modern cabin perfection

Aren't the cozy clean lines of this house phenomenal? There is something about architecture that blends the classic and archetypal with modernism that I completely love. I am not always sold on blocky modernism, but new modern homes that look vaguely like the houses we drew in first grade? I'll take them one and all. How snug and serene does this cottage look?

Check out this sweet interior hallway, with the warm pine embracing white plaster, and that dash of bright turquoise on the side. I love it so completely. It reminds me of this other modern barn house from a few months back, which also made me sigh.

First one is from LASC via designboom

so many possibilities

I've been wanting to take a woodworking class for a while now, mostly to alleviate this itch I have to design and produce my own furniture. Specifically, my own coffee table.

The clunky ikea table we have now is very functional, but is also an unattractive pressboard block. I see pictures of tables like this gorgeous piece above by Ali Sandifer and just lust after them. But this table is not for a grad student's budget! Still, I should be able to do better than ikea if I make it myself, right? I could design a table with an open area to slide in my magazines and a more enclosed spot to hide the bf's xbox controllers and our ugly remote controls! And after a bit of sketching and measuring out, I could go get some wood and get cracking!

So after a few minutes of day-dreaming along these lines, I start browsing my local community college listings for classes. I love learning new functional skills, and somehow this seems like both a fun and important skill to have. There are obvious pitfalls, of course. 1: I barely know a thing about woodworking, and 2: I want to be fantastic enough at it to be able to make a graceful table after only a few classes.

Should be no problem, though. My dad (and his dad before him) is a good woodworker and has extensive construction abilities, so I like to pretend his skills somehow transferred magically to me in childhood. Even though I have never used tools more sophisticated than hammers, drills, and sandpaper. When you've grown up seeing lumber go into the garage and finished pieces emerging, the building process starts to seem deceptively straightforward.

I may not get to this in the next few months, but there is definitely a furniture design/ woodworking class in my future. There is something amazingly serene about spending an afternoon with a slab of wood on two sawhorses on a sunshiney driveway, sanding planks down to a perfect silky smoothness. I could go for that kind of creative therapy right now. And what better redemption for all the sweat and effort of creation than the smell of sawdust, achy muscles, and the promise of a designed piece that fits my life exactly? I can't wait to try my hand at it, for sure!

eco kitchen breakdown

This efficient and self-sustaining kitchen from studio Gorm (via the wonderful Inhabitat) is a beautiful example of the type of design we should be incorporating into our everyday lives. I love how the simple ideas -- a dishrack draining onto plants! a built-in composter! -- are tucked into a space that hasn't changed as much as it should have since the 1950s.

There are a lot of aspects of this that I would love to see better (or newly!) integrated in my own kitchen. The dish rack reminds me of a cabinet called a tiskikaappi, which are widespread in Finland (and probably Scandinavia beyond, right?). These cabinets are fitted with racks instead of shelves and are placed above a sink so that washed dishes can drain down into it like so:

When we were quickly remodeling our kitchen a couple years ago, I thought wistfully about installing one of these. We have a big window right above our sink, so it seemed like an obvious no-go. If only this plants-under-drainer idea had occurred to me then! It would actually have worked very well, because we already house an overly exuberant basil plant and a scrappy little hydrangea on the countertop under our wall cabinets.

The worm bin composter also looks like a much cleaner solution to the food waste issue than the plastic bin we currently have sitting in our sink cabinet. The plastic bin periodically becomes way too gross to even contemplate, probably due to its not being a proper composting system but instead a mold-incubator that acts as a way-station on the route to the official outdoor compost bin.

Everything about this kitchen looks like a smarter, cleaner version of the jumbled components of my own, and I love designers for creating stuff like this. It just opens my eyes to why certain things do and don't work in my own life. Now if only some designers could create a beautiful, easy-to-install, efficient gray-water system, I could really start to live out my eco home design dreams!

apple butter factory

A couple weeks ago we made apple butter! Lots of it.

The bf came home from a fall-themed photoshoot with a bushel of apples (who knows what a bushel is but it was probably about that many) and I'd been reading all these martha-esque blogs about growing and canning your own food. I was inspired!

It took a little while to cut up all the apples, and figure out appropriate measures of cider, sugar, and spices to boil them down with. (We mostly followed the recipe here, but all of the recipes seem to have the same basic ingredients.) After the apples got nice and mushy, we blended the mixture and continued to boil it down.

When the consistency thickened to the point that a spoonful dropped on a plate could be divided into two parts (without seeping back together), we deemed it ready for canning. I have always thought of canning as a stressful process, but the bf was a huge help. With two people, it was incredibly easy!

Don't you love the deep, glowing color the apple butter takes on in the jars? We only had one lid that did not pop, but I am happy to have that jar in the fridge ready to be eaten. We already tested a little bit on toast! It tastes like coming in from a crisp autumn days to sit beside a crackling fireplace. Amazing!