Secondhand Nation

Do My Funky Chicken!

I scored this rad chicken planter from my neighbor Amber's trash cache.

It's plastic and has a drainage hole on the bottom.   What in the hell should I do with it?

Daughter of Invention: Vintage Make-up Cases

Kids are the best at improvising.  Here, a couple of phonebooks and an old make-up case make perfect booster seats.  Take that, Babies 'R Us!

I LOVE old make-up cases, or train cases, as some like to call them.  Every time my Grandma visited us, I remember my grandfather hauling in their light blue hardside Samsonite luggage set on wheels, including the make-up case.  I would always offer to carry up the make-up case, because then sometimes my grandma would let us play beauty shop with her.

These days, all my make-up fits into a tiny zippered pouch the size of a paperback book. I can't really feature myself getting so vain that I'd require that make space for all my beauty potions.  Still, when I see make-up cases in thrift shops, I always pause to check them out.  Usually they have really luxe features like satiny ruffled linings with mirrors, removable, compartment trays, and locks with little keys. So fancy!

These days, I like to shove magazines in 'em (especially nice for the your toity):

Or I use them to organize those aggravating little bits of toys my daughter is always perseverating over, like those ridiculously eensty Polly Pockets and Littlest Tiniest Weeniest Pet Shop - a pox on your wee little houses:

Decorating "Don't" Suddenly a "Do"! More at 11...

A while back, I discussed some decorating do's and don'ts. 

In a shocking reversal, I have now renounced one of my don'ts. 

Yes! It''s all true! I am a flip-flopping, flakey mind-changer when it comes to...window coverings.   

(Long Rambling Aside:  Please don't say "window treatments." The windows aren't looking at inkblot cards or doing affirmations in the mirror.  Unless, of course, they've been subjected to Christopher Lowell for too long.)

For the last two weeks, it's been unbearably hot and my house does not have central air.  Which is okay.  We have a window unit in our bedroom for the unbearable nights but otherwise too much air conditioning gives me an ice cream headache. 

So while I save energy and money without the a/c, to keep comfortable indoors, you really need curtains and currently my windows are all bare naked.  This is because I don't know how to sew and because I hate pre-made curtains which always tend to look like these gems from the 1971 Sears catalog.

(Long Rambling Aside:  Nobody makes curtains in the colors I want!  I want a nice, bright green fabric for my living room curtains.  Not sage green!  Not forest green!  Not lime-spring green!  Bright green!  Goddammit!)

Anyway, my kitchen window had some cafe curtains on clips covering the lower panes.  This was nothing pretty, just an extra-wide dishcloth I'd attached to the rod, which let light (and heat) pour through the upper panes.

So it gets hotter than hell and I had to batten down the hatches and strategically run fans so I could stay comfortable working inside.  After miserably washing dishes in my boiling-hot kitchen, I decided to ditch the cafe curtain.  I hauled out one of my many vintage tableclothes and, as the French say, WALL-AH:

My kitchen was suddenly comfortable!  The blue matches some other stuff not in the picture!  I didn't spend any money or measure anything!  Best of all, everything looks okay from the outside, which is the real test for window coverings.  If the outside world can tell you've just hung up that Led Zepellin Houses of the Holy tapestry you won last year at the Corn Crib's Summer Fun Daze festival, well, then, decorating don'ts are the least of your problems. 

How To Decorate Your Home: Do's and Don'ts

DO

• Display collections.  Better yet, collect things you can USE.  Collecting thimbles from all 50 states might be fun, but consider collections that you can actually put in service.  Lamps, dishes, tablecloths, dishtowels are all easy and cheap things to collect.
• Hang up your kid's art work.  Go beyond the fridge, where things get ruined and stained.  Put their work up on closet doors, in your office area, in their bedrooms.
• Frame photos of family and friends and put them all over.  Avoid the wall of fame along the hallway or stairs if possible - the light isn't usually good there anyway.  Mix it up - people get photo fatigue no matter how cute your kids are. 
• Scissor out art prints from books you like and frame them.  So you can't afford the print - so what?  We can't all run with the Sotheby's crowd, but you should still enjoy the art work you like to see.
• Decorate with your books. Put them out on shelves and lace the shelves with tchotkes from travel and life.  This encourages literacy and promotes conversation.  Separate the books you've read from those you haven't read;  this helps give you an idea of your own literacy.
• Hide the trashcan under the sink.  Nobody wants to see that stinky, stained thing.
• Accept the gift of clutter.  If we all get real about the fact that life makes things untidy, perhaps we'll relieve some of the societal pressure to keep things spotless, which is a holy waste of time and effort, anyway.
• Rethink your need for window treatments.  We all want privacy, but consider if anyone really can see you.  Consider using frosted spray paint in your bathroom instead of dealing with measuring and hanging curtains.  Window treatments date your house rilly rilly fast - why not spend your time doing something else besides updating dumb home decor?
• Pursue decorating that makes you feel good and supports your own living habits.  Keep books by the rooms you like to read in, store shoes where you like to slip them on and off, put the tv in the kitchen if you like to watch it while cooking.
• Paint!  Got an ugly end table?  Spray paint it!  If you don't like it, you've not lost much time or money.  Paint kitchen shelves, make polka dots on the walls in children's rooms, paint one wall a different color from its opposite.  Before you bother to spend any money on decor or furniture, ask yourself "Would a little color change how I feel about this room?"
• Embrace color.   Only dentists office decorate in beige.  Each room should have a palette of at least 3 colors bouncing off each other. Then take one color and bounce it down to the next room, with 2 different colors.  This creates a pleasing harmony throughout your home.

DON'T

• Buy into pre-packaged "themes" like lighthouses or Hawaiian Tiki bar.  Unless you happen to be a harbor master or living in the South Pacific, nobody's house is a lighthouse or a tiki bar.  Accept the fact of where you live and honor each room for its purpose.  If you don't like the room's purpose, well, you are the owner of the house...
• Use anything for a curtain that isn't actually a curtain (with one exception:  you may use dishtowels for cafe curtains ala Martha Stewart)
• Let the cords from TVs and stereos show.  Find a way to cover them with furniture or secure them along the baseboards with a staple gun. 
• Be stuffy.  Insisting on having rooms that you won't use very often, like dining rooms or look-but-don't-touch sitting parlors, is a waste of space.  This ain't the 18th century. Go here for more ideas how to use space. 
• Buy overstuffed furniture.  Overstuffed furniture does not want to be sat on.  It just wants to sit there, getting larger and larger until you worry it might rise up and eat your entire family.
• Act like a phony baloney.  Buying "repro" art prints at Target or Ikea that suggest your home is a French bistro or a jazz club is ridiculous. Unless you live with the Marsallis brothers or the corpse of Jean-Paul Sartre, your home is neither.
• Try to do it all at once.  Think of your home as an evolving art project, with each room changing and adapting along with your life.  As you accumulate experiences, travel treasures, books, art, and wisdom, let your home reflect these changes. 

Put a little style in your stool...

People do unspeakable things in their bathrooms, not the least of which is often decorating, and not of the garish sort that you might think, as you see in this faboo Me Generation biff. 

Sure, it's dated, but it's sassy and fun.  What really barfs me out is stuff like this dreck.  Please, would someone spread the word that geese wearing hats, rusty barn stars and phony wood signs selling apples are over?  What the hell?  It's like hiring John Ashcroft to be your interior decorator.

Anyway, in comparison with those kinds of God 'n Country, Patriot Act-themed possibilities, a little 1970's jazz is a breath of fresh air.  The disco wall paper, the rust orange counter top - all that's missing is a bottle of Quaaludes and a coke-streaked hand mirror.  When you consider what's normally going down in the can, maybe we could all use a little dazzle technology for distraction's sake, right?

I recently came up with a solution to two bathroom problems that plague me:  lack of reading material and a place to safeguard such material.  Having lived with males who tend to, shall we say, "splash" with wild abandon - were they even holding on to their ween?  were they just smiling and spraying the area like it was the car wash? - I never really liked to read any magazines around the vicinity of the toilet, given their crunchy pages and proximity the plunger.

So, trolling about Savers,I found this:

Looks pretty innocuous, right?  It matches the old-grandma gold-speckled counter in my bathroom and fits nicely on the back of the toity tank.  La, la, la!

But check out my genius move:

Because the slot only accomodates a few magazines, there's no surfeit of mags, no tossing them about willy-nilly.  So I have to change up the material quite often, which is good, because once I read the same issue of Sports Illustrated for about a month in a row. (Which proved to be a recipe for constipation and completely unadvisable.)  Best yet, it would take some spectacular ween negligence to reach up that far, and the plunger would have to defy gravity to encroach upon my reading material, which now can be high-quality instead of junky catalogs that I didn't mind sacrificing to the Piss God. 

Thrifting rules!