Café Design

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Power Tools & A Birthday Wishlist

So my birthday is just around the corner and I couldn’t be happier or more grateful for the many blessings in my life. When it comes to birthday gifts, my approach to receiving has always been of humble appreciation. That someone cared enough to go out of their way and get me a present matters more than the actual thing I got. (Although flowers, jewelry, chocolates, a bottle of my favorite perfume… are all winning combinations my darling husband and daughter have successfully used in the past, hahah. Thank you!) This year however I’ve adopted a more pragmatic approach to receiving gifts and I’m trying something different. No more jewelry, no more chocolates. Instead, I made a short list and what I badly want/need right now is a cordless 60V chain saw! ( If nothing else, a 40V would be fine to! That, and a beautiful oil on canvas I’ve been looking at for months now, in the display of a local art gallery 🙂 )

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Voles In The Garage & What We’ve Been Up To

Disclaimer: No voles were harmed during the events that inspired this post.

A relative of the hamster and just as cute, voles have made our lives over the last few weeks a living nightmare. I’m too upset to show you a picture of how cute they are, you’ll have to ‘google’ them yourself if you’ve never seen one 🙂 It all started with my mission to get us organized and have every inch of our home shipshape. Not an easy task but over the holidays Ivan, my mom and I made huge progress and even tackled the garage. We recycled what felt like a hundred cardboard boxes, finally finished unpacking our things and got a good handle on garage clutter. In the process I found Cordelia’s kibble (our sweet woodchuck who lives under our deck that’s been in her slumber since last November) and made the mistake of leaving it in the garage, uncovered in a plastic box without a lid.  The temptation of chicken-flavored kibble must have been tremendous because apparently voles don’t usually get into people’s garages (or so we were told) but they broke those rules and made a mess of everything. They were sneaky too, and managed to steal kibble unnoticed for several weeks before we realized what was going on and what attracted them in the first place. Long story short, we’re now vole-free (knock on wood, it wasn’t easy) and have made a plan to keep the space in perfect condition. We ordered wooden shelves from Ikea and a dozen storage boxes (with vole-proof lids!) from Walmart. And lesson learned, no more kibble lying around!

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Create Your Perfect Home – A Create Academy Course by Rita Konig

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

In December of last year Create Academy launched an intriguing course called Create Your Perfect Home, taught by renowned British decorator Rita Konig. Like many of you, I’m sure, I was very excited at the idea of having Rita Konig pull back the curtains on her projects and share a glimpse inside her processes. We’ve seen her genius at work in one of the most talked about and admired homes ever published – a Mill Valley camp turned family home by architect Gil Schafer in collaboration with Rita Konig, so this Create Academy course definitely has us paying attention. I have just finished watching the entire course this weekend and I thought I’d share a short review here on the blog, in case you are interested in taking the class but unsure of whether or not it’s a good fit.

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Our Old Apartment | A Few Before and Afters

OK,  so… Christmas is just a short day away! Can you believe it? With one more sleep ’til Christmas Eve I find myself anxious but also wanting to make these moments last a bit longer. I love the preparations just as much, if not even more, than the actual thing because then I know there’s a another whole year before Christmas comes again. And I love Christmas! It’s when I am at my happiest, especially since we’ve made it a tradition that my mom comes to visit over the holidays! Everyone’s happy, well-fed and thankful… We’ve been very busy these last couple of weeks (but then, we’re always busy) but we’ve also managed to sneak in many quality moments together and apart. I took my mom to Home Depot on Saturday morning (my favorite place to shop in town. Honestly.  Lumber, windows, paints, primers, French doors, hardware – better than clothes, I tell you! 🙂 Thinking about topics to post about, I realized I never got around to showing you some pics of our previous apartment taken by my sweet friend Alexia Guuinic.

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Bits of Life

Today we’re having the third snow day of the season in Western Mass and our daughter couldn’t be happier! She’s not the only one, this mama is happy too!  Although we spent the better part of the morning shoveling snow out of our driveway, our house never looked this charming! Isn’t it funny how snow is like frosting on a cake? Makes everything pretty, and the cold temps bearable. I hope it’s snowing where you are… 

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