The Internet and phone are turned off in our old place; we’re camping amidst boxes. Needless to say, posting has been erratic…we spent 15 hours yesterday at the new space wrangling electricians, Fios guys, handiman, rug delivery.
We’re both overwhelmed and excited by the impending move to new digs, ‘the improvised life’s ongoing work-in-progress, a move from pre-war to modern.
We’re going dark for a week or so while we get things organized…and our wit’s about us. See you soon.
And big thanks for all who wrote to wish us well on the new space.
(Video link here.) They say that moving homes is one of the most stressful of life events. We are finding that to be true, due to the sheer volume of details that makes up a life: it’s as though we’re in an avalanche, crushed by how much there is to do. Though we keep things pretty spare, we are wondering how things got so complex.
What if we didn’t have all this stuff and accounts and fierce need for HOME? It got us thinking about the video we saw recently about Daniel Suelo who one day decided to give up all money. He moved to the wilderness of southeastern Utah, where he makes a cave his home, foraging for food, living by his wits, creativity and the generosity of friends. Says Daniel: read more…
Soon summer will be here, bringing with it a crop of cucumbers (and countless other vegetables) just waiting to be pickled. But for those who are intimidated by the process of water-bath canning for shelf storage (or who just want a crunchy fresh pickle!) there is an easy solution: spices, water, vinegar, salt, and two weeks in the fridge. We love the simplicity of Kate Payne’s Fridge Pickles 101. And that’s just one of many great, fun recipes included in her fab The Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking. If you haven’t read about it already, we’re doing a free book giveaway this month. So if you’re hungry for more of Kate’s tips, simply leave a comment telling us what project around the house or in your garden you’re most looking forward to tackling this spring/summer. Make sure you do it by midnight on March 19, at which point we will randomly pick a winner.
I thought it would be fun to give a sneak peak of the new space I’ve been renovating – the secret project that has run me ragged for months. It will be a sort of laboratory for many ideas we want to explore on ‘the improvised life’. Although it will probably never be ;finished;, this before-and-after gives an idea of the challenging design problems the apartment posed. (The before was taken when I first hauled a few things up to the space to start to try to figure it out.)
Take this fatso design challenge: a long living room wall butted right up to the edge of the window on the adjacent wall (a product of the original cheap, corner-cutting construction). Tearing down the sheetrock wall on the left helped. Then I had a mirror the exact size of the window placed on the wall to form an L with the window; the mirror reflects the window, giving the illusion of a big corner window.
This simple optical illusion vastly expands the space, bounces more light to the back of the large room, while reflecting the best part of the park view outside. I tested the initial idea out by propping a cheap mirror that had been left in the apartment next to the window. read more…
A few months ago, I bought a space in Harlem, soon to be home of ‘the improvised life’s new LABORATORY, in which to experiment with all sorts of ideas for home and daily living.
I had scoured New York City real estate listings for YEARS, traipsing from space to space in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan weighing the pros and cons of neighborhoods, commutes, space-for-the-money – a huge list – until I finally said YES to modest space with very good bones. It was a lucky find, fitting a VERY limited budget AND having the essentials I’d been looking for: proximity to great transportation, a real neighborhood, good security, and most important of all, a wonderful view that could never be obstructed. The architecture is nothing to speak of and the apartment itself needed serious work.
It has become a lesson in seeing through the superficial to the bones beneath, and envisioning possibilities. read more…
Last week we went to the opening of an exhibition of artist Holton Rower’s paintings, made by pouring gallons of vividly colored paints onto plywood forms. They are on display at The Hole in NYC, an immense space that Rower’s monumental work fills with reverberating color and energy.
The paintings are made of humble materials: plywood and acrylic paint transformed by Rower’s imagination and daring. Some are so big that they could only be photographed by laying them in the alley behind Rower’s studio and photographing from 3 stories up. Tonight, we went to see him pour a painting and witness liquid color becoming form (as you can, on YouTube). read more…
Photographer Maria Robledo emailed us a couple of images of her impromptu flower arrangements, with these words:
I love making these freehand arrangments.
I dont start with that intention, i start with looking at the leaf or flower as a photo then i bunch ‘em together w/o thinking.
it’s a surprise to me too because they just come out to look so pleasing.
We admire how fluid her process is: she doesn’t start with an idea in mind. A leaf or a flower grabs her and then she’s off ”bunching them together” to discover how they will arrange themselves…
…like the blossoms that ended up – unexpectedly, charmingly – inside the jar/vase… read more…
On Ikea’s impossible-to-translate blog, Livet Hemma, we found this image of the two-toned fabrics European Ikeas are selling. We’re not crazy about the color scheme but love the idea: why not overlap vividly-colored tablecloths or large swathes of cotton or linen to make a color block table? Unhemmed ends are CHIC.
Last year, I posted a mid-century modern folding desk that I’d used for many years, and had decided to sell. Maria Robledo bought it for her 13 + year-old daughter Isabel. Recently, I was thrilled to see Isabel’s take on the desk: full of color and pattern, and a completely different style than my ascetically minimalist one.
The great DVDP devised a gif out of origami artist Jun Mitani’s flickr photostream: a lovely reminder of the possibilities inherent in simple sheets of paper…
…which reminded us of Between the Folds, a wondrous video clip we posted about origami’s cosmic potential.
Innovative uses for shipping pallets continue: here a play on shipping pallet gardens, painted bright colors and hung on a wall. In a post we wrote about how-to transform a shipping pallet into a vertical, layered garden, some readers brought up the question of food-safe paints for pallets that will house herbs, greens, nasturtiums and other edible plants. Kate Payne of Hip Girl’s Home (whose book we’re featuring in a giveaway) took the initiative and emailed the Old Fashioned Milk Paint folks, who make a completely non-toxic, zero VOC paint and sealant. Wrote Kate: “…air quality matters here, but so does sustained exposure to moisture and possible leaching, this is a great question!”
It’s well known that one of our favorite visual themes is people leaping – an obvious metaphor for “taking a leap” into new territory, work, projects, endeavors that we might have thought fearful…life.
We came across an interesting trove recently on Retronaut, of New Yorkers in the 1890′s. Although there are some spectacular leaps… read more…
There are a lot of online drawing tools, but most of them feel too complicated to be of much use to us. Diagram.ly, on the other hand, couldn’t be easier. If you’ve ever needed to throw together a quick diagram for a report and been stymied by the lack of options or user un-friendliness of Microsoft Word, you’ll find this to be a great (and free!) alternative. We’ve been using it to sketch out some storage space, but see its potential for many free-form design projects. For the more business-minded, the folks at alternativeTo point out that it would be great for organizational and work-flow charts. And certainly kids who just want to play around with shapes could have some fun with it too! It’s a perfect combo-platter: practical AND playful…
But we never showed what actually happens over the course of a week as the tightly-closed bulbs open and bloom. So we photographed the hyacinths that we’d plunked into a Smarta bowl from Ikea about 5 days ago. All we had to do was water them lightly every few days. Over days we watched the plants transform in front of our very eyes. We realized that we had actually created a tiny tabletop garden, whose subtle changes we could enjoy daily.
(Video link here.) Dig this video made by composer Diego Stocco in conjunction with Burt’s Bees. Stocco creates a great beat, simply by shaking tree branches, flicking orange peels, banging on coconuts, mashing his hands through cooked rice, and sifting his hands through almonds – all amplified. Even the buzz of bees make an appearance. Just a reminder that you can find (and make) music anywhere.
. If you haven’t read about it already, 
