Survived Irene, Celebrating by Decorating The Hallway!

Well we're back from our Zone A Hurricane Irene evacuation, and came home to zero water damage.  Clapping! A special thanks to our cousins, The Langs, for hosting us and my folks all weekend in Pennsylvania.  In celebration of our home's survival, I decorated the hallway by putting books away by color in the Expedit.

This is what the hallway looked like when we moved in.  That's our front door.

This is a rendering of what I wanted the hallway to look like.  Still do.

And this is what the hallway looks like now.  Progress!

We've made a lot of progress towards that rendering.  We decided not to do the white stripe on the door, which looked weird when we tried it.  We did grab that mirror from Ikea, and the console table we wanted was expensive'ish, about $300 from Room and Board, so we opted for a temp solution: an Expedit from Ikea for about $40.  I put our books in it this morning, which looks quite nice, but slightly out of place in the hallway.  Aaron thinks it looks too overwhelmed with Harry Potter books, and is therefore uncool.  Except, Harry Potter is cool, so that part confused me.

Check out some more shots...

Growing gallery...

Next up, ordering a rug for the hallway, I'm thinking Flor tiles.  Also the hubs still wants to upgrade to the Room and Board table.  What do you think so far?

Accessorizing The Office!

Aaron's man cave has taken a turn towards glamorous this week.  Oops!  So we're thinking of renaming it something more befitting, like the library.  So far, no books, but I'll work on that later.  It's at least being upgraded to the office.

If you read the last post, you know we moved the dresser from office into our bedroom.  We've since replaced it with an Expedit from Ikea.

The dresser, since moved to our bedroom.

Expedit tiiime.

The Expedit is working much better for us.  It is longer and narrower so it utilizes more wall space and makes the entrance feel less crowded.  Sadly, the cubbies became an instant vacuum for clutter, so I needed to fill them with something far more organizational, pronto.

Enter Michelle Adams inspiration.

In her very own glamorous office, she too has an Expedit, and filled it up with black magazine holders from The Container Store.  Oh Michelle, awesome idea!

After waiting a week or so for their arrival, they came this afternoon and I popped them into their new home.

Files and magazines will be organized fo' serious!

Mmm, I heart this.

Ok clapping for Expedit and being able to move our wills and the deed to our house from the top of the laundry machine, to something more appropriate, like a container store magazine file thing.

And you may have noticed, there was also some new art in store -- our ketubah! Which, for those gentiles out there, is our Jewish marriage licence, decorated with cherry blossoms for no reason except that those are nice to look at.

We used to have it in the bedroom.

It was clashing with our dressers a bit; dark wood, light wood, eh.  It worked much better in the office.

Chocolate goes well with chocolate, life lesson.

Ok onto other glamour.

It was only a few months ago when our little cub (office lounge area) looked like this.

Accessories-time!

And what a difference a rug and mirror can make! We had the rug from our previous pad, it was from Williams Sonoma Home.  We also got the mirror from Williams Sonoma Home (no longer available), several weeks ago and had intended to put it in our bedroom, but again with those pine-colored dressers, it seemed like it would work better with a darker color scheme.

And here is the hubs, very excited about the mirror, which we hung this afternoon, after some serious measuring on Aaron's part.  Thank you Aaron!

This room has become my sanctuary.  It is the first room that is sort of 'done'.  We could still use a nice black and white photo gallery in white frames over the TV, and we're almost done organizing the office closet, but for the most part, we're in the home stretch and I really love the way it turned out.  It gives me hope the other rooms will one day feel as done and as sanctuary'esq.

The Gods of Craigslist: A Dresser Descends

God, or at least the God of Craigslist, dropped in to say hello last week.  We were having a typical evening: I was shuffling furniture around the house, frowning, reshuffling, and Aaron was trying to ignore me and watch baseball.  I shuffled an old Crate and Barrel dresser of mine from childhood right next to Aaron's side of the bed, trialling my idea to use dressers in place of night tables.  Hrrm.

Dresser In Library / Office / Man Cave

Dresser In Bedroom

Ok, well, that actually looks very nice.  Woo!  Concept good, practice good.  And now for the Astrocrag task of finding another similar dresser that is about the same size, and isn't a fortune.

I went to PotteryBarn.com, and found this:

The Ashby Dresser, for a cool $999.  Is it just me or does this look like this took a tumble in a landfill and was never cleaned upon being salvaged? Uh, pass.

I then sauntered over to Craigslist.  Craigslist had been annoying me lately: there was too much clicking, so I installed a little gizmo called CraigsToolbox, which previews all the images for you in-line, reducing the clicking.

I searched for "Pottery Barn Dresser".

Omg.  The second result.  It is my dresser.  It is the exact, same, dresser.  It is $200.  It is in Chelsea.  It was posted THREE HOURS AGO.

Scroll down, dear reader.

Scroll up.

Are you seeing the unbelievable insanity of what is happening here? I went into unbelievable insanity mode, casually writing someone who turned out to be named Julie an overly relaxed email wondering if the dresser was still available.  Oh it was? Oh great, we're interested, can we pick it up tomorrow? Oh Tuesday works fine for us too, we'll see you then! This is insane.

So Tuesday rolls around, Aaron rents a zip car, and we pop over to Julie's.  I go upstairs, her husband opens to the door, and looks around for the bigger person I brought with me to get the dresser out of his apartment.  Aaron's downstairs with the car, I reassure him.  I walk into their bedroom.  It's the twilight zone: they have our sheets from Restoration Hardware, and (obviously) our dresser.

I check out the rest of their apartment. They're moving, so they're selling some other stuff.  Oh, more twilight zone: they have our couch from Williams Sonoma Home.  And, they have the Ron-Marvin coffee table from Williams Sonoma Home, which I would have bought had it not been too small for our space.

Anyway, I needed to get out of there before I found out we were related.  I pushed the dresser into the elevator, grabbed Aaron downstairs, where we hoisted the dresser into the ZipCar and drove home.

When we got home, I slid it next to my side of the bed.  It fit within less than an inch!

I stood back.

Wow.  Amazing.  I am slain.  By the Gods of Craigslist.  Thank you, Gods of Craigslist.

Aaron's Side.

Anne's Side.

The whole thing is too insane for me to even conceptualize.  I still need to think about it and sacrifice a goat.