Decor

Before And After: Charcoal Bathroom Makeover

February 25, 2022

zzzzzzzzzz

OK, so nothing was wrong with the second bathroom in our new place - not technically, at least. Our condo is a new build - the original structure burned to the ground in the Woolsey fire a couple of years back - so everything was in great shape, but it just felt like...a hotel. You know, what with the large flat mirror, the nickel-plated lights, the white walls. It was one big "meh."

You know what I enjoy, though? A blank slate. Give me a boring room, and I am a child on Christmas morning.

Before & After Renovations

Before and After: Blush & Bashful Powder Room

January 13, 2022

The "before" (totally fine, but zzzzzzzz).

First, please tell me you get the reference in the title. Thank you. Now, you may recall I have a thing for pink bathrooms - I painted the tiny bathroom in our San Jose house a deep rose shade (vastly improved from the prior olive-and-vomit-themed aesthetic). In my new place, the main bath is very much not-tiny: There's an entirely separate vanity area (pictured above) with its own sink and walk-in closet in addition to the toilet-and-bathtub bathroom itself. Which means my "personal suite" in our apartment constitutes about 1/3 of the total square footage.

Which is A-OK by me.

Decor

Preteen Boy’s Room: A Makeover

December 9, 2021

First of all, I almost sobbed typing the word "preteen" into this post's title, because I had flashbacks to this. He seemed so. big.

Moving on, so I don't watch that video again and start crying.

The thing about my son's room in our last place was that it was...how do I put it...

...

...awful.

Decor

Slow That Roll

October 15, 2021

Time to go!

My financial advisor gave me a bit of a talking-to the other day. I totally deserved it.

See, I close on the new place in five days. She is perfectly aware that I am spending the bulk of my money on the down payment, but also knows me well enough by now to know that my Amazon cart is, at this very moment, stocked with copper drawer pulls and such for an apartment that I do not yet technically own. She knows this because we first started working together right after I moved to Woodland Hills, and she set me up with this software that's sort of like Mint, but actually functional - it puts your expenses into various buckets, so you can see what you're spending on, and where you seriously need to cut back - and quickly discovered that my top expense was home renovation and decor items. For a rental.

Decor

The Death Knell For Millennial Pink Has Sounded

April 21, 2021

Let us first begin with a quick story that has absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter of this post, because sure.

By now, I think we are all aware that I hover somewhere on the "holy shit, how are you still alive" end of the clumsiness spectrum (see evidence here, here, here, and here). A few days ago, however, I reached Apex Level Disastrousness, in the form of a Spring Break trip to the desert during which I managed to break 1) my cell phone, 2) my son's laptop screen, 3) the glass top of a table in our AirBnB that I shattered by tripping and falling directly on top of it (I'm fine, and obviously I paid for the table, and no it wasn't cheap), 4) my left index finger, perhaps not literally, but I burned it on a pan so badly that I look forward to a very large, very glamorous scar that will almost certainly last for the remainder of my days.

The phone, of course, was the most critical issue at hand, because of course we have evolved to the point where we are completely non-functional without our phones. I had to ask people (!) in person (!!) how to navigate to the AT&T store to get a new phone, and when, upon arriving, I was told that I was welcome to ship my phone off to Apple and await a replacement that could take up to 5 business days (no), I ended up saying fuck it, and upgrading to the newest version - the iPhone 12 ProMax - for basically the same cost as the insurance deductible.

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