apartment

14/1/2011

Housekeeping and inspiration

This landed in my inbox today and is too gorgeous not to share – Vogue.com’s Lauren Santo Domingo turns the camera on herself:

I really like looking at how other people store their books, especially those with a huge collection. Saw this today and I just love the combination of earthy colours, retro furniture (is that a Saarinen tulip table I spy in the first picture?) and eclectic collection of knick knacks and accessories (hippo bar?? yes please).. and a whole wall of vinyls! Love!

Images from (and more) here.

Feeling inspired again to continue working on my apartment. I have some leftover furniture that from earlier that I need to get rid of, which is taking up too much space. My apartment lacks serious storage, though it’s not really a design flaw. Existing built-ins are quite enough for the average person but I have too many shoes! Finally did a massive clean and have bags of clothes, handbags and accessories that will be driven off to Salvo’s this weekend hopefully! A bit ashamed of my consumption habits, some of these things are brand new with tags still on and I can’t be bothered to list them on eBay. An unofficial 2011 resolution perhaps – stop buying things I don’t really need! How many of you do that? It’s hard to be a girl! :)

I’m really looking forward to my weekend although it’s hard to top last Sunday.. hope you have a great one wherever you are!

Absolutely Fuzzy

14/9/2010

Darkest Night

My room, newly Blik’ed.

Thanks to YM!

9/8/2010

Miss M and Sydney

How are we doing this lovely Monday evening?

My last week has been a little hectic, but in a good way. Muna dropped into Sydney after work at the Gold Coast (if you could call spending a few days at Splendour work!) so I took a couple of days off work to hang out with her. We used to work together in my last job in Malaysia, and apart from being one of the most inspiring and awesome people to work with she is also amazingly fun! Having her here did make me miss my old work ‘family’ a little bit.. ah, good times.

Just this weekend, I found this on the side of the Object building on Bourke St. The way it stacks, overlaps and how it’s kerned tightly hints at the message it is trying to convey. Can you guess the font? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not Helvetica :)

I’ve been looking for something to decorate my apartment walls with. So far there is plenty of inspiration but nothing I really want, except this mash up of snakes and skeletons by Hannah Stouffer. It will go well with my sparkly beast project; it’s almost complete and I am excited about sharing it with you!

On another end of Bourke St sits this cute little hole-in-the-wall called Miss Chu that Muna found during her short stay in Sydney:

They make great rice paper rolls and on the menu is a wagyu beef pho I’m going back for. It’s the closest thing to a hawker-style place in Sydney and I miss that!

I took Muna to as many places as we could fit into her short stay. We avoided the more touristy stuff but we did jump on the ferry to Manly and had some Ben and Jerry’s at the Corso. On Friday I had a car and we had a little coastal tour of the Eastern suburb beaches, spent some time in the sunshine and caught the sunset at Rose Bay. We also caught up with another Catcha ex-colleague Ads, whom I’m currently working with in Sydney:

Can’t believe it’s Monday already.. we’re in the midst of moving offices so I’m working from home today. Time to grab some dinner and get back to work!

17/6/2010

New work space

Caught the flu and have been laying low. Looking forward to downloading some pictures from our trip to Hunter Valley over the long weekend; in the mean time I have plenty of work to catch up on..

This is my new work space. In this picture I was just setting up the printer – am pretty happy with the set up! Printer comes out when I need to use it and sits on the stool. Wireless keyboard and mouse means when my iMac is hooked up to my flatscreen, I can play games and catch up on my TV dramas from the comfort of my couch!

However – I have a million and one things hooked up to TWO power sockets in the wall next to the phone jack/TV antenna. Not sure what the electricians were thinking when they put this together. So far I have the TV, DVD player, iMac, modem, speakers, floor lamp, external HDD and printer on.. actually a little worried about overloading but I think an extension with individual switches will take care of that.

This is what the back of my desk looks like – any ideas?

28/4/2010

Fine lines and crystal skulls

“Hey honey, did you just Google ‘how to paint a wall’ on your iPhone?”

I think I almost manage to blush.

“Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing it the wrong way!”

“Like from side to side?”

It was a running joke. After taking off the masking I finish off my edges with a fine size 0 brush that is meant for my acrylic work.

On that note, it should be pointed out that perfectionists should never paint a wall with a semi-lustre finish unless they know what they are doing. Because it took me four coats and it the surface still isn’t perfect (though, I did get to the bottom of it: the third coat with the wool roller had distributed way more paint that it should have, I should not have used an outdoor roller for an indoor job!) but the fourth was done with a 6″ velour roller. It covered up most of the damage on the third layer. One more layer and my wall might come toppling over from the weight of all those paint layers.

But it looks good. The wall has finally dried and with the boy’s help, paintings hung, furniture moved; boxes unpacked, repacked, moved into storage. It’s starting to come together. There is a whole lot more to do to my new place but it will be a slow progress as I’m trying not to bite off more than I can chew. Here are a few things that will keep me tied up in the upcoming months:

1. My Damien Hirst/Peter Pracilio skull project. I’m still waiting for this brilliant skull I ordered last month to arrive:

(Just FYI, Springboks are one of the few antelope species that are considered to have an expanding population, and are not in any way endangered)

Which I plan to resurface, inspired by this piece:

Swarovski Safari by Peter Pracilio

Will document the (slow) progress of this for later :)

2. A wall display/storage area. I am in the midst of figuring this out and doing some research on different materials to use to put this together. I quite fancy the idea of installing a wall-sized metal panel and using magnetic hooks – pros are with the right magnets there are a ton of other uses for the wall apart from just being a pretty place to ‘store’ my stuff. Cons are it is wall-sized and would cost a bomb to custom make and install.

3. Custom making a storage solution for my very unconventional storage area. This looks like it can be sorted with some hacking of some of Ikea’s heavy-duty storage stuff. Hmm.

Wish I had more time to spend on these fun little things! Oh, and a delivery van for a trip to Ikea.

Sx