I really love this rug. (I can’t wait until Fritz is 100% with the housebreaking so we can have rugs again.)

In an American Idol shirt, no less! Hysterical. I definitely think this is worthy of closing out the week. Have an excellent weekend!

Irish Blood, English Heart (Tuesday, 4/30)

All You Need is Me (Monday, 4/29)

The pots are saying: “Hey ya!” Make your neighbourhood more alive

I love this idea! These flowerpots are by Maija Louekari (I’ve mentioned her before). So fun!

What would you make pots on your windowsill spell? I’m thinking “Go away!”, personally, but that’s not very nice of me. Maybe this is an idea better reserved for the back garden for those of us who are less…gregarious.

Look! It’s a fence! We knew we couldn’t do it ourselves, so we broke down and paid someone to come and install a fence for us. It makes a massive difference, despite the rest of the garden still being no more than a few clumps of grass on a plot of dirt. I can’t even describe how wonderful it is to go back there and not have to look at anyone else’s plots of dirt and patches of grass, and to just be limited to our own.

I know it’s not some incredible modernist construction, but it’s a little bit of privacy and containment. Fences are expensive to have installed (much more so than you’d think), so there was no way we could do a great horizontal cedar one or anything like that. This one will go gray eventually, since we’re not going to treat it with any preservatives. I’ll like it more when it’s gray.

This is the other side of the yard, warts and all. The cement that I want to cover with pea gravel, the too-small (yet also too large) fake-old porch, the awful white door with the fake muntins (oh, how I loathe fake muntins!), etc. Gross. This needs a lot of work, I know. It’ll get there.

We also drove out to Westchester to pick up a couple of original Knoll Hardoy/BFK butterfly chairs that I found on Craigslist. They have new covers made out of Mechoshade that’s safe to keep outside. The cloth has a really nice weave that reads as a light gray from a distance. I love these chairs! They’re going to look great with our new table.

A little at a time…

Even though we’ve driven by Hudson Valley Office Furniture in Newburgh dozens and dozens of times since we moved here, we never took the time to go in until last week. What an amazing place! They bill themselves as being a supplier of “nearly new” office furniture, but as it turns out, a good portion of their inventory is from the ’60s and ’70s. I started wishing I needed a Steelcase desk, because they had a million of them.

We spotted this Knoll/Saarinen tulip-style knockoff inverted on top of a pile of cabinets. The top is wood-grain laminate and the sides are peeling, but it looks easy to remove. We figured we’d bring it home and keep an eye out for a round marble remnant to replace it with. Not 5 minutes later, though, we found a piece of black marble in EXACTLY the right size (!) just hanging next to some coffee tables. Sold! (At a “just get it out of here” price, of course.)

I still have to unscrew the old top and get rid of it. It’ll look great when that’s done. The marble is heavy enough that I don’t think I’ll need to do much more than put a little Velcro underneath to get it to stay in place on the base.

I’m pretty excited about the shiny metal base, and the scratches don’t bother me at all. We’re planning to use this table outside, which I’d probably hesitate to do if it were the real thing (platinum base + black marble top = $759, or about 20x what we paid for ours).

Hooray for scavenging!

Fritz is 50% larger than he was two weeks ago (which means he weighs three pounds!), according to the vet! He’s also done with his shots, which means he can learn how to walk on a leash instead of being carried everywhere.

Fritz has turned into a MANIAC. A teething maniac. Sigh. I know it’s all part of being a puppy, but WOW. I don’t remember Bruno being this crazy. Bruno doesn’t remember being this crazy, either, but he’s dealing with it.

Los Angeles architect Fritz Haeg narrows the divide between residents and their communities with projects like Edible Estates, an international effort to convert front lawns into working food gardens.

Watch it all the way through. It’ll make you feel great, I promise. (From Dwell.)

Yes, really! The roughing-in work is FINALLY done on the upstairs bathroom. Everything incoming and outgoing has been replaced, so even though this photo doesn’t look beautiful, this is serious progress. This week we’ll do some work to reinforce the joists, then next week (hopefully) the tile guy will come to put a new subfloor and our marble hexagons in place.

The clawfoot tub has also been flipped over (no easy feat, the plumbers did it for us!) so I can get started on getting the outside of it repainted before it’s time to have it put back in the bathroom. Frankly, it’s been in the “guest bedroom” (HA) for so long now that it will be weird to have it gone. And, you know, filled with water instead of plaster dust.

Every now and then IKEA comes along with a textile design that just knocks me out. Such is the case with the new blanket from the SOMMAR range, designed by Maria Vinka. I love this pattern! I bought a bag made from it, too. Cute, cute, cute.

Following the wake-up call that was the landscaper’s quote on our original garden plan, I feel like I’ve hit a wall in terms of planning our outdoor space. Landscaping is expensive, hard work. Work that we don’t have the time, expertise, or energy for. Also, because we live in a row house with limited access to the garden beyond walking through the house or basement, it’s very difficult to see how exactly we would be able to get, say, 2.5 tons of pea gravel back there.

It’s a 35′x20′ lot, and I have no idea what to do with it. Somehow, I thought that having the mulberry tree removed would get things in motion. It’s gone (and I’m glad—the thing was a berry-dropping, sunlight-killing, ant-attracting beast) but I’m still at a loss. All I know is that I don’t want grass, it has to be dog-friendly, I want to grow some vegetables, and it can’t cost a fortune.

I know, all I have to talk about right now is FRITZ, FRITZ, FRITZ. It’s all-consuming! Things are going well. Bruno has left the “if I ignore him, maybe he’ll just disappear” stage, and has entered the “I’ll play with him, but he can’t sleep next to me” stage. It’s so fun to watch them play! Bruno chases Fritz, Fritz zooms around the house like a maniac, Fritz does a war dance in front of Bruno, Bruno chases Fritz, Fritz falls asleep, Bruno falls asleep (in a separate bed, of course), etc. It’s great. Fritz is also starting to get the hang of the whole housebreaking thing, so it’s possible our living room rug could make a reappearance as early as next week.

Fritz looooooves to chew! He’s also a fan of his new bed from Otis and Claude (seen here with a LUDDE sheepskin wrapped around the cushion). I dream of the day when he and Bruno are curled up in it together!

Meanwhile…
→ the plumbers are on their fourth day of work (!), and the roughing-in still isn’t done
→ the quote came in on our garden plan from the landscaper, and it is INSANE
→ a tree guy is coming to remove the offending mulberry tree today (for a very reasonable price)
→ maybe we can build a fence ourselves after all…

We brought home our new little guy today, and he’s absolutely amazing. He doesn’t have a name yet (EDIT: no suggestions, please!), but that will come soon enough. Bruno is skeptical, but handling it alright. We are very much a family of four, me and my boys. A few more photos here.

This isn’t the greatest photo of my new hair because it’s sort of tucked to the side so it looks shorter in the back than it actually is, but I’m very happy with how it came out. Of course it looked more perfectly perfect immediately after the appointment (hairdressers have that special blow-drying skill that I have yet to master in my own home), but this is day-after reality!

Pattie at Soon Beauty Lab was great, and the whole experience was definitely worth repeating. It was also one of the cheapest haircuts I’ve had in my life ($50!), so I really don’t have any excuse for not going back to get regular trims. I have to stop with the late-night self-trims. She could tell that I’d been butchering it!

A side bonus of Soon is that they are dog-friendly. There was a very, very sweet little Havanese (I think she may have been a mix, because she was tiny) named Boo snoozing on the chair next to me the whole time. People who love dogs and think they should be a part of everyday working life automatically get extra good-person points from me!

Many thanks to all who replied to this post from me few weeks ago with great suggestions for hairdressers in NYC. After much mulling, I finally decided to make an appointment for 6:00 PM today with Pattie at Soon Beauty Lab. Five hours to go!

I’m bringing along a montage of photos of Sara Quin from Tegan and Sara. I’ve never even listened to them (actually I’m listening to something right now online, and…well, I think my appreciation begins and ends with the haircut, oh well), but I saw this haircut while searching for photos of blunt bangs, and WOW! It’s a great cut. I always feel kind of goofy bringing along photos to the hairdresser, but surely that’s the easiest way to communicate what I want, right?

I’m also going to have a discussion with her regarding hair color, and what can be done about mine. I’ve been dying my hair for 19 years (!)—black for about 15 of them—and I’m sort of curious about how I might look with a totally different color. Say, pastel blonde. Who knows? If I do it and I hate it, I can always make it black again.

I’m nervous! I always get this way before a haircut. Tick, tock…

I’m curled up on the sofa with my coffee and a manuscript for a book I’m working on the cover for. The story is told from a dog’s point of view, which sounds really awful, but it’s actually quite smart and well-written. I’m still trying to figure out what the protagonist looks like and what kind of dog he is, but that information can really only come from the dialogue of other characters in the book (I do know he has one black ear and one white ear). Dogs, apparently, don’t spend a lot of time looking in the mirror or worrying about their fur color.

I made Bruno a new bed on Sunday (big enough for two!), and he’s enjoying it more than I expected he would. I just sewed an oversized envelope-style pillowcase out of linen, and put a really soft down pillow inside. I was thinking about sewing on a circle of boiled wool in the center, but now that the weather is slowly, slowly getting a little bit warmer (I still need a scarf, though), I think I’ll just leave it as is.

p.s. The plumber is coming today! By this afternoon, all of the roughing in should be done.

As I alluded to in my last post, we’ll be getting a new family member very soon. Next weekend we are picking up Bruno’s little brother, a 10-week-old black and tan long-haired Chihuahua!

The only photo we have of him is awful, but I can’t stop looking at him. I think Bruno (who is half long-haired Chihuahua) is going to love having a wee furry friend around. Well, after he goes through a bout of horrible jealousy. That’s to be expected.

We’ve been thinking about having another dog for a couple of years, and the time finally seems right for all of us. I can’t wait to get to know this little guy, and for the four of us to bond. I wonder what his name will be…!

Dogs are so special. I honestly don’t know how we lived before Bruno came into our lives.