Is it just me, or it next to impossible to snap back into work mode this year? Maybe it’s because I took two weeks in a row off in December, but I just don’t feel like I’m fully present and engaged in what I need to be doing every day. I think the weather might be partly to blame—it’s been unseasonably mild in lower New York this year, and I constantly feel like it’s either late fall or early spring. I’m just sort of floating from one day to the next.

I did just have a really great weekend, though. Jen from Honey Kennedy came to stay at my house in Newburgh for three whole days, and we had a wonderful time. Jen is terribly sweet and funny and really, really nice to be around (just ask Fritz and Bruno, who fell deeply and madly in love with her), and I’m happy to have finally met her in person.

Aside from holding the very first semester of Anna’s School for Unicorns (a.k.a Photoshop classes), I also made us some very very thick and rich and spicy and almost too delicious hot cocoa using Vosges Aztec Elixer. And tofu scramble. And burnt kale chips. And reheated pizza. I’m pretty sure it was like going away to a fancy resort for Jen! (Or, um, not…)

I got my hair cut again, too. More of the same! I’ve been back to Mariko at Dlala Salon four times now since I got the best haircut ever 8 months ago, and that has to be a record for me in terms of frequency. Can I add that NOT ONCE have I taken a pair of manicure scissors to my bangs in a fit of midnight desperation since I started seeing Mariko? Her cuts look so good growing out that I don’t have to.

It’s pretty neat having LONG hair, too! I haven’t had this much hair since I was a freshman in high school, which was…um…23 years ago. I’m going to just let it keep growing. Now that I know about layers and deep parts and stuff, it’s nice to have waves and partial buzz cuts and long bangs.

On a side note, I just want to put this reminder out there: Much like paint is just paint, HAIR IS JUST HAIR. The great thing about it is that even if you do something stupid and it looks terrible, you can always just cut your hair short and eventually it’ll grow out. As a side bonus, you get to have a million different hairdos as it gets longer. If you want a fun haircut, get a fun haircut. It’s just hair.

Fritz turned four years old a few days ago. I can’t believe he’s four already! It seems like it was just yesterday that were were bringing home this insanely adorable, sleepy lump of fur. He was so cute! (And then he ate our sofa.) Fritzy is so good now. Yes, he has his moments when he does an ultra-annoying Chewbacca/seagull vocal impersonation for seemingly no reason at all and for lengths of time that are highly unnecessary, but he’s a total snuggle bug and just an all-around great dog. He’s also really warm and he likes to sleep under the covers at night, so our heating bill is less with him around. And he’s still really cute.

Oh, clothes! I found that nice triangle-print shirt at Target! The proportions really aren’t as weird as the photo on their website makes it look. It’s quite flattering, actually. And Martha has a the same one of course.

Yeah, that’s a new black + white iPhone case. I ordered one from Society6 because I’ve been thinking about selling some stuff through them and I wanted to know what the quality is like, and I’ll be honest…as cute as the illustration (by Dawn Gardner, whose work I love) on my new case is, the quality is really, really sub-par. I’ve had a capsule case from Uncommon since I got my phone in May (that’s the multicolored one in the top photo, designed by Marco Cibola), and I love it. The plastic is smooth, strong and durable; the edges are smooth and comfortable to hold; and the design is actually embedded in case. The case from Society6 is unbelievably flimsy, and you can literally scratch the printed image off with your fingernail. I fully expect it to look terrible in a couple of months. Both cases were about $40, and while that’s pretty steep for something so small and made out of plastic, it’s definitely way too much for the ones from Society6. Bummer! It’s definitely cute, though, so I’ll keep using it until it breaks.

UPDATE: Society6 contacted me after reading this post, and they have very kindly offered to send me a replacement case as they believe I may have been sent a defect. Fingers crossed that the new one is better. I’ll update this post when I receive it!

(Like I said, RAMBLY.)

The bookshelf-building project has been going well (aside from the fact that the shelves don’t really have many books on them yet), but it’s been at the expense of the rest of the house. You know when you start working on something and you wind up having to make the most giant mess in the world and then you realize you have to actually finish this other project first and that leads to a secondary giant mess on top of the first mess, and you were up until 4AM and it still didn’t make any difference and now you just feel sick but you also don’t want to live in that MEGA-MESS you created?

That’s how I’m feeling right now, and I have approximately 10 hours in which to make things better. Get it done.

TO-DO BEFORE 6PM:

+ PUT AWAY ALL THE STUFF.
+ Cut and mount roller shades in the kitchen.
+ Cut and mount roller shade in the guest bedroom.
+ Bring the records downstairs.
+ Hang the Flentsed mobile.
+ Hang the String light.
+ Clean bathrooms.
+ Clean kitchen.
+ Bring all tools and supplies to the basement.
+ Dust.
+ Vacuum.
+ Mop.
+ Frame stuff and then hang it on the walls.

(You’ll note that several of these items are carried over from my vacation to-do list from a few weeks ago. Sigh…)

I spent the last couple of nights of 2011 painting the long side wall in our dining room black, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. The living room and dining room are right in line with each other, railroad-style, so visually it’s just a continuation of the black wall in the living room.

The house is very narrow (20 feet wide, including the entry hallway), and the black wall adds some depth to the room in a nice way. Also, since the dining room doesn’t get a lot of natural light, the dark paint has a richness to it even in the daytime that makes the room feel cozier than it did before…and, as in the living room, it brings in a bit of formality that feels right in a Victorian house. Personally, I think black walls get written off as being cold or depressing far too often! Elvis agrees, as you can see.

As in the living room, the bedroom, and the apartment kitchen, I used Benjamin Moore’s ‘Soot’ with a matte finish. It’s actually the deepest, darkest indigo blue imaginable and not a true black, but that’s what gives it that extra oompf.

(How is this plant still alive?! I always forget about it, and it’s right next to a heater, so it’s been teetering on the edge of death for years.)

Coffee + Music + Painting = My default comfort mode during vacations. Seriously, once I get going with painting stuff, I feel really good. It’s definitely one of those tasks that inevitably takes ten times longer than you imagine it will, but the impact is so worth it in the end. I can’t imagine paying someone else to paint walls for me! The payoff when the work is done is just way too satisfying.

Speaking of painting, if you want to know how I do it and the steps I recommend, shuffle over to Manhattan Nest and read Daniel’s post about the whole process. I prefer Aura over Regal, but other than that, we pretty much do things the same way, right down to the Wooster paintbrushes. What he says about painter’s tape? That’s the truth. Don’t do it. Especially in an old house. Yes, I freehand everything, even black paint that butts right up against white.

I didn’t take any full-length shots of the dining room yet because things are still looking like this, but that’s just because we’re getting ready to build new bookshelves. That’s what all of this fancy plywood is for! Yay.

P.S. There’s an Instagram gallery right here on the blog now. I used a plugin called Instapress to create it. It’s a teeny bit buggy, but good enough!

Yes, I redesigned! It’s been more than a year since the last D16 makeover, which much longer than I like to leave things alone. I’m a bad client, though—I kind of want everything to stay the same at the same as I want it to change. Kind of like how I feel about my house, my clothes, my food…

I’m sure there are going to be some bugs (I’m way less fastidious about cross-browser happiness when it comes to my own stuff than I am with other people’s sites), so if you happen to discover anything weird, please do let me know what operating system and browser/version you’re using so I can address the problem! Oh, and there’s a new FAQ page. The link page is taking a nap right now, but it’ll be back soon enough.

On to more important things…

IT’S THE BLANKET!!! IN MY HOUSE AND ON MY BED!!! YAYYYYYY!!!!!

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while then you know I am completely obsessed with Pia Wallén’s Crux blanket. I dream about it. I refer to it for proportional guidance when painting medicine cabinets and cord cozies. Basically, I talk about the Crux blanket incessantly to anyone who will listen.

About six months ago, I found out that the original wool version of the Crux blanket is no longer being produced—once the current stock is gone, it’s gone. Despite the fact that the wool blanket is prohibitively expensive (the price being the sole reason I haven’t upholstered my entire house with them), I did get a little mopey…until I learned that it had been replaced by a far more affordable (but still spendy, let’s be real here) cotton flannel version.

Blah, blah, blah, months of waiting and pondering and bribing of toothy Chihuahuas…and then I thought the blanket sure would be a nice birthday present from Evan (he agreed)…followed by more months of me agonizing over committing to the actual purchase. A couple of weeks ago, though, I finally went ahead and ordered my very own Crux blanket from the superfabulous Juli and John at Mjölk in Toronto. Their service could not have been faster or kinder, and they even tweeted a photo of my blanket being packed for shipping!

And yes, I do realize I’m talking about a blanket here. Humor me, OK? It’s just sooooo soft and thick and luxe and perfect…and it’s reversible, so it’s really like two blankets in one. And did I mention it’s soft? As much as I would have loved to have put it on the living room sofa and made it available for snuggling at all times, I am all too aware of Fritz’s reputation when it comes to blankets, so the bedroom it is. Totally fine with me.

!!!!BLANKET!!!! !!!!BLOG!!!!

I’m not going back to work until January 3rd, and I have a TON of stuff I want to get done around the house between now and then. The last few (six?!) months have been so hectic, and nothing around here feels complete or organized. There are little piles of stuff all over the place—papers needing to be sorted, recycling that has to go out, tools that either need to be put to use or put away, out-of-season clothes…ugh.

WINTER VACATION TO-DO:

+ Laundry.
+ Vacuum.
+ PUT AWAY ALL THE STUFF.
+ Organize kitchen pantry.
+ Clean out kitchen cabinets.
+ Clean the refrigerator.
+ Cut and mount roller shades in the kitchen.
+ Screw down the threshold in the vestibule (this has been on my to-do list for almost two years!).
+ Figure out what frame sizes we need, and maybe even buy frames.
+ Refinish that dresser, already. OK, this isn’t going to happen.
+ Paint the dining room.
+ Figure out the materials list for built-in bookcases.
+ Put the new slipcover on the sofa.
+ Put the new blankets on the beds.
+ Hang the Flensted mobile (thank you, Mommy!).
+ Figure out where to put the String light.
+ Wash Bruno.
+ Bring out all recycling on Friday. DON’T FORGET.
+ Shred everything in the shred pile.
+ Moisturize. (ongoing)
+ Take pictures.
+ Write real blog posts with real pictures in them.
+ Redesign this blog.
+ Get the oven repaired.
+ Bake something.

OK, so I have nine days to get things done. I hope I can cross off most of these items, but honestly, if I just get as far as putting away the bottle of Pepto-Bismol that’s been sitting on the dining room sideboard since August, I’ll be feeling pretty proud of myself.

Sure, it’s 60° and sunny and the spirea in the garden are budding out of confusion, but we’re still pretending it’s winter and going along with the usual end-of-year merriment with family. The City of Newburgh continues to be beautiful against all odds, and even after six years here I still can’t get over my clouds, my mountains, and my river. Happy, happy.

I know, Fritz is absurdly cute. It’s sick, really. The eyebrows, the underbite, the ruff, the fancy ankles…too much. Sigh.

I have to get some stuff done today. This is the first weekend in forever that I haven’t done any freelance work, and as nice as it was to sit around a bit yesterday, now I have to get moving!

TODAY:
• Laundry
• Vacuum
• Clean bathrooms and kitchen
• Rake leaves and clean up outside
• Goodwill (next weekend!)
• Grocery shopping
• Unpack the suitcase filled with random items that’s sitting in the hallway (next weekend!)
• Measure dining room wall to plan new bookshelves

Speaking of people getting stuff done, have you been over to Daniel’s blog lately? I seriously do not understand how he manages to do all of this stuff. I mean…I know Daniel. We hang out often, and never once have I seen him wearing a cape or lifting train cars, so I’m pretty sure he’s not a superhero, but somehow he’s managed to get done in just a few months what would take me a few years. Is it just the wonder of youth that makes him so efficient? Whatever it is, it’s impressive. He’s my power animal.

Just a few snaps for the weekend. I’m still really busy (of course), but this is what my house looks like when I take a 5-minute break.

I’m really excited for October.

Hey, remember when Daniel performed a thrifting miracle and produced a Random Light seemingly out of thin air for about 85% off retail? That was almost NINE MONTHS ago, during which time said lamp has taken up a bunch of space doing absolutely nothing on the floor of the room at the back of the house (also known as Evan’s studio).

Well, no more!! It is FINALLY suspended from the ceiling and emitting light. Yay! I realize these pictures are no fun, but the room is a mess and it was dark out and honestly I was just happy to have accomplished something that wasn’t on my decidedly un-fun to-do list.

We hung the lamp kind of low directly above the desk. It’s huuuuuuuuge (too big for our living room, even with 10-foot ceilings!), and the only way it made sense to hang it was over a table. It looks really pretty against the black wallpaper.

Better photos to come once the room is fixed up a bit more! Perhaps Evan will agree to do a guest post…

TODAY:
• Work.
• Dust.
• Vacuum.
• Laundry.
• Organize.
• Work.
• Cook.
• Eat.
• Work.
• Iron.
• Work.

It’s pretty much like that these days.

This is not a happy radiator. This is a sad, rusty radiator covered with peeling paint that’s probably filled with lead. We’re constantly having to sweep up the chips so the dogs don’t eat them, and in the winter we have to wrap the whole thing in foil because it’s such a mess when the heat is on.

We’ve had two other radiators in the house sandblasted and powder-coated, and as great as the results are, it’s expensive. We have ten of these cast iron monsters, so there’s no way we can have them all done professionally, so we have to limit ourselves to the ones that are too far gone to take care of ourselves. This one in the living room is definitely on that short list.

Let’s look at some HAPPY RADIATORS instead!

Home of stylist and interior designer Jo Berryman, as seen on 1st Option

Yeah, I know, I’m not really looking at the radiator either (why is Damien Hirst following me everywhere I go?). But see it over there in the corner, all cute and black? I love how it looks in this mostly-white room—it grounds that corner really nicely. My only concern with a black radiator is that we already have black doors and a black wall in the living room, and I hesitate to add a third shade of black to the same room.

Photo by Christopher Baker for Blueprint magazine (I still miss you, Blueprint!)

YESSSSSS. I love this bright, screaming yellow. I showed this picture to my mother (I’m sure she appreciates me linking to those photos again, hah!) yesterday, and she said that my house isn’t “eclectic” enough (!!!) to have a yellow radiator. Oh, I see—it’s like THAT. Huh. No, I understand what she’s saying, but at the same time, I’m really not afraid of having a radiator be such an eye-grabber in what is otherwise a mostly-neutral room.

Like Tim Gunn says, though…it’s a lot of look.

Home of J. Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton; see more in Lupton’s Flickr set

My mother’s suggestion was to go with red instead of yellow, but I dunno. I really like how the red looks with all of the warm grays and the floor coverings in the Lupton/Miller house, but I don’t know that red feels as nice when it’s mixed with a lot of black and white. Plus, our wood floors have such a reddish tone to them already that I worry a red radiator will just look muddy and blah in our house.

Brooklyn homes on Bergen Street and in Park Slope with interiors created by Wary Meyers

I’ve posted the photo of the gradient radiator before, but it’s too great to leave out of this post. I love love love it. Probably not right for our house (and not really suitable to powder-coating, I don’t think), but still amazing. The photo on the right wouldn’t work for us either for obvious reasons, but it’s good inspiration. We do have seven more radiators left to contend with, after all…

The rocking chair in the room at the back of the house (technically now Evan’s music studio, but it feels weird saying that) has a new buddy! We bought this mustard-colored upholstered Eames shell chair years ago for cheap. It came with a standard H-base that was rusted out and missing all of its feet. A while back I swapped in a rolling DAT base that came off of another chair, but since we really don’t have any use for a rolling chair, it’s just kind of been sitting around in a corner of the guest bedroom doing nothing since then. It has a 2-inch tear in the upholstery (due to bad packing—grrrrr), but the mustard color is so great that I don’t care.

As long as an Eames shell chair has a narrow-mount configuration on the bottom (most of the stacking shells have a wider mount—you can see the difference here), all of the different kinds of bases are interchangeable. It’s much easier to find vintage shells at good prices if you don’t care about the bases, and it’s relatively inexpensive to buy reproduction bases in whatever style you want. True, a vintage chair with a repro base isn’t worth as much as an intact original, but I really don’t care about that. I’m just happy to see a vintage shell get a new life.

I’ve bought multiple bases (including the one on the rocking chair above and the dowel bases on the chairs in the apartment kitchen) from the eBay seller Depury, but there are plenty of other sellers out there all offering roughly the same product at more or less the same price points. You can expect to pay between $75 and $125 depending on the type of base.

Whatever you do, make sure you hang on to the screws and rubber washers/shock mounts when you remove the old base. Most upholstered Eames shells have removable rubber washers and threaded holes in the fiberglass, but others (including all of the non-upholstered shells) have thick, permanent shock mounts affixed to the bottom that allow bases to be attached without the screws penetrating the shell itself. Just don’t go screwing anything to the bottom of your chair without there being some rubber involved!

We chose a wire-frame LAR/low-rod base (commonly known as the “cat’s cradle”) for this chair. Since it’s going to be sitting next to a rocker, I thought having a height difference between the two would be nice. Also, it’s low enough for the dogs to climb in! I suspect this is going to become a favorite snuggle-spot (and photo-op) in the near future.

Do you remember the video I posted a few months ago featuring some of my neighbors in the City of Newburgh* who had joined forces (and finances) to buy and restore a house? Inspiring stuff—and the house is now on the market.

* By the way, when I say “City of Newburgh”, that’s to the distinguish the place I live from the adjoining Town of Newburgh. They’re very different places (with separate governments and everything); the former being the older, historic, urban riverfront city where I make my home, and the latter being a much more recently developed suburban town.

Evan and I have a good deal of affection for this house. Before we bought our place (nearly six years ago!), we looked at 17 Courtney twice with our realtor and really considered making an offer on it. Ultimately it was just too much house for us—it needed a lot of work—but those visits also served as an introduction to the part of Newburgh that would ultimately become our home: Washington Heights, usually just referred to by locals as “the Heights”. (And yes, our little Manhattan apartment is also in a neighborhood called Washington Heights. Confusing, I know! It’s just a coincidence.)

I realize I’m biased, but I’m gonna just put this out there: The nicest neighborhood in the City of Newburgh is the Heights. Guys, we have great neighbors. Some of them are lifelong Newburghers and others—like us—are more recent transplants from New York City or other Hudson Valley towns, but in all we’re a group of people who truly care about Newburgh and love living here. That little pocket of houses on the east side of Liberty Street is particularly special given its proximity to the river (this is my view!), and every day I feel lucky that Evan and I bought such a great house on a great block.

But back to 17 Courtney! I know major renovation work isn’t for everyone, and as I mentioned, the amount of work that this house needed (new electric, new plumbing, new kitchen and bathrooms, total renovation of the woodwork, walls and floors—everything imaginable, really) was just too much for Evan and I. The fact that this work has already been done is HUGE…especially for Newburgh. I did a walk-through a few weeks ago, and I was GOBSMACKED. I wish I had photos of how the house looked six years ago so you could see the difference—it’s stunning. So much love has been put into this house, and I really, really hope it winds up becoming a home very soon. It’s been sitting vacant for a number of years now, and given that 17 Courtney overlooks our garden, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the house and wishing someone would come and take care of it.

The first floor has an extra-wide entry hall (that wainscoting is embossed leather!), a massive living room and dining room, a walk-through butler’s pantry, a huge kitchen that opens into the garden, and a bathroom. With the exception of the light fixtures and radiators, everything you see in these photos is original to the house. (Isn’t it incredible that something can be 120 years old and still look this good?)

Oh, and the wood fireplace in the living room? It has dragons carved into it. Yeah, that’s right. DRAGONS!!

The second floor (three huge bedrooms/two bathrooms) is just insanely beautiful. When Evan and I looked at this house six years ago, there was paneling everywhere—even on the doors!—and the floors were covered wall to wall with linoleum tiles. Seeing the original pine plank floors uncovered and restored makes me get teary-eyed. I’m just so glad that this awesome house was saved, and that it’s in my little neighborhood.

17 COURTNEY AVE, NEWBURGH NY:
Total Rooms: 7 / Bedrooms: 3 / Full Baths: 3 / Sq. Ft.: 2470 / Built: 1890
$225,000

To see even more photos (including the kitchen and bathrooms!) and get additional details, visit broker Chris Hanson’s website, Historic Newburgh Homes. If you can’t get enough of the Heights of Newburgh, this amazing house is also in my neighborhood.

I love Newburgh! I love 17 Courtney. And I love my neighbors.

I’m working on an awesome freelance project—which you’ll get to see very soon!—at home for the next few days, and that means I’m camped out on the sofa with an iced coffee (and a couple of cute puppies) at my side. Here are the four views I have from my “desk”. I like the last one best, of course.

Summertime in the Hudson Valley means more than just green mountains, winding rivers, antique fairs and crickets—it also means groundhogs, also known as woodchucks.

Among famous groundhogs of the northeastern United States, most everyone already knows Punxsutawney Phil and Staten Island Chuck (full name Charles G. Hogg), but I’d like to introduce you to a lesser-known celebrity groundhog: Newburgh Haggis.

First spotted by Evan in the summer of 2008, Haggis has made a very nice home for himself (herself? I’m not going to check) in our garden, devouring numerous vegetable and herb plants straight down to the root. He’s raised children under the deck, created a tunnel system to rival the NYC subway, and dutifully “relocated” (i.e. dug up and left for dead) several plants according to his own landscaping sensibilities.

In other words, he’s a member of the family. Sometimes he has friends Scarface and Fatback over, but mostly he’s a solo ‘hog. We’ve accepted the path of destruction he leaves in his wake, and we welcome his arrival every year.

Moments after the photo above was taken, the sweet potato plants pictured were reduced to tiny stumps, of course, but at least Haggis got a nice meal out of it, right? Sure, he’s trouble. But he has such a cute face.

You know that room at the back of our house? The one I painted white? Yeah, that one. I’d been using it as an office for a while, but after we relocated the iMac to the apartment (and if I’m being honest, I’m usually just working on the sofa with my laptop, anyway), it kind of just turned into dead space—a place to put things. Which is lame, you know? Because then it gets cluttered and forgotten and you never want to go in there.

Happily, though, Evan is going to turn the room into a little music studio for himself! He’s already moved in some of his guitars and pedals and…um, whatever all of that other stuff is (my musical knowledge is limited strictly to listening, and I like it that way), and he’s been working in there quite comfortably.

We’d like to build some sort of rack or stand for guitars, and hang some hooks for cables and straps and stuff, too. We definitely need a rug (I’m trying to convince Daniel to sell me this one), and YES…we need to hang the Random Light already! (Woah, can you believe I’ve had that thing sitting around for five months now?!)

And then we need to clean up the messy piles of stuff sitting all around the room and on the desk.

I’ve been trying to convince Evan to start blogging, by the way. I think he’d be really good at it because he’s smart and cute and funny, and I’d like to see more stylish man-blogs (or as I prefer to call them, “mlogs”) out there. No luck yet (though he is on Twitter), but I’m working on it!

Ah, that brief period of time while the purple sandcherry in our front garden is in bloom, and the Japanese beetles haven’t taken over yet…and when there are weeds every where because it’s been raining constantly and I’ve been too busy to get out and stick my hands in the dirt.

I gotta do some gardening today. I know we complain about this every year in the northeastern US (and of course New Yorkers in particular loooove to complain about the weather…okay, and everything else, too), but did we just go straight from winter to summer and skip spring completely? I don’t understand why we never have temperatures in the 60–65° range, for example. It’s like it’s 45° and disgusting one day, and then it’s 85° (and still disgusting, just in a different way) the next.

But today is nice. Really nice. So I need to get out there and take advantage of it. I already spent an hour pulling some teeny-weeny little weeds, and there’s lots more let to do!

TODAY!
• pancakes
• laundry
• grocery shopping
• pull weeds in front and back garden
• turn compost
• trim grass strip next to sidewalk?
• rake/sweep
• iced coffee ♡♡♡
• put away winter coats
• FREELANCE WORK
• manicure/pedicure
• write up a planting plan for the back garden
• figure out how many bags of rocks/mulch we need

Oh yeah, and check out how crazy and bouncy and BRIGHT GREEN the creeping Jenny is looking already this year! Having our porch gutter drain directly into this corner of the front garden (via our rain chain, which has been working like a champ for a year now) was such a good idea. The Jenny is a-creepin’ like nobody’s business, and this pleases me greatly.

This photo has nothing to do with anything, I just thought the light in the hallway was nice. The photo does make me wish I had a better camera, though. Sigh.

I didn’t make a to-do list this weekend, and as a result I wound up not really doing much of anything other than some freelance work. It’s not even noon yet on Sunday, but I already feel like the day is pretty much gone—by the time I’ve made a grocery list, run errands, cooked a few pots’ worth of lunches for the week, folded laundry, etc., it’s going to be bedtime. Which just makes me want to sit on the sofa with Evan and the dogs.

Sunday always carries a sense of impending Monday-doom with it. Not that anything particularly doom-ful happens on Monday (I actually like going to work), but I hate that feeling of lost opportunities. Opportunities to accomplish stuff and sleep well and not just lie on the sofa covered in dog fur.

I should’ve made a list.

Maybe this post should actually be called “April! Stuff I Tweeted”, because it appears that I can really only remember to assemble these round-ups on a semi-monthly basis. (And I love that I start each of these posts with an excuse. Heh.)

(Also: CAN YOU BELIEVE IT’S APRIL ALREADY?! Yeah, April. Craziness.)

Anyway, here are my favorite tweets from the past couple of weeks! Have fun clicking your way through…there’s some good stuff here:

+ I love this use of plywood PRÄNT boxes, as seen on IKEA’s Livet Hemma blog. They’ve been painted inside at random, then joined together with binder clips to create a modular shelving unit. Nice!

+ There’s a lot of awesome happening in this photo.

+ I enjoyed working on this book cover as much as you’re probably thinking I did.

+ This fall, Marimekko will open a flagship store in New York City at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway. Yay!

+ I keep trying to come up with a comment about this product, but I’m actually speechless.

+ Okay, I admit it, I’m jealous of everyone’s iPhones. Even though I really don’t need one and can’t afford one anyway.

+ Via Cornel West: This NPR funding fight = Republican insecurity in terms of the low-quality of argument & truncated quality of vision (Listen to the full discussion on Smiley & West)

+ A surprisingly respectful article from ABC News: Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson: Hollywood’s Odd Couple, Now Gone

+ Time Between Thing Being Amusing, Extremely Irritating Down To 4 Minutes. (“It’s precisely at this moment when the subject starts to experience an unshakable and overwhelming desire to punch anyone making further allusion to the phenomenon right in the face”)

+ Via mjolkshop: The story of how participation in Groupon almost destroyed a small business.

+ Remember when websites used to have guestbooks?

+ Pretty renovation blog discovery: süsk & banoo.

+ Check out what some of my neighbors are doing at the house right behind mine:

Video by Freamfilms, Inc.

This morning, as I was wrapping myself up in a nice, hot towel after my shower, it occurred to me that I’ve never really written about my friend, the towel radiator.

One of the dilemmas we faced when renovating the downstairs bathroom was how to deal with the need for heat. We have cast iron steam radiators in every other room in the house, but when this bathroom was carved out of a former pass-through butler’s pantry sometime in the late ’30s/early ’40s, the piping for heat wasn’t routed into the room. I’m not sure what they did for heat for the next 50 years, but at some point a little electric heater was added to the bathroom under the sink. That’s what was there when we bought the house, and, of course, it was broken and rusty and worthless.

Initially we considered electric underfloor radiant heating since we knew we’d be gutting the room down to the subfloor, but what at first seemed financially doable added up to too high of an expense once all of the various parts were factored in. (The dogs would have loved radiant heating, no doubt. I imagined them lying in there all day like lizards, bellies warming against the tile…) Anything that sat on the floor or protruded too far from the wall was out of the question; the bathroom is just too tiny.

Enter the towel radiator!

Towel radiators are common in Europe, but far less common in the US. You do sometimes see heated towel bars, yes, but that’s different—they will warm a towel, but they don’t product enough heat to warm a entire room. We don’t have a lot of options here, but we really liked the look of the Runtal Omnipanel, which is available for both hardwired electric installation (that’s what we have) and forced hot water heat systems. We got the 24″ wide TW12, which is just powerful enough to heat a 5×6′ bathroom. They come in a gazillion colors (they can even be custom color-matched), but white obviously made the most sense for us.

There’s also an optional programmable timer that you can buy to set the heat to come on at designated times for each day of the week. We have one, but apparently we’re too stupid to figure out how to use it right (the manual is a doozy!), because every time we think we’ve finally got it right, the set time comes and goes and the radiator doesn’t come on. And then we forget about it.

The particular model we chose retails for about $1000, but we managed (incredibly) to find one on eBay for $500 that was being sold by a rich person who decided to re-renovate their bathroom for the second time in five years. It looked like it had barely been used.

It does stick out from the wall a bit, but it’s less than 4″ total—very slim. We were able to fit it in at the end of the bathtub (our tub only has walls on two sides; we have an L-shaped shower curtain rod), so it’s virtually out of sight but towels are still easily accessible after a shower. And the warm towels…oh my goodness. It’s like wrapping your wet, shivering body up in an electric blanket, only without the risk of electrocution. Total heaven. It really feels like the kind of luxury I imagine people with ponies and maids enjoying every morning.

As a side benefit, the radiator also dries wet towels very quickly, virtually eliminating dreaded “musty towel odor” (a.k.a. my biggest bathroom fear), and it also cuts back on moisture in the air. We don’t have any ventilation in the bathroom other than the little window (which we always open during a shower, even in the middle of winter), but in the two years that have passed since we finished renovating the bathroom (I can’t believe it’s been that long!), we’ve never had a problem with mildew or mold or anything like that.

We don’t want to waste electricity, so we actually don’t leave the radiator on unless we’re taking showers (and for about 20 minutes afterward so the towels and room will dry out). Yes, I realize that defeats the purpose of having radiator, and yes, that does mean it’s freezing in there much of the time, but we’re used to it…though maybe a heated toilet seat is in order!