Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Practical solutions for small living spaces

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Our house is kind of small. It’s an old 1927 home built with beautiful hardwood and solidly built, but it’s small. The three bedrooms are small, the basements unfinished and there’s only TWO closets in the whole house. I guess back in 1927 people weren’t clothes hogs and didn’t need more than two closets in a home?

Given that our home is on the small side, or rather than some of the rooms in the home are on the small side I’m always trying to figure out ways to save space, not make the home look cluttered, and of course to give the illusion that the rooms are a little larger than they really are.

I’ve done that by carefully selection our home furniture, using various design techniques, including wall and ceiling color and of course all kinds of space saving organizers.

Right now it’s our “middle” bedroom that I’m thinking about. Our master bedroom is the largest bedroom, but by todays standards it’s probably smaller than most kids rooms! I think it’s 13 feet by 10 feet. Yeah, kind of small. Our middle bedroom is the second largest, and the one on at the south end of the house is, well, the size of a decent washroom. Really!

Anyway, we have our old double bed that we used in our apartment in the middle bedroom. What a comfortable bed that is. Unfortunately it literally takes up about 2/3’s of the room. Some day I’d like to use that room as a nursery, but until that time comes I was thinking that it could be used as a nice den.

If we got a murphy bed we could get rid of the double bed that’s in there. Murphy beds stand up against a wall and sometimes come with really nice cabinets that make them look like really nice standing cupboards. Certainly if we got one like that we’d get a bit of extra storage space on the sides of the unit.

The bed could remain hidden most of the time and the room could have a desk on the opposite side to be used for a computer or something. It might work.

I’ll have to think on this some more and investigate the cost of Murphy beds. It is a practical solution for small living spaces though.





We’ll be refinishing our basement soon

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I must be in a mood to redecorate. We should start refinishing our basement some time in the next month or so and I’ve got to find some furniture for what will be a rec room of a substantial size.

We do have a sectional couch that we plan to use in the basement but we need a bit more furniture to go with it. I’ve been browsing online and looking at various sites that sell indoor furniture and I really like some of the north carolina furniture at this store. It looks like it’s well made and I really like some of the styles.

Obviously we have to get the basement finished before I’ll really decide what kind of furnishings I want down there, but it doesn’t hurt to do a little window shopping ahead of time does it?

Getting out the Patio furniture

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Now that Spring is almost over, and summer’s just around the corner the warm weather had definitely arrived, we’ve been getting our garden and patio ready for summer entertaining.

Chris put together most of our patio furniture about two weeks ago. We take it apart each fall so that we can store it. When you live in a cool climate you can’t just leave it out or it’ll rust. I think he still has three of our bar stool like swivel chairs to put back together.

The only thing we haven’t put out yet is the teak outdoor furniture. We have a beautiful handcrafted table that’s made of recovered teak. It looks like it was made out of fallen logs or teak tree stumps. It’s beautiful and extremely heavy. Teak is a heavy wood. We keep it in our enclose porch through the winter.

Now, I know that teak is pretty much resistant to all forms of bug infestation, but the sun can bleach the wood. So each year we lightly sand the wood and then put a couple of coats of teak oil on the table. It looks gorgeous when it’s been freshly oiled, and when it gets wet the color of the wood gets richer and multiple shades of red wood to blond wood color seems to show across the top of the table.

Do any of you have teak outdoor furniture?

Our home reno project du jour

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I’m starting to get into that renovation mode again. Chris and I have been working on our house since the very first day that we got it. On the second day in our home we were taking out all of the wall to wall carpeting and knocking down three of the walls that sectioned off the living room dining room. We mean business when we get busy renovating!

A few weeks ago I bought a new domain that I might move my gardening blog over to at some point. Whether I do or don’t it’s going to be a Home and Garden blog and I’ll be talking about decor, interior design, home renovation as well as my love of gardening on that site. I haven’t done a thing with it but it will be located at homeandgardendiva.com.

We’ve taken photos of our projects as we’ve been doing them – again from day one. So I’m sure I’ll have lots of photos of our work on the new site. You’ve got to see our living room and dining room walls! I did them myself in Venetian plaster. I worked 18 hours a day for three weeks straight to finish 600 square feet of wall in a tri color venetian plaster of my own mix.

The walls are a lovely shade of yellow with light yellow and off white mixed in. Venetian plaster looks quite a bit like marble and it’s got a sheen to it from all the hand polishing I did when I did the job. I don’t have any photos on this computer or in my flickr account that do it justice right now. I’ll have to take some tomorrow and possibly add them to this post. However, it has a real Mediterranean or European feel to it like that of the Tuscany Villas. It’s beautiful.

The furniture in our Dining room is all antique, and our living room has a much more modern tech feel with our HDTV and leather couches and recliner. The walls pull it all together and make it look amazing. All we have to do in the room now is get the molding and our beautiful tin ceiling up!

Honest, I think that when I do eventually show you guys photos of our living room / dining room you’ll love it. The styles that I’ve put together are all different and I’m sure that it might not sound like it goes together as well as I’m telling you that it does, but just you wait. I’ll show you photos one day and you’ll see what I mean.

All we have to do is finish this job! I’m glad I’m starting to get into the mood to do it again. Oh and I’ve come up with a bribe for Chris too. He really wants to get a very expensive piece of equipment for his guitar. It’s about $500 but it has to be install into his guitar. It’s a special pick up if you want to know. His acoustic guitar does have a nice pick up but he wants to replace it with this deluxe one and put the old pick up in another guitar – another installation charge! I figure it will cost about $700 bucks to get this all done. My deal with him is that if he does go ahead and get this for his guitar we have to get started on our living room dining room project again – and get it done by sometime this summer. I think it’ll work.

Twenga – your UK shopping search engine

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logo-beta.gif Feel like doing a little shopping? Well if you happen to live in the UK you might want to gander over to Twenga. Twenga is a UK based shopping search engine that uses proprietary crawl technology in order to provide the best shopping deals for their members.

The site is easy to navigate. There are category listings on the left side of the main page, and all pages have category tabs across the top so that you can easily browse through the site without having to return to the home page first.

You can find just about anything you need on Twenga. You’ll find great deals on Photo equiptment, camcorders, digital cameras, mobile phones, MP3 players, computers, Household appliances, Homewares, Linen, Furniture, Gardening – DIY, Fashion accessories, clothing and many more products.

Another thing that I like about this site is that once you select a product that you want to know more about, for example this Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50, you can read a detailed description of the products. When you scroll down the product page you’ll see a list of online stores that sell this Panasonic model.

Other features that you might enjoy are the fact that you can read articles of the products that you’re interested in, as well as write a rating yourself. I believe that you can also rate the products that are listed as well.

If you happen to be browsing the site and see an item that a friend might like, perhaps some jewellery, you can click on the “Recommend to a friend” link that’s located directly under the product rating on the right of the product description and tell them about interesting item that you found.

It seems that they’ve thought of just about everything on this site that you might need.

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