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home decor

in home

Finding Your Perfect Slab

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February 14, 2016
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There are few things in our new house that I am more excited about than our countertops. From the very inception of our new home, the vision was driven by picture perfect kitchens on pinterest which centered, of course, around a show-stopping countertop.

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I was originally disappointed by our builder’s selection of countertops but decided on classic carrara marble. Yes, I know that they can be fussy. And so, to balance that out, we decided to use a more durable dark granite around the cooktop because we know it will be impossible to keep that area clean. Again, our builder had a small selection and so we settled on something called Impala Black for our kitchen surround.

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in home

Interior Design by blackmana – App Review

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February 3, 2016
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Have you ever wanted to make an EXACT, to scale, blueprint of your future house so that you can plan out furniture placement, decor, and paint colors? I have! Which is why I started looking for iPad apps that would help me do this very thing.

Interior Design by blackmana is $8.99 in the App Store. This is by no means trivial. I normally only download free apps, and I will only actually purchase apps if I happen to have an iTunes gift card. I just so happened to have such a gift card. Even so, I think this is well worth it if making a replica of your home is important to you. This app has close to no in-app purchases and everything from furniture to textures to materials are included.

Let’s talk about the different features of the app. There are three different views.

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in diy

The best worst DIY Cheeseboard

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January 30, 2016
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We love to scroll through people’s blog posts, make snap one minute judgements about them, and then decide whether or not we want to like or pin them. What we don’t realize is how much time and effort might have gone into that blog post. For example, I did this just the other day when I saw a DIY Cheeseboard post on Coco + Kelley. I decided that was going to be my first DIY project. Even when gathering the materials that cost a grand total of $25 I made jokes about quitting my day job and becoming a cheeseboard artisan. Let’s just say it is a good idea that I did not do that.

$25 dollars of material

+ 8 man hours (due to my incompetence not because it should take this long)

= a product worth probably less than $10 (again due to my incompetence)

Having said that, I LOVE my cheeseboard. Mostly for the memories, the laughs, and the incredible amount of fun I had on my first real DIY project. You can find the original Coco + Kelley post here. And below you will find my personal interpretation of that post.

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in inspiration

Style Inspiration: NYC Restaurant L’Amico

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December 27, 2015
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These days no matter where I am, a restaurant, a coffee shop, a clothing store, a friend’s house, all I see are possible design ideas and inspiration. This was no different at L’Amico, a bright, modern farmhouse of an Italian restaurant with an open kitchen and wood everywhere.

What I noticed upon entering the restaurant was that I loved everything about it. It made you feel hip and yet at home at the same time. The front wall of windows had been retracted so that the whole restaurant was open to the busy streets of Midtown Manhattan and yet it still felt cozy. I began collecting observations so that I could understand how this ambiance was created.

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Open Kitchen: You can see the chefs hard at work in the background of the photo above. It was essential to me when choosing a floorplan for my own home that the kitchen be open to the family room. To me, a kitchen is a family room and they should naturally just be parts of the same room. This is how you achieve that feeling of warmth.

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in inspiration

Style Inspiration: $2.4 Million Mansion

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November 15, 2015
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When your local paper features a story on a new model home with a two story master closet, you go. Thus my lazy Saturday style adventure began. After you choose and purchase your new home, there seems little reason to continue looking at model homes. But this is actually the most beneficial time to go to model homes. As I mentioned in my previous post Model Home Mirages, model homes set a pretty unrealistic expectation of what your home is going to look like. They have all the bells and whistles and are decorated so fine, that you feel like you’re in a Better Homes and Gardens magazine.

And that is EXACTLY how you should see it. Now that I’ve already chosen my home, I am using this opportunity to walk through model homes only focusing on the amazing interior design. Instead of buying magazines for $10 a pop, I can simply drive to a few local model homes and experience the designs first hand; walk through the living exhibit, touch it, live it, and figure out what I want in my own home. Therefore price doesn’t matter and of course I chose to walk through a $2.4 million dollar, 5000 sq ft monstrosity.

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