Updates on the Homefront & This Week’s Finds

Happy Friday! Hope your week was a good one so far. Things have been very busy at our house over the last few days, but the good kind of busy. The kind that gets you pumped, off the couch and accomplishing things. We’ve made good progress with our backyard, which I’m super excited about, although I still haven’t gotten around to painting our basement. I don’t know why but every time I want to pick up the paint brush something else comes up :). (The walls are done but I still have to paint half of the stairs and three pairs of bifold closet doors.) Anyway, I guess I have to keep chipping away at it until it’s done.

Updates on the Homefront

The good news is that our prayers have been answered and our contractors showed up over the weekend and we now have four pretty walls (with no holes) in our family room/home office. They added insulation, patched up the drywall, finished beadboard-ing all around and are now working on the built-in shelving. Below are a few pictures I snapped that show the progression of this room from nightmare to where it’s at today:

Although there’s still much to do before the finish line, the room is starting to come together and I love it. And the best part? My husband loves it too! He has been a tough customer to sell on some of my design ideas (especially the ones involving higher costs and a smaller TV), so I’m happy he’s happy.

This Week’s Finds

Interesting Reads: Now that I’ve shown you what’s been happening at our place, I wanted to share with you a few books I’ve been enjoying lately. I recently stumbled upon a couple of gems that I think you’ll enjoy too! The first one is by Blue Balliett, a little book called

The Ghosts of Nantucket, 23 True Accounts.

I loved this book and wish I’d found it sooner, for Halloween! It is spine-chilling, brilliantly written and absorbing, and will definitely make the hairs on your back stand up. Plus, it paints a beautiful, albeit scary, picture of some of the historical homes on Nantucket with illustrations by George Murphy. I say that’s a win-win-win!   

Another book I really liked, and I say “I” but it’s really all of us who fight over it: How to Speak Dog, an award-winning NatGeo children’s book on better understanding the language of pets. It also comes as a How to Speak Cat, designed specifically for feline-lovers. We’ve been thinking about getting a dog for as long as I can remember and it was never the right time. Now may still not be the right time but at least we’re better prepared. 

The third book I’d like to mention, and maybe you know it already, is

The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben

…which he followed up with a second (or maybe third) book called:

The Inner Life of Animals – Love, Grief, and Compassion in the Animal Kingdom.

They are both fascinating and informative reads, highly recommended! Now onto the pretties: 

The Daily Find: If you follow Café Design on Instagram (our handle is @cafedesignblog), you may have noticed that I recently started a new feature called The Daily Find. The idea behind it is to share something pretty for your home, or for your closet, every day. I am constantly looking at things online, either for clients, design projects, friends or for myself and I thought it would be nice to share some of my favorite finds with you in real time. So here’s what’s been on my radar lately: 

Glass Ornaments: Obviously, it’s the right season to be thinking about ornaments. Some of you may have already set up a tree, while some of us are seriously behind. I was inspired by Amanda Brooks’ decoration of Fairgreen Farm of which I wrote in Monday’s post and in a conversation with my mom I asked her if she could send us some of our old glass ornaments that we had growing up. Every year I insisted on helping with the tree, and every year there were some ornament-casualties. Miraculously some of them survived and I’d love to share them with my family.

The memory of an old-fashioned Christmas tree is really what it’s all about for me. Not necessarily color-coordinated, or too carefully considered but happy and filled with memories. Amanda Brooks mentions in a recent House and Garden UK article that, for her, Christmas is not really about good taste, but rather about joy and child-like enthusiasm. And I love that!

So I started looking for some really nice old world ornaments online and found a few that were really special. Mind you, they are not cheap and please don’t think that I am pretentious and want my tree covered in thousands of dollars worth of tinsels because that’s not really what this is about. But rather, these ornaments are something special, pieces you’ll buy slowly over time, each year adding a new ornament to your collection, or gifting them to family and friends. Some are made by Inge-Glass, a German manufacturing company that is one of the finest ornament-makers in the world. I hope you’ll enjoy them and find something you like. 

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Porcelain Mugs: Another thing that caught my eye was inspired by a need that’s recently come up at our house. Call me butter fingers but I manage to break in average a mug a month so now we have no coordinated mugs for coffee, cocoa or s’mores, or company, if we’ll ever get to entertain again. So as I was looking for some new mugs to replace the ones I’ve been systematically breaking, I thought about investing in pretty ones that I’ll have no choice but be more careful with. And I found a few Spode porcelain mugs that are simply gorgeous! Here they are! I apologize if it starts a new obsession for you as it did for me.

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Wardrobe Refresh: And last, every winter I like to update my wardrobe a little. A couple of new sweaters, maybe a new parka or a beanie. I don’t have as many clothes as I had in my twenties, and part of that is that a few years ago I changed the way I approached shopping for clothes. I prefer quality over quantity and buying things that I really, really like and know would wear often has become my mantra. So here are some of the things that I’m loving right now as I’m planning my seasonal wardrobe refresh. Also, most of these are ON SALE! Hope you see something you like!

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As I was writing up today’s post it dawned on me that some of these things would make great gifts for friends and family. And if nothing else works, and you’re still out of ideas  remember that cold, hard cash, or gift cards (Amazon has ones that are already gift-wrapped) are always a great way to go! Have a lovely weekend!