuse.  We eat, drink and put our feet up in this room and I’m not gonna change that just because we have a white sofa and a hand painted coffee table.  The color is watery, saturated and mentally cooled off this room a few degrees.

I even updated a few of my own paintings with some more saturated turquoise so the table wouldn’t feel lonely.

It looks good with pink, even though that pouf is for my office, I could use it in here if I wanted.

But it also works with the more manly  side of the room with the greens and the browns and the muddy robin’s egg.

I just love my new old table and the life it’s brought to our room.  Angela did a great job.

And if you would like to see Angela’s work for yourself, she’ll be at the Metrolina the first weekend in June.  I’ll be there hanging out with her too.

This is just like 10% of what she has and I’m horrible at taking photos of other people’s stuff, she’s got all sorts of dressers and side tables and coffee tables and a bed and bookshelves and I even saw a mantle in her garage.  Plus, her stuff is not super expensive. She’s really careful about what she pays for an item so that she can sell it for a great deal.  IF you see something here that you want to find out more about you can email Angela {because some of you are already asking me about my table and I know I’m horrible at returning emails} ButtonBirdDesigns {at} gmail {dot} com . Otherwise, I hope to see you at the Metrolina~it’s the same place that Laura and I went to shop with Eddie Ross last November and so much fun!

 

Pillow Talk

The other day I showed some photos of our family room and talked about all my little junk.  One of comments mentioned that my sofa looked like a big white hole without pillows and a throw. My first thought was “whaaa? I have a million pillows on my sofa, what is she talking about?” Then I went back and looked at the photo, ahhh, I think I was washing all my pillow covers, and she was right, it did look like a big white hole.

Part of the problem with showing photos of my house every day is that we live here.  So unlike a magazine, this house hasn’t been staged or prepped {or cleaned} it just is.  I try to move rouge shoes and papers out of the way but I don’t style things much before I snap photos.  And I understand that can be really confusing when I’m talking about how to make your house pretty and then I show something that is unfinished or in progress.

I also don’t like to make a zillion disclaimers…my coffee table is gone, I don’t like that lamp, I’m working on the shelves, the sun is refusing to come out, I had to take a photo out of one of those frames for my son to use for a project, the blue on my garden stool is a little off for the room, the blue on the coffee table that is now back is being slowly introduced to the room….you get it right?  It’s a process and I’m sharing it with you.  I like to think that might be one of the reasons you hang out here.

You have all been incredibly gracious and forgiving of my imperfect home.  It’s not ever going to be done or perfect.  Thank goodness.

So, back to the very true point that was brought up. Here’s the photo in question. I think it’s a fun idea to compare a room with pillows and without pillows {and a coffee table}.

And with pillows and a coffee table and a fur ottoman and I switched the garden stool and the stump table because I move stuff every 4.5 minutes, and I’m moving it again as soon as this post is finished.

I think these pillows are so pretty all filling up the sofa like that. This is the way I would have them if we didn’t have to live here.

Here’s a little yellow added in.

Brighter colors.  This is the perk of having a white sofa.

But, in real life, I usually only keep three of those pillows on the sofa.  At least there are supposed to be three.  Someone must be using one for a fort or something.

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In real life all those pillows will be thrown on the floor so that a herd of boys can sprawl out all over it or so that my husband can stretch out on it.

It’s a delicate balance.

Each of us can figure out what works for our family in every season of our life.  Maybe for you even one pillow drives you batty.  I actually LOVE a sofa full of pillows like this. But, I know that pleated one will get destroyed quickly.  And that throw back there is fragile and only comes out in our room or for special occasions.  However, all of my pillows are actually feather pillow inserts with washable pillow covers.  So, I think I’m gonna try to leave a few more out.  If they end up on the floor most of the time, I’ll put them back up on the guest room bed until we have guests and I want our room to look really pretty.

What about you, do you have a pillow policy?  Do you have anything you only pull out on special occasions?