Café Design

Decorating Consultations

What We’ve Been Up To

I apologize for Wednesday’s missing post, we had a special family birthday celebration on the 17th that had my undivided attention – our little love bug turned seven!! I can’t believe it and have so many mixed feelings about it. I thank God every day for having her in our lives, for her happy, funny and curious nature. But with each year that passes I wish I could somehow slow down the minutes and days so we can cuddle a little more, and she can be my little girl a little while longer… I also wanted to thank everyone who left messages after last Friday’s post, I so appreciate your kind words, advice and encouragement. In fact, I’ve gotten Margaret Roach’s revised gardening-primer book – A Way to Garden and I’m smitten and highly recommend it to anyone in a similar predicament – that is having the garden but not a clue what to do with it.

The Exterior – Before
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Our New Home

Happy almost Fourth of July!! Thank you so much for your sweet messages after Friday’s post, you are all so kind! As promised, I’d love to show you a few images of our new home. The house is a little Cape Cod-style cottage sitting on nearly one acre of land. Built half a century ago, it has been well-maintained and cared for, although not much has been updated on the inside. Many (if not all) of the original architectural details have been preserved, which I love!! The windows need restoring and, as you can see from the images below, the rooms need quite a bit of work as well but, we’ve given ourselves a year to tackle most of the projects ourselves. We’ll be working on a budget and will be taking our time to figure out how best to decorate so the house becomes a better version of itself without losing its charm. We love how cozy it feels right now but we’d also love to open it up a bit more to the beautiful backyard. Typical of houses built in the mid 20th-century is a lack of connection to the outdoors and it would be great if we could change that – either by building a deck/patio just outside of the library or by adding more windows in different rooms of the house to bring in more natural light.

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Moving Day!!

It’s moving day! Yay!! This little Cape Cod-style cottage, built in the 1960s on a quiet cul-de-sac in Amherst, MA, is finally ours! We got the keys from our realtor last night and this morning we’re ready to move in. Can you believe it? It’s a dream come true for our family… The house is humble yet charming, small enough to retain a certain storybook feel yet spacious enough to comfortably shelter our little family of three. It also comes with a pet hedgehog, Cordelia, who built her home years ago right under our backyard porch. A few bits of apple and some kibble and we’ll be best friends in no time! As for the interiors, the elderly couple who lived here for the last decade or so took really great care of house…We don’t plan on knocking down walls or anything, just make the house a better version of itself with a few upgrades here and there. First on the list, landscaping…

Our front door with hedges in need of a haircut!
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Life Lately

Happy Father’s Day! Today’s post is for those of you wondering what happened to Friday’s design story. I’m still here. A little bit more tired, covered in paint, but still here. I don’t know about you but this week has been the busiest I’ve had in a while. So many things are wrapping up, school is ending and as we’re saying goodbye to our wonderful first grade teachers, we’re also packing and preparing the last details of our upcoming move. Since our lease ends in a short two weeks, the countdown to moving day is on and my good friend Alexia, a talented local photographer, offered to come over to our place and take a few pictures before everything is dismantled and stored away in boxes. It’ll probably be months before I’ll find them again so goodbye vases, slipcovers and fluffy pillows. We did a mini-shoot on Friday and it was so much fun! My house is far from being magazine-worthy but it was a good experience that gave me a little bit of insight into the world of shoots and styling. I have worked with Alexia on product styling in the past but this time, being my own home, it felt different. I realized there are still many things I need to get a handle on, like making faster decisions and not dragging my feet, keeping it simple, allowing myself more time to explore different styling possibilities… But mostly to keep it simple. I tend to get way in over my head when it comes to OUR rooms, too many ideas to experiment with and too much freedom gets to me. Anyway, I will keep today’s post short and simple, and very real, and show you a few behind the scenes of our home, photoshoot and packing … I promise to get my blogging act together for next week! 🙂

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The Ugly Chair Makeover

If you’ve ever had a piece of furniture you found so ugly you could not bear looking at any longer but felt you couldn’t throw it away either, a family heirloom perhaps, then this post might interest you.  When we first moved to our current apartment, we had a plan. We thought we’ll be staying in Amherst short-term, a year or two at most so things were purchased with a tight budget in mind. We were also saving up to buy a house somewhere where my husband’s job would take us next so we made quite a few shortcuts when it came to decorating. I designed a cozy furniture plan that would fit our lifestyle and filled the missing pieces with (very, very low) budget finds. A brand new IKEA Ektorp sofa was comfortable and pretty enough, and oh, so affordable. A few discards from friends, a couple of lucky antiques shops and local Craigslist finds and we were done. Never mind the overall flea-market feel and the fact that nothing was perfect or what we really wanted. We were willing to live with it if it was short term. And because we love to entertain weekly, one of the first things we bought for our apartment was a pair of armchairs from Wayfair. The chairs are VERY comfortable and light, easy to move around when we have people over. The brown upholstery hides all sins and is soft to touch but is also, very, very ugly! A brownish-reddish-synthetic-velvet lookalike that has been a challenge to decorate with. I initially chose the chairs mainly because of their pleasing shape, it has some appeal and I knew that with a few tweaks and a nice slipcover they could look decent, even pretty. They were also a STEAL and had good reviews so I pounced.

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