It's really hard to type with a cat sitting on both of your wrists, but I'm gonna give it a go.  Nori is a feeling a little lap-deprived since I've been gone for the last 2 days.  It's time for some cat/mom bonding time, even if it involves impairing my wrists for the time being.

Before I left, I read this post on Centsational Girl and was totally inspired.  First of all, I love Emily Henderson's work, and I've always admired her bookshelf styling skills.  She manages to combine just the right amount of quirky statuettes and old books to make me swoon.  Also, I have a lot of time on my hands and love a new project.  Enter: Project Bookcase Re-Style.

We have 3 major bookcases on our main level, and we have a lot of books.  Not like an obscene about of books, but a LOT of books.  Anyway, here's our built-in hallway bookcase before I touched it.


Haha, this is almost embarrassing! This is probably not the best place for a catch-all, but it has turned into our place of stuff-stashing.  Bottom shelf:  lamp shade.  Third shelf:  random white shelf that needs to be hung in the bathroom.  Fourth shelf:  supplies for next crafty project.  Fifth shelf:  angel figurines from my recently deceased grandma that I haven't had the heart to put away yet.  Shelves 6 and 7 don't look that bad, fortunately.

And now for our living room shelves:


Just lots of books.  And a black cat that likes to play jungle hunter by camouflaging herself against my black furry blanket.  (It actually works pretty well for her, she's scared me a number of times that way.)

I started by taking all of the books and arranging them by color on the hall bookshelf:


I've seen a lot of people arranging their books by color instead of by content/title/author.  Like this one on curbly, or these on colourlovers.  I really like the way it turned out, even though I think it works better if you have a cubby bookshelf like the expedit from ikea or something.  (T and I have been dreaming about getting an expedit for ages now...)

Then I went to the thrift store and found some treasures....(the book is for T, he loves old medical books.)


After literally hours of arranging, re-arranging, and re-arranging again, then coming back 2 hours later to re-arrange again, here's what I came up with:


People, I have a lot of white dishes.  Yes, I know that.  It's just that they're so charming and look so good against a black bookcase!  I love the way it turned out.  Midway through the process, I realized that I had a ton of old books stashed at my parents' house in my old room like the silver oil burner, the 3 blue bottles, and some of the books in the left bookcase.  We had to leave T's old textbooks on the bottom 2 shelves because a) they act as an anchor because they're so stinkin' heavy, and b) we have nowhere else to stash them.  So maybe I'm not Emily Henderson, but I think it turned out all right.

Have any ideas on what I should do differently?  I'd love to hear 'em!

About a month ago I found a treasure in a thrift store:


I loved the cute retro starbursts and had to have it.  Then, I decided it needed a friend:


This is actually from the same line of cake carriers, from what I can tell.  The little blotchy things are actually the same little starbursts from the first carrier!  I about flipped out when T and I found this one at an antique store.  Then, I decided to make it a party!

Here's the long-awaited next project!


Pretty retro, huh?  Ted and I picked up a pair of these from two different thrift stores when we still lived in Pierre.   We've been holding onto them for over a year now, and our guests and guest room have had to bear their ugly existence for far too long.  I guess I just didn't quite know what I wanted to do to them to make them beautiful...until Tuesday.


Yup, check out that fat drum shade.  This thing is huge.  Anyway, I knew I wanted something more modern and I knew I wanted a white base.  I was thinking something metallic would bring it into the 21st century.  I scoured Mill End for some pretty raw silk and instead ended up with this purplish grey taffeta.  The plans were to use mod podge on the shade since that worked so well on our suitcase project.    Word to the wise:  mod podge will stain your taffeta.  Good thing I tested it first, eh?  Now you know.  Hot glue to the rescue!


Ta-da!  By the way, we have no idea what the wall color is, either.  It changes with the light of day.  Sometimes it looks mushroomy, sometimes green, and now, apparently it looks beige.  Well, whatever.  I love the way this turned out!  And what's even more shocking is how easy it is to recover a lampshade.


Sorry about the grainy picture, apparently I should have T take my blog pictures again.  Photography is so not my thing.  Did I mention that I got the fabric for $2.50/yd?  Awwwww yeah.


We have a guest that is staying in this room for the next month or so and I'm so excited that this year she doesn't have to endure the ugliness that was these lamps.  Hooray!

I had a funny realization this afternoon:  the subtitle on my blog is "A modern girl's guide to living fabulously." Yet, the last few posts have had absolutely nothing modern in them.  I guess I should update the subtitle to include my love for all things mod vintage!

Anyway, I wanted to share with you a new little collection I've started.

I am so excited to share with you our latest project.  I saw this awesome chevron bar tutorial on curbly.com  over Christmas break and was dying to try and duplicate it.  I


The makeover was inspired by the show "Mad Men" and T and I thought the bold chevron pattern was perfect for our style.  I even had the perfect spot planned out in our basement.

On Super Bowl Sunday T and I decided to make a quick stop at Goodwill before we went to my parents' party.  I thought it might take us awhile to find a cabinet that would work, but I was wrong!  We walked in the door, saw this beauty and were out again in less than 5 minutes.


It was a no brainer!  This is actually the finished product.  The early stages weren't quite as lovely.  T and I think that somebody converted it from an old TV to the cabinet that it currently is.  You can kind of see the two light circles on the left panel where it looks like there would have been speakers.  There was even a little tag on the inside telling you how to change the vacuum tube!

We made quite a few adjustments ourselves!  First, we pained the top black.  It was an originally an icky brown mock-wood color and it just didn't fit.  We then decided to paint the bottom shelf black to match.  There's actually caning on that shelf but it was a nasty gray color that didn't match the side panels.  Trust me, it's much better in black!  We added the black felt on the inside to give it a bit of class, replaced the knobs on the glass (there were none, originally) and added the little golden medallions.


There are two little random holes in the caning and there were two wooden plugs that went inside them.  I'm guessing that was originally something for the speakers for the tv, but really we have no idea.  In any case, they needed to be covered.  I wanted something vintage, but Hobby Lobby does not carry many vintage-looking medallions.  I found these in the bead aisle and thought they at least matched the gold on the glass doors.  So, after a good scrubbing, some paint, and a little elbow grease, our treasure is complete!

We're still in accessorizing mode, but so far we have picked up a few treasures.  We got these retro coin glasses for $3 total.  They're kind of hard to see, but they have coins from different countries all over them.


We also got this fun little guy:


I had my eye on that baby for awhile before I finally talked T into buying it at Savers earlier this week.  I even left the price tag on it.  It came with the original warranty and directions!  I love it!  The only sad thing is that it's missing the lid.  Oh well.



So, although our bar ended up looking nothing like our inspiration, we love it.  Any thoughts on accessories we should add?

T and I are currently in Sioux Falls for the weekend.  Hooray for Easter!  We enjoyed the most moving of Good Friday services with my family last night.  I was in tears by the end.  It was the last song that pushed me over.  A good family friend sang a duet with our music director.  She used to sing duets just like this with her husband who just recently passed away.  It was a first time she sang a duet with anyone else besides him and all I could think about was how strong she was to keep praising the Lord in these difficult circumstances.  By the end it was all I could do to stay in my seat and not go comfort her, because by the end, she was streaming tears too.  Praise the Lord we'll see her husband in heaven someday!

I'm sick of people not being able to leave comments on here.  Stupid template.  Grrrr.

Will you do me a favor?  If you try to leave a comment and are unable to, will you send me an e-mail?  Just a note to say, "hey, this new template doesn't work either" would suffice!  emsensei{at}gmail{dot}com.  Julia from Hooked On Houses stopped by and couldn't leave a comment.  (I about threw up when I saw she e-mailed me instead!)  I'm such a dork...to be e-mailed by Julia!  My hero!

Okay, it's voting time.  I went thrifting today and brought home some treasures and found two awesome pieces that need rescuing:

an awesome dresser:

T and I picked up this antique Moonstone vase at an antique store a few weeks ago, and when I found this sort of matching candy dish at a thrift store, I just had to have it.  Paired with the sunflowers....ahh, it just makes me smile.
Then came the funky little yellow dish on far right bookshelf.  (Yeah, I know you can only see half of it...)  Then came the sunflowers, which I usually hate, but they just added to the whole yellow, black and white motif.  I may have a new favorite color scheme, folks!

Our chair is done!  We finally finished it tonight, after it had been sitting in our garage "drying" for a week.  (I use the term "drying" loosely because really it was just taking up space in our garage, forcing me to park outside and scrape my windshield all week.  I'm sure it probably only took like 4 hours to actually dry.)

Here's the before pic:

Dear friends, meet our new kitty, Nori.  She's officially survived the first 24 hours in the Danger house, and she's adjusting fairly well.  About as well as can be expected, that is.  She's the most affectionate cat, always nudging and loving on every human in sight.

Well, Ted and I did something today that we haven't done together yet.  We went thrifting.  (I know somebody will be shocked to read this!)  Normally a thrift store is the last place you'd look for me on a Saturday afternoon, but I just got the itch for some new sconces for our bedroom today.  We found some!  They're wrought iron little curly-ques and they're perfect!  (We still had to check out the other thrift store too, just in case I found something I liked better, naturally.)

Currently T and I are sitting on our couch tapitty-tapping away, him on his med school apps and I on blog. Yup.  He has 18 essays to write for one school.  Holy cow, that's a lot of essays.

T cooked pepper steak for dinner tonight!  Oh Lord, thank you for giving me a man who cooks!!!!  It was marinated perfectly in tangy teriyaki sauce, and delivered on a bed of sticky rice.  YUM.

Now it's off for an evening with Bond.  James Bond.