Other Ways to Decorate with Books

In my last post about backing your bookcase, you saw books in their natural environment. Lined up, stacked, contained and confined. That doesn't sound so great though, does it? If you love your books as much as I love mine, spread some of them around. Let them have some fun! These books, above and below, get to welcome your guests and roll around on a tea cart.

[Better Homes & Gardens]

These get to stack up with a bunch of their buddies on a pretty purple table. Notice how some are acting as risers to show off accessories and lend dimension to the tabletop display. Books, like dogs, are happiest when they have a job to do.

[Elle Decor]

Here, a few carefully-coordinated volumes support a beautiful arrangement of flowers so that it's not overshadowed by the drama of the shell-framed mirror.

[Lynn Von Kersting via BH&G]

Also in an important supporting role, the books on the left-hand bedside table lift the lamp to the same height as the one to the right. Think about this next time you use mismatched tables—or mismatched lamps—beside your bed or sofa. Keep your lampshades lined up. Books love to help.

[Southern Living]

When you've run out of conventional storage space, as Joni did, pile your books on a table, stack them in baskets, add a collection of objects and your overflow becomes artful arrangement. No one needs to know that you've simply bought way too many books!

[Cote de Texas]

A single, beautiful book becomes art itself. Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, below, has been the center of attention on countless coffee tables. No doubt the other books are jealous, but some are just born to be stars.

[Kendall Wilkinson via OKL]

Other books enjoy being members of the ensemble. In this display, below, colorful books arranged facing forward on ledges take the place of artwork above the sofa.

[Pottery Barn]

High above the sofa—and everything else!—these brave books line up on shelves built over the windows just for them. How will they ever get down? Your guess is as good as mine.

[Apartment Therapy]

At the opposite end of the wall, way down at kid level, the books below are displayed on an old-fashioned plate rack, making them easy for little hands to grab at story time. Plus, their attractive covers make great art in your child's room.

[Martha Stewart Living]

All the way down on the floor now, a graduated stack of books becomes a table. This is the perfect job for those over-sized volumes that don't easily fit into bookcases. A tip: don't put much on top of that stack in the way of accessories. It's not the most stable surface after all. Do leave room for your cup of tea and a small plate so you can have a snack while curled up in the adjacent chair. Reading, of course, yet another book.

[Real Simple]

The ultimate in "books as decor"—a dedicated library. This one was created from an under-used dining room. A terrific idea, I think. On most days this room serves as reading, research and storage space. Then, imagine how cozy it would be to dine by candlelight among the textures and colors and countless stories contained within your collection of books.

[Cottage Living]

If you're interested in learning more about decorating with books, here's a book named just that. I don't have this one myself, surprising considering how much I love both decorating and books. I have peeked into it at the bookstore, however, and it probably will come home with me sometime soon. Because you really can never have too many books. Even books about books.

Another Layered Art Idea

While writing my last post, I searched high and low for other examples of layered framed art so that I could better illustrate the concept for you. Interestingly, the only images I found were these few, all from the same source. First, the one you see above, is from a Pottery Barn catalog. The frames are hung using wires or string, but neither the pic nor the catalog description are clear about what they're hung from. Could be a rod or a picture moulding high on the wall. I like that the casual looseness of the arrangement is brought back together by the use of similar black and white subjects all identically framed.

Next, this salon-style installation in a mix of Pottery Barn frames lit by one of their rail lights. As casual as the first image was, this one is made even more so by the variety of frame styles and their contents. See the curiously "popped out" numbers 5 and 9 in the middle? They led to the discovery of a nifty new-to-me gizmo, also from, well, you know where. Called a "frame riser", it allows you to layer photos, art and mirrors over each other without them having to touch or attach to each other. And, surprisingly, it holds up to 25 lbs, so you can layer pretty much whatever you want...

...and create your own free-form scrapbook wall of memories and inspiration. This image is also from our friends at PB and I find it quite charming; especially for a family room or home office. Follow their lead if you wish, but, please, use your own uniquely special mementos, not the store-bought kind.

Creative Art Idea from the Show House

In this post, the last one about the Pasadena Showcase House (I promise!), I attempt to illustrate a creative DIY art idea I saw on my recent tour...

STEP ONE: Get your hands on a great big oil painting. Three feet wide, at least. This may require a visit to your local flea or antique market. This project works best with a landscape or cityscape, something with a lot going on and multiple small subjects rather than one central subject. Lots of lumpy bumpy paint texture is good too.

STEP TWO: Gather a bunch of random-sized picture frames. 8x10's to 16x20's and anything in between. A variety of sizes and frame styles is most ideal. If you're crafty enough, feel free to cut them up and reassemble your own custom sizes. Carved frames make the biggest impact but toss in a few plain ones to mix it up.

STEP 3: Take that big painting out of its frame. Your plan is to cut it up into several smaller pieces. Your objective is to create something like this popular treatment...

...where a large map is cut into sections, each section framed separately and hung in a tight grid...

...or, like the treatment below which requires a large poster or photo enlargement and those square album cover frames. The only difference is that our disassembled and reassembled oil painting is more random.

STEP 4: After you've cut your painting into pieces based on your frame sizes—or cut and resized your frames to match your painting sections, you decide which approach works best for you—paint all those frames the same color. A single frame color is important. It unifies the many pieces of your installation so that they read as one work of art. In the treatment I saw, the frames were painted a dark grey, a color pulled from the painting's moody streetscape. This is key to the look—that the frame color blends, does not contrast, with the colors in the painting.

STEP 5: Now, get your cut-up painting pieces into those frames. I don't care how you do it—staples, tape, glue, whatever works best for the situation you have. Nobody's going to see the backs anyway so just make it work. Remember, this is a DIY project so I expect you to be a little bit handy before you even attempt it.

Note: If I'd been more stealthy, or less hurried by the surge of lookiloos coming up behind me, I would have thought to snap a forbidden cell phone pic. But I didn't. Instead, I've created this "virtual" version of the finished product...

STEP 6: Hang your new art! As you see in my virtual example above, the designer chose to overlap some of the frames onto the others. He actually used nine separately framed sections for his treatment so I'm sure it took some trial and error to get the layout just right. Please use you imagination to see the frames as all slightly different types and widths. At the show house, the wall behind the art was painted almost the same shade as the frames making the look all about texture and color and mood. The overall size of the arrangement was about 40"x30". If you don't like the overlapped look, try a tightly arranged collage or salon style like this...

This is a pretty ambitious project, but really not so difficult, and I'd never seen anything quite like it before so I thought it worth sharing. If you're looking for a unique way to fill a large space, I think it's a great idea to file away for when the right situation and materials present themselves.

What do you think? Would you try it?

Coat Closet Makeover: Messy No More

Coat closets. I'll bet it's fair to say that most of us have a love/hate relationship with them. Probably because we need them to do so much more than just hold coats.

. . .

Like the ubiquitous "junk drawer", a coat closet is handy to have but can rapidly become unruly. Well-intentioned organization gives way, under the weight of our busy lives, to "out of sight, out of mind". You open the door or drawer and whatever you have in your hand—coat, umbrella, take-out menu or rubber band—gets added to the mix and closed away (quickly, before you notice what a mess it is in there!) where you don't have to deal with it. Until you do. Until you find yourself asking, for the millionth time "Has anyone seen my hat?", "Where did I put that tall vase?", "Why aren't my boots in here?!".

Prompted by Lauren's post wherein she challenged her readers to clean up their coat closets, I finally tackled mine. Knowing full well what I was getting myself into.

See how tiny and dark? But it doesn't look so bad from back here, does it? If you don't look too long at that sad, saggy ironing board cover. (please don't - it doesn't represent me well) There's a new one, still in its package, shoved into that black hole somewhere. Here's a closer look, below. Don't be fooled by all that light you see. There's an industrial task light switched on in all of these "before" photos (and a couple of the afters too—dark closet + dark end of the hallway = hard to photograph).

That was the top of the closet, now here's the bottom, below. Most of the stuff on the floor is shoved back into the corners to make room for the vacuum (that shouldn't be there) and the beach bag (that somehow never found a better home).

Neither the beach bag nor the black and white check bag hanging behind the ironing board made it onto the handwritten list you're about to see. I'm sure I missed a few other things too. I was kind of overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that kept coming out. And out. And out. Just for fun—or posterity, or as a future "what was I thinking?" note to self—I wrote it all down:


Yikes! Seventeen (17!) coats and jackets. The letter notations next to each are for myself "T", my husband "D" or my daughter "K", not "toss", "donate" or "keep"—I didn't want you to think this is such a brutal makeover that we ended up with just one jacket between us! There were, however, several jackets and plenty of other things that needed to be moved out and on to a new location or a new life away from this house. To be relocated: a vacuum cleaner that is rarely used (no, not because I don't clean!... but because we have another one that I prefer... and it lives in the garage); shutters I can't seem to part with but don't know what to do with; upholstery foam left over from a project; decorative pillows that should have been put into "pillow storage" in another room, etc. What wasn't kept, relocated or tossed will be donated to an upcoming yard sale or Goodwill. Altogether, just over 100 items came out of that closet—if you count the 12 light bulbs individually.

Are you ready for the "after" now? Me too. But first, let's take a moment to admire the simple beauty of empty space. Aaahh. . . all that potential. . .


My handy husband installed and painted the shelf near the floor. It's 12" above the floor, to allow ample space for things placed both under and on top of it. It's also 4" shorter than the depth of the closet. I'll show you why a few pics down.


If you have any orphaned shoe stackers hanging around your house, using one or more as a shelf-on-a-shelf is a great way to get more storage for small things in an area that otherwise might not function to its full potential. I had been using one already, but I saw that two would fit, one on top of the other. I realized, however, after huffing and puffing the second one up there, that I needed the height on top of the single stacker for my taller candle hurricanes. So down the second one came.

You've already seen the new closet light (if you read my last post), but here it is again, above. I installed that all by myself, I'll have you know. And now. . .

Ta da! The finished, filled up closet. At this angle, it's hard to tell what exactly has changed. . . unless you look closely. The new tan ticking cover made it onto the ironing board and the cluttery stuff hanging behind it is gone. The feather duster's still there—tucked up under the iron rack and hung on a cup hook to keep it securely in place and always ready for action. If you look very closely, to the right of the duster, you'll see one of the best solutions I came up with while restocking the closet. . .

The lint roller that lives in this closet found a new, smarter home. Before the makeover, that roller either stood on end or lay on a shelf where it quite often stuck to whatever was next to it. So when I reached for the lint roller I might sometimes get the spray starch too. Grrr. A magnetic hook hung from the underside of the box that houses our security system's "brain" solved the problem. Simple fixes like this make me really happy!

Here's another look at the first pic on this post, but with notations. . .

. . . so you can "see" what's in those baskets and boxes. The basket on the top shelf is new. I rounded up all the smaller hurricanes and other candle holders, added a few small vases from a cupboard in the kitchen and tucked them into this easy-to-retrieve basket that has handles on its sides. Onto the newly available shelf space, I added two new boxes. I wrapped hard-sided, Christmas-patterned gift boxes in kraft paper to "neutralize" them and added labels to identify the contents: "pillar candles" and "tea lights, tapers, votives". Moving all the candles into this closet freed up even more kitchen cupboard space. Don't you love it when organizing one space, leads to more space in another?!

Now, here's an "after" shot of the floor area, above. So. Much. Better. The basket on the floor used to sit by our front door when my daughter was young. She used it to unload soccer and volleyball gear on her way into the house after practice or games. We still occasionally use it as a stopover spot for wet shoes coming in from the rain or garden. But I much prefer it here, out of sight now, in the closet. To the right of the shoe basket, you can see my red sweeper peeking out. That the sweeper and swiffer both live in this closet is the reason I asked for the shelf to be cut the way it is. . .

The 4" space allows room for the handles of these tools that live in this closet because A) we don't have a broom closet or adequate pantry area in our kitchen, and B) they're much handier here near the rooms they're used in than they would be if they lived in the garage. And look. . . there's that stripedy beach bag again. Given an important new job as the tote for totes. Besides the black and white check one that was already in here, I found a couple of others wandering around the house. As I come across more—and I know that I will—I'll relocate them to the "tote tote" too. Next to the totes, on the new shelf, is a picnic basket. Let's look inside. . .

Oh no! It's a shark! Sorry, didn't mean to scare you. It's our portable Shark vacuum that comes in handy for cleaning up little messes. I purchased the picnic basket just for this job back when we first got the shark, but the vacuum hasn't always lived in it. Here in the cleaned-up coat closet, I'm happy to see the two reunited. And much more conveniently located. Two pics up, you can see that, next to the shark basket, I placed a metal locker basket filled with toys and coloring books for our smaller visitors. And that's it! Nothing in here that doesn't belong and more than there was before. Really, there's more. I counted.

Thanks for stopping by to have a look. This has been a long post—almost as long as it took to fix that closet!—so I'll recap the organizational ideas used in a future post where I'll include some other ideas you might be able to use too.

More Light !

As I reminded you in my last post,"lighten up" is my resolution, my words to live by, my singular yet multi-faceted goal for 2010. I explained what those words mean to me in this post. To keep myself accountable, I'll give you an occasional update. Last post was about my lightened-up attitude (Hooray for Mary Poppins!). This one is about actual light.

First, a new lamp, above. From HomeGoods, a very simple brownish/bronzish candlestick to replace the squatty blue and white ginger jar that used to sit on this table. New lamp's taller, slender profile suits this corner better as the ceiling height here is about 11 feet. I should tell you too that this lamp came with a stark white drum shade. Nothing against drums—love them—but I hoped when I bought the lamp that this ivory silk bell I already had would fit and look good. It did and it does. I'll save the drum for a future project—it's the perfect type to wrap in decorative fabric or paper and convert to a pendant. Like these from shadesoflight.com :

Interested in more shade-swapping ideas?

Learn to play "lamp shade switcheroo" here.

. . .

Next, a bit of ambient light in the entry that I concocted myself using a wood lantern (from a crazy gigantic home decor store nearby that I'll give you a tour of soon) and the bulb from an old nightlight. I love the shadows it casts on the wall and that it lights up some of the details on the antique secretary. This area near the front door needs just a bit of light because ten or so feet further along the same wall is that new table lamp I just showed you.

In case you're wondering, here's how my lantern became a lamp: Lucky for me, the top comes off. But any lantern with a door like this one also has can be reached into for rigging. The nightlight bulb and socket are attached to a plug-in cord with a thumb switch already in place. The clips on the sides of the socket are what kept it in place inside the figural ceramic lamp that was discarded long ago. (was it a lighthouse? I think so.)


Here's a close-up of my masterful installation, below. See that paper clip bent open and wrapped around the base of the socket? Its other end is hanging from one of those little dowels around the cupola of the lantern. Yep, I'm pretty sure that's how the pros would do it too. Tucked up under the lantern's roof and with the cord twist-tied in place so it's less obvious, all you notice is the warm glow of light, not the hardware.


Last but definitely not least. . . a lighted coat closet! (how long have I lived in this house and only did this now?) I found this fluorescent fixture at Target. I had seen a similar one at Lowe's but the installation involved some sort of double-stick tape or maybe velcro. I could just see it falling on my head (or, better yet, my husband's—he'd love that) after one too many flips of the switch. The Target model came with mounting screws and keyholes cut into the back of the fixture which allows it to sit very securely flush against the wall. Those are the kinds of details that can make or break a project for me—and getting those details just right can make what seemed like a simple job take much longer than expected.


But all the trouble is worth it when, in the end, you get this :

Light!

. . . in our dark little hole of a coat closet. Which recently underwent a much-needed (and very successsful, I might add) makeover. More about that next time . . .

Hanging Your Collection: A Quick Tip

Consider this post the "Part B" to my last post about arranging a collection on your walls. . .

Whether you're hanging framed art or objects, in sets of two or four or more. . .


. . . horizontally or vertically. . .

. . . following a single line or a grid, the planning and placing is fairly straightforward—if the individual pieces are all the same size and shape. You measure and plot and level and hammer or drill and hang your collection in fairly short order.

Arrangements become more complicated when your collection consists of pieces of varying sizes, shapes and visual weight. For frames, a gallery system like the one below from Pottery Barn can simplify the process. The bonus here is that you can make changes easily should you tire of the order or any individual element.

If you wish to hang a collection of varying shapes and sizes directly on the wall in the salon style, as a vertical collage of sorts, you'll benefit from these tips I found at bhg.com.

Here's how to get a successful arrangement like the one you see above:

1) Trace each frame or object in the group onto brown kraft paper and cut out.

2) Label each cut-out with a description of the picture/object or a corresponding number.

3) Accurately mark on each paper cut-out the location of hanging hardware on the back of each frame or object.

4) Using blue painter's tape (its low-tack adhesive won't pull up wall paint), adhere the papers to the wall. Experiment with arrangements until you have one you like. (Here's an extra tip from me: arrange the actual art pieces on the floor nearby so you can see how each piece relates to the next in the order you have in mind. Paper shapes help you achieve a pleasing layout, but seeing the actual objects in those places gives you a better idea of the final look.)

5) Install picture-hanging hardware directly through the paper on the marks you made. Pull paper away and hang pictures one by one.

Even a very large arrangement can be achieved using this method. . .

. . .as you can see in these pics, above and below.

One more tip, for Melanie, who commented on my last post that she has a high-ceilinged wall to decorate in her new home, and would like to use plates somewhere too. . . the photo below combines these two ideas. A very tall wall decorated with a collection of plates in the same pattern becomes a striking focal point in this home's foyer. The paper cut-out method described here would be very useful in a space like this where avoiding mistakes means fewer climbs up and down the ladder.

Photo sources, top to bottom: pointclickhome.com, southernaccents.com, chrismadden.com, pointclickhome.com, potterybarn.com, bhg.com (x5)