Help! My apartment’s got a stupid hole in it. After the Domino Debacle, I’m still pretending our little dining table, Ikea Ingo, is an extra desk – tucked not so elegantly against the couch. This leaves a huge wall and a huge void – some 15% of our total apartment is just… a weird L-shaped [...]
64 things from A to V: Quick – how many different Ikea products are in your home? I asked Paolo – he guessed 50. Not bad, not bad. I left to find out, and was gone for some time. When I thought I’d finished in the kitchen, I remembered to look in the cupboards. Added more. [...]
We dragged home an Ikea Hemnes 6-drawer chest awhile ago, specifically choosing the 100% wood option lest we decide to paint it. (Why would I have Ikea furniture in this apartment if I didn’t paint it? That would mean I’d use free time to read or engage in intellectually stimulating hobbies. And who would want to [...]
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Isn’t it priceless when old people fight in public? We’ll get to that. First – evolution. The apartment laundry room didn’t just magically improve itself – it took exactly 50 bad ideas before someone else gave us the answer. The closet with which we started. (Which led to the pipe dream. As illogical as always). [...]
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Lots of countertop options out there in the universe, but for me it was never a choice. I’ve always loved the look of butcher block and, besides a fleeting love affair with Paperstone, we never considered anything else. Still, at the time, I really wondered if we were making a mistake – isn’t butcher block [...]
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Ask me where my keys are. Go on. I know the answer. I know the answer every single second of every single day. THEY’RE IN THE DRAWER!!!! A year’s derailment through chaos and disorder - not always the fault of the apartment renovation. Apartments don’t have obvious foyers or dumping grounds and, previously, all these keep-on-your-person-things would [...]
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We know, we know, we know. We’re extremely lucky to have what almost constitutes a laundry room. It’s apartment gold. (Previously: hopes & dreams for our apartment laundry room, a stupid flooring choice and a Canadian saves the day). The laundry room had come with this thing: shoddy plywood and an inconvenient closet rail. (Its placement [...]
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I thought I was so clever when I built our waterproofed Ikea Groland – late one night. My life was a movie and the Ikea assembly stuff was the “fun young thing” montage section, set to something peppy. Basically this, but with Ikea instead of pom-poms. I only wanted to build Groland’s bottom section – [...]
Groland sat down in the kitchen. Once there, he stayed in his box for weeks. (And – girls – Groland is heavy. If Groland sits down somewhere and there’s no stronger set of muscles around…. he’s staying there). Before lifelong adoption he needed to earn a boy scout badge in waterproofness and morph from birch to black [...]
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As we started the bathroom campaign, we made duty stops at Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware… And realized quite quickly that our bathroom vanity would be found elsewhere in the universe. 1986 is a year – not a price. So in a knee-jerk reaction to that, we bought something very different indeed. And because we’re [...]
