Arts-and-Crafts, and Cams and Cambolts

The projects your blog hostess has been working on lately have actually been more in lending a hand to my buddy Scoobie than anything pressing of my own. Her place is under full-on decorating attack. It started with updating the kitchen I showed you a week or so ago, and now it's been adding some arts-and-crafts style furniture.

This is where that extra hand has come in: unwieldy pieces of lovely wooden assemble-it-yourself furniture which assumes you not only have that hand to spare, but an extra couple of feet, a six-foot stature and possibly a mechanically inclined hunk at your disposal.
At the moment, there's just me.

(Disappointing, all around, I know. :) )

But so far, we're managing. Once you put together one flat-pack assemble-it-yourself piece, you begin to figure out how those tech writers think when they come up with the instructions...

You start to get inside their heads....

You begin to take for granted all the things that are not implicitly stated as steps toward finished furniture. Like just because they SAY to do a certain thing, doesn't mean they really, really, really mean to do it right then. Or just because they don't say to do it, doesn't mean it doesn't need to be done.

Their heads are a scary place to live sometimes. I know, I used to be a tech writer myself.
Anyway, you can see Scoobie's completed sideboard here. She's still arranging the decorative goodies on it, but this is an early draft sample of what it might look like.
Note, those peach curtains are on their way OUT. While nice, and while matching the wallpaper circa 1990, they were left for her from the previous owners. Scoobie plans to remove the wallpaper and paint the walls a nice lights arts-and-crafts green, to tie in her red-and-green William Morris rug.

Here is a display cabinet she assembled all by herself, no hand or hunk-to-spare involved.
And this is the barrister bookcase we assembled last weekend. It took a few hours, and then we both took some Advil. But it looks pretty sharp!
I'll be excited to see how her office will take shape. And when it does, with Scoobie's kind permission, I'll share it with you all, too.

So everybody sing: "Cam bolt's connected to the... locked cam! The locked cam's inserted into... Side B! Side B's connected to the... Top A! Top A's connected to the... Wood peg...."

Treasure Box Wednesday: Furry Funny?

My schedule is a bit wonky this week and I'm currently not posting this from home-- but hey, it's Treasure Box Wednesday and I don't want to leave you all with nothing in the virtual treasure chest.

So I was thinking, the pet lovers among you (and after all, how many homey homes don't contain a pet!) might get a smile from my latest humor post over on Of Cabbages and Kings-- "Object Identification from a Cat's Perspective." (Click here to check that out.)

The post draws on my extensive (okay, three months) observation of feline MacGyvering abilities. (Yes, MacGyver is a verb.)

And if you must move on to other locales in the blogosphere?... Then have yourself a furry nice rest of your week.

Seeing is Believing at the Madonna Inn



To go along with last week's little video tour of the Winchester Mansion, I thought you all also might get a kick out of seeing some of the rooms in the Madonna Inn, out in San Luis Obispo, California.

With 110 theme rooms all decorated in... um.... unique style-- from gaudy gilt to caveman kitsch, it's an eye-popping attraction! This is romantic decorating gone X-treme.

You can peruse the individual rooms by clicking the room names on their website here: http://www.madonnainn.com/features.php

(You might want sunglasses.)

Don't forget to check out the Caveman Room. Y'know, for all your indoor waterfall and leopard skin bedspread needs. It's where Fred and Wilma second honeymooned, don'tchaknow.

Anyway, that's what I have for you today. Sorry I'm running behind on posts this week, dear people. Sunday I was helping one of my friends assemble some large pieces of furniture and didn't get back home until it was too late and I was too unmotivated to post. 

I hope to have pics of her recent updates for you on Wednesday. Yabba dabba dooooooo!