Posts from the ‘Uncategorized’ category

So You Want to Remodel your Kitchen or Bath: Pt. 1

First, Let’s Start With How You Establish the Design

Throughout my career I’ve Picture 097helped lots of clients through the always exciting, but never fun remodel process.  The exciting part is thinking about your new room, but the un-fun part is getting through a project while living in your home.  I’ve come up with some ideas that help move the work along while keeping you sane and focused on the end result.

This is my process:
1) Decide on a theme.  Do you want a fresh new look, or will your bath need to blend with the established style of your house?
2) Decide what you want to change, meaning, how do you want the room to function?
3) Gather all the magazine pictures and ideas you have and try to settle on one look.  Then start to build your design with that “look” in mind.
4) Design 101:  First let’s talk about focal points. A focal point can be a painting, or a piece of furniture, or a color scheme already established in a contiguous room.  That item or color becomes the focus which will steer you through the decisions. Read more

My 2 Cents

I’ve been designing forever but I’m the absolute worst at documenting my work, bar none.  In this age of Facebook where there are those that archive their every moment, I let my work go for months and years with nary a flash.  But now that’s all changed!  I’m on the blog train, and I’m so excited to share my thoughts, passions, and experience I’ve gained over the past many years.

I recently opened the front three rooms of my 1924 Italianate home as a showroom.  Since one space is my dining room, I thought I’d set a different table every month as a fun way to introduce myself.  I’ve always loved setting tables–for me, it’s the very best part of entertaining–and I’ve collected an embarrassing  amount of dishware along the way.  Now I not only have a place to use my stash, but I get to show off a very favorite form of design. So you’ll see table settings on this blog, but also work in progress and nuggets of wisdom gained over a lifetime of practice.  I’m one of the lucky ones who gets to work every day in a field that I love and it’s time to share the secrets.

BTW, did you realize that the sign for cents has been removed from the keyboard?  Every time I need it, I’m again surprised that it’s gone (what—every 5 years or so?).  It’s probably been missing for years—wait, let me look that up.  Oh, it went away in the 1970’s with the advent of personal computers.   Obviously a good call!