Do you ever forget that you know how to make stuff? Like, with your hands?

My first impulse when I need something that’s sewn is to look on Etsy, so I suggested as much to Evan when we decided we need a draft snake for the front door to our apartment (we installed a door sweep already, but the dogs still obsess over the sliver of light that creeps in at night). He quickly located a cute one, made sure it was long enough, and placed an order.

Then the snake arrived, and we filled it with rice. All was grand until we put it down in front of the door and discovered that a rice-stuffed snake is shorter than a snake skin. It was also so skinny that it wouldn’t reach over the threshold to actually cover the gap under the door. Oops.

I was all set to hop back on Etsy and look for a replacement snake in a large enough size, when I remembered that Hey! I actually have a ton of fabric and a sewing machine! And I know how to sew! I’m no master seamstress by any means, but I can certainly sew a flat rectangle when the need arises.

And so, I got to work on the World’s Largest Draft Snake. It’s 38″ long, 16″ around, and filled to the fangs with 7 pounds of rice. It’s a DRAFT PYTHON.

I used a piece of my precious linen Grea fabric (previously seen acting as a curtain in the dressing room at my house), designed by Maria Vinka for IKEA’s 2007 PS line. This fabric makes me so happy. I don’t mind that it took me almost three years to find the right use for it!

No, I’m not going to post instructions. Okay, yes I will: (1) Measure fabric. Cut. (2) Fold in half, good side in. (3) Stitch on three sides. Invert. (4) Fill with dried rice or beans. (5) Stitch open end. DONE.

As I write this, the dogs are sleeping peacefully, draft python in place, hallway light sliver obscured. 60 miles north of here, the too-small-for-the-apartment draft garter snake is doing a great job blocking the gap under the door to the attic in the house. Everyone wins!

This is my mouse path for today, from 10:00am until 5:30pm. The lines are movement, and the dots are periods of inactivity. (The bigger the dot, the longer the rest.)

Makes a very busy day look beautiful, doesn’t it?

I’ve loved you (and felt your love) since Day One.

Please be well, all of you.

I’m a sucker for a bargain, and the DWR Annex in Secaucus (almost) never fails to disappoint. This Saarinen side table looks totally fine, right?

From this angle, too! I can’t see anything wrong with it. Why would it be marked down EIGHT-FIVE PERCENT??

Ah-ha! I see why now—there’s a chunk missing out of the edge. Oh well. Doesn’t bother me! It’s near a wall, anyway. You have to really look hard to see the damage, and even if it were more visible, who cares?

I’ve gotta say, I highly recommend that anyone who thinks IKEA is somehow inferior to so-called “high-end” goods in terms of overall durability spend an hour at the DWR Annex. Trust me, a $430 laminated side table chips just as easily as an $80 (for two!) version (and looks just as bad afterward). You need to look at the quality of individual products. Don’t worry about the brand name!

(Also, tulips. They make everything more beautiful.)

In case I don’t say it enough, I love these guys. Even though they bark every time they hear the elevator open (and every time they think they hear the elevator open, too). I love them even though they put up a struggle every time they have to go out for a walk. And even though they take up so much bed space that I sometimes wind up sleeping with one leg on the floor.

Bruno and Fritz are the best. How I ever existed without either of them in my life is unfathomable.

Our little apartment has three closets, all quite generously-sized. Since we don’t have lots of clothes or need excessive amounts of storage space, we decided to turn the largest of them into an office. We don’t watch much television these days, but this setup meets our needs in that area as well (no need to miss episodes or Project Runway or American Idol just because we’re in the city!). We have a Slingbox connected to our cable box at the house, so anything we watch up there can also be viewed through our computer in the city. Nice, huh?

Plus, when we’re not using the computer (for work or TV-viewing), we can just shut the doors, return the chair to the kitchen, and the whole thing disappears. It’s nice to be able to shut out technology sometimes.

Check it out—I have a white painted floor in my apartment! Okay, so it’s just the closet floor, but still. All of the closet floors are painted white. They had already been painted previously (the same grotesque shade of flat mayonnaise yellow as the walls, which was badly chipped and extremely dirty), so I’m not breaking any “rental rules” here. (Hah.)

The desk itself is cobbled together out of 3/4″ plywood that was already in the apartment (the building super had attempted to build some sort of closet divider with it). I painted it black to match the wall (that’s the same color as in the kitchen: Benjamin Moore ‘Soot’ (Aura Matte finish). It’s resting on two plywood cleats attached to studs on either end, and gets extra support in the middle from two diagonal braces (pieces harvested from these IKEA trestles). A $10 pull-out keyboard shelf completes the desk. It’s a bit of a Franken-creation, but it works, and the total investment was less than $30.

(And yes, we have wires just like anyone else! They’re all running through this nifty cable organizer which hangs on the back of the desk, and are then attached to the wall with cable clips completely out of sight. I loathe visible power cords and wires, especially in a working environment.)

Oh, and did you notice the Componibili storage unit? That’s the same one we scavenged for $29 back in August 2008. It gives us all the storage we need here. Perfect.

The cute Asteroid bud vases are designed by Koray Ozgen (the creator of our matching Asteroid lamp).

I’m still trying to find just the right place for them, but right now Martha McQuade’s beautiful “Dipped Horizon” and “Marfa Path” prints have taken up temporary residency in the closet office.

My desktop wallpaper is made from a picture of Michael Jackson in photographer Todd Gray’s INCREDIBLE book Before He Was King. (Raindrops added by me, of course.)

I keep opening and editing this post with the intent of writing something—anything—to commemorate the loss of Salinger from all of our lives, since I suspect many of us are feeling the same thing right now.

J.D. Salinger is the writer who made it okay for me be a reader. It’s hard to be a cynical kid. The sense of mistrust that accompanies early tendencies toward cynicism (and loneliness, and arrogance, and…) makes it difficult to take anyone’s word on what books are good to read, but I’m glad that I listened to my dad when he gave me his battered copy of The Catcher in the Rye. I must have been 10 or 11 years old, I guess. I read the whole thing in a weekend, which felt like a monumental accomplishment at that age.

Next up was Franny and Zooey, which I devoured with a similar ferocity, followed by Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction shortly thereafter. I was a bit older (16, perhaps) when I finally dipped into Nine Stories. I was beside myself with teenage glee when I discovered the source of inspiration for not one, but two songs by my then-favorite band, the Cure, within its pages.

When I was 18, I got my first pet ferret. I named him Salinger.

I try to read The Catcher in the Rye at least once a year, and the rest of Salinger’s (small) cannon of published work whenever I feel like I need a reminder of the enormous impact the characters he created have had on my life—and the total development of my personality. (I’ve always thought of my family as being more than a bit Glass-ish, after all.) This letter, written by Salinger in response to yet another request to acquire the film rights to Catcher, perfectly sums up the reasons why I admire him not only as a writer, but as a man of artistic integrity. J.D. Salinger never gave us more than he wanted to, and I respect him immensely for that.

(By the way, did you know that Salinger had a lifelong design clause in his contract that stipulated his books covers could not contain any imagery? Fabulous.)

(EDIT: If you’re into the whole book cover thing, check out this great essay by Michael Bierut, “The Book (Cover) That Changed My Life”.)

When someone dies at the age of 91, it’s a bit of a stretch to be surprised. I think I thought J.D. Salinger would somehow live forever, though.

As you can see, I am upholding the grand NYC rental apartment tradition of painting over wires and cables.

The bed is the now-discontinued green wool GRIMEN from IKEA. Also from IKEA is the enormous-yet-outrageously-well-priced HOVET mirror. The floor lamp is an Asteroid by Koray Ozgen for Innermost.

The long-haired Chihuahua is from Mars.

You know those brass-and-glass sconces that always wind up in apartments? The ones with a cluster of grapes etched into the frosted, fluted shade? Like these. Gross, right? Well, there are four of those suckers in our apartment. FOUR! You can see two of them in this photo.

Not wanting to get too spendy with hardwired light fixtures in a rental (but being completely unable to live with the sconces as-is), I did a little brainstorming and came up with a solution. I removed the shades and put them in storage (we’ll put them back when we move out), then spray-painted the brass glossy white. Happily, they came out looking like porcelain—very much like the ceiling fixture in our bedroom at the house.

Rather than mess around with shades, I ordered four silver-tipped round glass bulbs and called it a day. Not bad for a total investment of less than $20!

And before anyone asks, NO, I don’t feel badly about painting the sconces. They were grimy and had multicolored spatters on them from years of sloppy paint jobs. They look a million times better now. As I’ve said before, the day I encounter a landlord who puts care into their own renovations and maintenance work is the day that I start caring about whether or not I’m “allowed” to make my own real improvements to the space I’m paying to live in.

Yes, we’re still working on the apartment! Everything takes three times as long as you feel like it should, of course, but we’re getting there. The little dining area in the kitchen is now complete, and last night we ate our first dinner (roasted red pepper soup, tiny boiled potatoes with dill, and a salad) at our new table.

Two and a half years ago, I mentioned swapping out the original stacking bases on these vintage upholstered Eames shells for dowel rods, and I just now got around to it. (I bought the bases on eBay.) They look great. I should have done this sooner instead of just relegating the chairs to the basement for so long.

The flip-down table is the NORBO from IKEA in birch. I had originally planned to paint the entire thing black, but the wood is nicer than I had expected it to be. I opted to just paint the bracket to make it blend with the wall so that the table looks like it’s floating.

p.s. For those who like to know, the paint colors are Benjamin Moore ‘Soot’ and ‘Simply White’ (Aura Matte finish). The Stendig calender is by Massimo Vignelli, and the ceramic ‘Fire’ candle holder is by Nathalie Lahdenmäki.

p.p.s. Here’s a before photo of the same part of the kitchen, taken when we first visited the apartment: