(Video link here.) Recently, while discussing a particuarly stylish Ikea creation, our friend Maria remarked: “I figure Ikea’s stuff is only good for about 5 years.” Suddenly, we flashed on all the discarded particle board Ikea storage units we’d seen on New York City streets. In the long run, Ikea can simply be a waste…
Read Morea solution to the busy visuals of vertical book towers?
When we first saw the Sapien vertical book shelf, we were smitten. What a great idea: an impermanent shelf that stacks books vertically, making use of odd spaces. We bought one, well, er, a less expensive knockoff. Once we actually stacked it with books, we realized how problematic it actually was; it was too heavy to…
Read Moreladders as pot racks in wood or copper (diy)
Recently, Design Sponge featured the three-level Copenhagen apartment of Camilla Ebdrup, half of the Danish duo behind LuckyBoySunday, and her husband, photographer Andreas Stenmann. Their style is a mix of modern and vintage, with many items foraged from the nearby canals, where interesting items are washed in from the sea. We especially loved the wooden ladder…
Read Morecustomizable upright holders for storing…just about everything
A couple of weeks after we posted the versatile tinkertoy plate holder we’d bought at Crate and Barrel and hacked…er…tailored it to suit our big platters, we discovered that Crate and Barrel had done some hacking as well. They added an edge and painted them rustic white, and are using them throughout the store to…
Read Morewooden plate holder hack (for big platters, lids, racks etc)
Over the years we’ve been given a number of beautiful oversized platters which we love to use for celebrations of all sorts. We’ve discovered they are too oddly-shaped to fit stacked on a shelf in our renovated kitchen cabinets, but would if we could find a way to stand them up. Using wire plate display…
Read Moremakeshift solutions via a spool of red twine
In the days after our move to Harlem, friends came to help with the massive amount of unpacking, disposing of paper and boxes, and figuring out how to make the unfinished space as livable and pleasant as possible. As is typical with well-layed plans, ours did not go altogether smoothly.
Read Moreintroducing ‘the improvised life’s new ‘laboratory’
A few months ago, I bought a space in Harlem, soon to be home of ‘the improvised life’s new LABORATORY, in which to experiment with all sorts of ideas for home and daily living. I had scoured New York City real estate listings for YEARS, traipsing from space to space in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and…
Read Morea perfect set of wheels for making furniture mobile + a great sapien bookcase hack
When Design Within Reach launched the Sapien bookcase, it seemed like a brilliant idea: a bookshelf that allows books to be stacked vertically over five feet high, to form a neat stack from which you could easily remove any book. CB2 promptly knocked off the rectangular-pillar-with-removable-shelves-design. We bought one, then rued the day. The problem…
Read Morecool clamped-together shelving + a noguchi-esque clamp
It seems that once we start focusing on a subject, we begin to find all sorts of solutions and iterations. Lately, it appears to be shelving… Recently on Remodelista, we spotted these clamped together shelves used at Dyke & Dean, a housewares store in Hastings, East Sussex, England. It reminded us of the clipped together cardboard…
Read Morepegboard 101: for tools, jewelry and beyond
We’ve been mulling the idea of using a pegboard on the inside of a tool closet door, the cleaning closet door (to hang mops, brooms, vacuum cleaner hose) and perhaps even in a walk-in clothes closet where it would be useful for hanging jewelry for jewelry, belts etc. We can’t stop thinking about Julia Child’s…
Read Moregiving subtle color life to shelves
Lately, we’ve stumbled on some cool ways to bring color to shelves. We saw BM’s Junior line of furniture and thought: why don’t we just paint the backs of our shelves in color blocks to wake them up a bit? And then we saw the reverse in action: just the edges painted a color…
Read Morebirch logs for book cases and other household accents
Recently, we’ve seen bundles of birch logs being sold at delis around New York City: cheap enough for an evening’s cozy fire. Since we don’t have a fireplace, we’ve admired them as a lovely, elemental raw material – right on our doorstep – and mulled what we could do with them; we’ve been meaning to…
Read Mored-i-y color-block decorated storage cabinets
There’s a lot we love about this whimsically d-i-y decorated storage cabinet: The torquoise and yellow legs…
Read Moremagazine storage d-i-y: belt them!
We really like this novel way to store magazines by strapping stacks of them with belts; it turns them into an objet, a surprising something that is more stylish than a stack of magazines, yet serves a function. Cool-looking belts can be had cheap at second-hand and thrift stores. We wondered if the stack could go…
Read Morepaint your shelf edges….pink!
Painting the edge of a shelf an unexpected color is such a simple way to put some surprise into a closet…it reminds us of the orange painted door edges and hinges we featured a while back. (We’re thinking that edging the shelf with a beautiful tape would do too.) It’s easy to do, and give a big…
Read Moresighting: shelves made of stacked books (books as bricks)
BoingBoing recently posted a compelling video (below or link here) of a toupeed fellow named Augustus Gladstone giving a tour of the room he lives in in an abandoned hotel, in some unnamed city. Gladstone’s apartment is an eccentric, strangely homey place decorated with what appears to be mostly found stuff and collections of bric-a-brac. There’s some…
Read MoreDIY Leather Cabinet Pulls (via Holton Rower)
For years, we’ve been amazed at the clever and imaginative solutions our friend Holton Rower has come up for his various spaces – both at home and work. Take the chic leather cabinet pulls we’ve been seeing around at high-end housewares stores, for $20 + a piece. Holton starting making leather pulls twenty years ago…
Read Morestealing and tailoring ideas
We were interested to see Ikea’s blog Livet Hemma‘s recent take on an idea we posted months ago: clipping boxes together with big binder clips to make somewhat freeform and sculptural shelving. We looked at their iteration of the idea, wondering if they’d seen our post, or if they’d just thought it up themselves. We…
Read Morealt plastic food bag solutions: re-usable cloth, mesh, or freeform…?
For some time now, we’ve struggled with the plastic bag problem. Not shopping bags – we’ve got that figured – we just carry a cute fold-up bag in our everyday bag. We’re talking plastic food bags. What is a really feasible bag for collecting messy things like bunches of grapes, piles of cherries or loose…
Read Moredigital memory archive (photograph stuff then give it away)
Although we’ve always thought of ourselves as rather minimalist, we’ve been realizing that we have attachments to things that we don’t really want or need anymore, and have a hard time letting them go. What we are really attached to are the memories and associations the object spurs, afraid we’d lose the memory if we…
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