Tree to table

There's nothing quite like chopping down a tree and turning it into a table. But to get to this,

You have to do a lot of this:

It helps if you convince a talented little brother to swap an old table for design work on the new:

And then it's not even sad when you have to say good-bye to the table you bought just before you got married:

We love the new table. It fits perfectly with the rest of the house and it feels like it's been here since day one. Quinn did a wonderful job for us; he considered all the other finishes, angles, and design elements in our home and designed the new table to fit with those. The colors of the wood -- mostly plum with some lighter shades of rich brown -- blend so beautifully with the finished steel. The table seats 10 comfortably and 12 in a pinch. It arrived the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, just in time to host dinner for some family members.

Tai built the wood sections (as you can see from the slideshow), and we had the metal base fabricated by a few of Quinn's contacts from school. All told, we estimate that we spent roughly 8 to 10 percent of what it would have cost us to purchase a similar piece at retail. We now have an heirloom piece of furniture with a great story and a ton of sweat equity.

We're still waiting for Quinn to pick a name for it. Suggestions welcome.

Blinded

Here's the post where we test your patience for home improvement minutiae. We finally, finally got window coverings. We've lived in the house for almost 18 months, sharing many of those moments with our neighbors, people driving by, and anyone standing on the sidewalk (or within 50 feet of the house, really). No longer!

We had honeycomb cellular shades in the original slc202 condo and loved them for saving us from the single-pane glass in that place, but our windows are good enough in the house that we don't really need the additional insulation that honeycomb shades offer. Plus they're a little more expensive, so we just went with a basic pleated shade.

We looked at a couple of online and local sources, and found the best combination of price and product online at Smith and Noble with their privacy weave pleated shade. Tai double checked the measurements, dug up a killer coupon online for our order, and about two weeks later we were installing.

Most of the shades nest inside the window frame with an inside mount. (Thrilling "installation" photos to follow...)

Our downstairs shades are bottom up only, since our house is slightly lower than street level (we didn't think we would ever really need a top-down option down there). Upstairs bedroom shades are top-down/bottom-up, and we love them:

Our fish bowl days are over.

Underfoot

A slow return to disposable income has meant that we can spend a little on small house projects here and there, bringing us long overdue upgrades...like entryway rugs. Flor had a sale recently and we took the opportunity to pick out a couple of arrangements for the main entryway and our back mud room.
Tai put together the front entryway pattern from Flor's Fedora line, inspired by/cribbed from this image:

We were very excited to see this arrive:

You can pay a few extra bucks for Flor to pre-cut your tiles in half, making the pattern assembly very, very easy:

We used a combination of charcoal, chartreuse, oatmeal, and cayenne to create an offset pattern.

We used Working Class in the mud room because we wanted something pretty durable. This is the entrance that we usually use and kick off our dirty shoes and boots into this area every night when we get home. Working Class isn't technically supposed to work over radiant floors -- we think the rubber backing will stick and rub off eventually -- but it was still the best option for that space. Besides, we figure that we'll pretty much always have some sort of floor covering in this area, so if the backing rubs off, we can just cover it with something else.

We used cool gray and dark gray for the simple pattern.

These are small details but they help the house feel friendlier and more lived-in.

Simple seats

We've had a counter but no seating, until recently. My parents gifted us this set of bar stools at Christmas, and I recently surprised Tai by completing the set:

These are, admittedly, a pretty egregious knock-off. While we sort of wish that ours were the real designer thing, if we were waiting to save up for the real thing we'd be standing around for years. These work just fine, and I've seen them (or near-twins) showing up at Tulie Bakery and my work.