Recently in Apartment Category

We would like to get rid of this ASAP. $150 or best offer. Comes with a FREE matching table. The futon comes apart for fairly easy transport. We are in Carroll Gardens. Email abrooklynlife@gmail.com if interested.

Sometimes we let Winston and Sebastian romp outside. They look so happy:

So, I have had several photo shoots in my back yard where I attempt to take flattering photos of it. Greenery, it seems, is not my photo forte. All my shots feel jumbled and messy, with no clear point of focus and all the green blurs together. Auto focus seems no better or worse than manual focus.  Anybody out there got tips on taking shots of plantings (backyard, parks, nature walks, etc.) with a Canon EOS Rebel? Mine only seem to come out well when I'm doing a sharp focus on one plant with a blurred background. The moment I try to take an all-backyard shot, I can't seem to get the camera to focus on everything at once. Exposure on sunny days is also a problem. Grass looks fine, but white flowers have no definition... help! (Click on the photos for bigger versions.)

This is probably the best non-closeup I got, but even here, plants on right side seem out of focus:

Non-greenery shot I like:

Honeysuckle with birdbath in the background:

Closeup of plant cluster:

Closeup of one of my favorite plants:

On Saturday from 11am to 7pm, Design Just Out of Reach is having a sale (10-50% off), that may just put the store's furniture within reach. People who love floor samples take note.

Design Within Reach
76 Montague Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201-3305

Behold the bamboo stencil sample we've been working on perfecting. The finished product will be sprayed on a concrete wall in our backyard. Never bought spray paint in New York--will I have to sign my life away to get at the cans behind the chains and locks?

Dennis and I have been experimenting with making stencils (not easy when you have grandiose ideas about how complex said stencil should be). I posted a long, long time ago about Stencil 1, but I came across the company again in my search for examples of nice stencils. I'm particularly taken with how they've treated this room (photo below), using a lighter color with the stenciled image, instead of the traditional darker--I find it quite striking. Don't be surprised if it crops up on one of our walls in a future post.

I'm not the first of my friends to buy Flor tiles, but now that I've "installed" them for myself, I give them two thumbs up. Given a New Yorker's penchant for moving, it's hard to say what shape your next apartment will be and Flor tiles seem to eliminate the fear that the carpet you buy for your apartment today won't work in your next space. (They also stack nice and small in the case you want to store them.) We got the Rugby Stripe for our "dining room"--aka, the side of the living room where we have a table. My one complaint is that they come in 19.7" squares, and that made us have to go a bit bigger than we would have liked (12" squares would have been perfect).

Installation. Put down squares and then use these little sticky dots to connect the squares together to hold the rug in place:

The finished product sans table:

The finished product with furniture:

There's a lot of stuff in this teeny-tiny Brooklyn store that used to house a cosmetics shop. Stationery, T-shirts, jewelry, bags, even a full book of wedding invites pack Serimony. Kinda makes me think Tiny Living in the East Village could help the store make even more space for its wares.

The apartment is shaping up slowy but surely (see the kitchen here). Today, I painted the bathroom. Originally (up until about 4pm) the bathroom was going to be a light shade of blue to compliment (somehow correct?) the hideous blue tile on the floor--that is until I got the paint on the wall. It turned out to be more of a very light sherbert blue-green color that reminded me of my elementary school's bathroom walls. Every once in a while you make a $22 mistake that's best to admit and fix as quickly as possible. So I rebounded in the totally opposite direction, a dark stone gray. Had I to do it over again, which I do not, I might have chosen a slightly lighter color of gray.

Before ...
After...

The kitties even got a little present: a brand new kitty box. Our extra long cat Winston had outgrown the old one, a very cool Booda Dome. Hopefully the extra length and higher sides on this Booda Loo will solve the peeing-outside-the-box problems that were rather embarassing to poor Winston.