The Interior DIYer

Uncategorized

True story

A funny thing happened a few weeks ago. We were visiting my parents one weekend and when I first arrived I spied something unsual in my mom’s art room. I went in to inspect. There, hanging in the corner of the room was a branch suspended by two pieces of twine*. 

“Oh I really like what you have going on here, mom“, I called out to her. 

“Oh. OH! I HAVE TO SHOW YOU THIS!” my mom said, running for a magazine. “I was flicking through the last Image Interiors & Living when on page 69 I saw a room that had a branch hanging from the ceiling. I really liked it and thought it would look great to hang my paintings from. I kept flicking through the magazine and there on page 135 was a tutorial for how to hang a branch of your own. Oh! I thought, how lucky am I! It was only after I hung up my own branch that I noticed that the tutorial was written by an ‘Alex’ … Then I realised IT WAS YOUR TUTORIAL IN THE MAGAZINE“.

My mom is hilarious and was so excited, we were literally holding our faces because our minds were so blown. My mom DIYed a project she found in a magazine and later realised it was written by me. True story. 

You can now find my ‘Branch Out’ tutorial from the July / August issue available online on Image.ie!

*As it’s in their conservatory, it’s not suspended from the ceiling like in my tutorial because, well, there is no ceiling so my mom improvised. 

Uncategorized

Darker bar cart and an autumny update

Autumn is beginning to creep up here in Dublin [not complaining]. The weather was awful this weekend so we were stuck indoors and I had the perfect opportunity to faff about our apartment and nest* to my hearts content. One area I’ve been stink-eyeing for a long time is our bar cart. I’m forever pinning beautiful images of effortlessly styled bar carts, and ours always just kind of looked like a toddler emptied its pockets onto it. 

I moved stuff around, added things that had been hidden in my styling stash and attempted to create a pretty vignette. It’s not completely there [yet], but I’m a lot happier with it. 

Another reason I was prompted to get my cart in order was I got a cheeky and unexpected parcel last week from a wild mane-d vixen, that made me squee. Simply entitled “to my gothic princess“; two Crystal Head Vodka skull glasses. Talk about SWOONWORTHY [they’re actually quite difficult to photograph, but trust me, they’re simply amazing. See one with black absinthe … for photo purposes. They’re amazing, thank you Kimbo xx We’ve already broken them in :P]. 

Whilst I was autumnizing our living room I took out my roller and quickly added a patch of berry paint, which I’ve been kinda dying to add more of to our apartment so I tested to see how it would look behind the TV. I love the idea of dark walls accented with white and bright accessories to balance things out. I think it might work well, but I’m concerned about how dark it will look come winter. I adore it, but I’m still on the fence especially re: possible seasonal affective disorder. At the very least, perhaps I’ll do something about that unsightly cable? As it is, it really brings a certain je ne sais quoi to the look I’m going for. Don’t you agree? 

When in doubt, #CropItLikeItsHot.

*No, I’m not pregnant. I’ve heard of this ‘nesting’ that occurs during pregnancy, and quite frankly, I’ve been nesting since the age of 17.
Uncategorized

I’m just a worrier. That’s why my friends call me Whiskers*

Today’s a good day. Apologies in advance as today’s blog post is a bit of a therapy session …

In the beginning, before we signed the lease for our apartment, we told our letting agent that we had two cats. She said that was no problem. All was fine and dandy until our landlord came to visit two years later. Our letting agent frantically emailed us saying we had to hide our cats because our landlord didn’t know we had them. 
Queue infinite levels of stress, cleaning and arranging for the cats to be out of the apartment for hours leading up to our landlord visiting. Not to mention my epiphany that mentally destroyed me and pushed me into hyper-drive – what if our landlord’s allergic to cats? Well, you better scrub your fingers to the bone and make sure there’s no trace of the cats! Not even a hair. 

This fear mongering and general being thrown-under-a-bus-for-no-reason from our letting agent went on for years. I won’t get into the details, but she caused an insurmountable amount of stress for years. On one particular occasion involving the Irish Revenue and I was so anxious I became physically ill. I know to you, this probably doesn’t sound like a big deal, but if our landlord found out about our cats, we were told he would take action. 1) Ask us to leave [our rent is currently way below average for Dublin, praise science, so we want to stay as long as we can] and 2) keep our deposit. Or he could 3) ask us to simply get rid of our cats if we wanted to stay. It caused many sleepless nights. It sounds dramatic, but when you’re living it, it’s a very real worry. 

But today, today is a good day. The perfect conditions arose for me to tell our landlord about our cats [he’s no longer using said Letting Agent From Hell, and instead dealing with us directly], and guess what? He was totally cool with the cats. He actually laughed. He’s a decent person. Years. YEARS of unnecessary stress and for nothing. 

I’m having a giant drink with my lunch today. Maybe three.

Normal non-fear fueled blogging will resume next week as scheduled. Oh, and if you’re curious, you can creep all my crazy cat lady pictures of June and Tosh under the hashtag #JuniperAndToshi. Happiest of Fridays, homies xx  

*Thank you Mr. Ferrell for creating the most epic-ly appropriate blog title reference.