Touring Ikea on My Butt

As some of you may know, I have been on crutches for about a month due to a stress fracture in my right foot. I've been sentenced to another two weeks of crutched life, but this time I have to be religious about it. No longer am I allowed to cast them aside to navigate the toddler toy minefield that is my tiny duplex, or to drop off the tiniest thing at a client's house (unless it can ride undamaged inside a backpack), and gawd forbid I try to measure much of anything myself. I seriously shouldn't complain though, since it is a stress fracture causing this grief and not a tumor...which is what the doctor originally thought my problem was. (Thankfully, he kept this little nugget of information to himself until he got the results of my MRI and saw I was in the clear.)

Doing much of anything while perched on crutches is hard enough, but shopping in particular can be exhausting. And taking on some place like Ikea on crutches? I knew I would give up about a third of the way through the maze unless I bucked up and drove one of those embarrassing scooter carts.

Yes.

Yes, folks, today I did drive the scooter cart through Ikea. You know I didn't drive a bazillion miles out to BFE Round Rock to have the yellow shirts carry my lifeless body out on a hand truck. Much like renting a motorcycle in Bermuda though, driving a scooter shopping cart takes a bit of a warmup and even after I got the hang of it, I was "realigning" pallets of merchandise right and left. Obviously, I tried to be extra careful around the breakables...

But let me tell you, despite my initial embarrassment and the Saturday crowds and tight aisles that left about 45% of the merchandise inaccessible to me, I had FUH-UN (2 syllables) driving that electric cart through the store. Oh. My. Goodness. Yes.

In fact, it was so much fun, I think I'd like to try it on a weekday when I can REALLY whip through the store. Maybe I could make a day of it and hit a few Target stores too. But of course I wouldn't dream of doing this after I'm released from crutches because I know that would just be w-r-o-n-g.

If you know of other superstores with scooter shopping carts in the Austin area and would like to help me create the ultimate Scooter Shopping Cart Extravaganza--and thereby help me enjoy crutch time to the fullest, please add your comments below.

#2 Keyword Search Phrase for July

Considering that this is a blog mostly about interior design and decorating, wouldn't you assume those words would rank at the top of the keyword search phrases that drive people to my website?

Well, you'd be wrong this month.

The highest-ranked keyword search phrase so far for July is "room fu." Pretty normal.

What follows "room fu" is not "interior design" or "interior decorating" or even "austin designer."

The keyword phrase that comes in at number two is "mikey verdugo shirtless."

Seriously?

So of course this made me very curious and I did my own search using this keyword phrase...and discovered this article, which reveals that Mr. Verdugo, of HGTV's Design Star fame, evidently had a few star turns before his stint at HGTV, and not of the design variety.

The dude did gay bondage porn!

Having participated in the Design Star casting process before, I know they specifically ask you if you've got any skeletons in your closet that could embarrass the network.

I'd be willing to bet that this type of thing would fall into that category, Mikey!

My Clients are the BEST!

I recently began working with a photographer on his new studio space and the subject of a rust effects paint I used on the fireplace below came up.


While discussing the (exciting) possibility of using this material on the main entrance wall, I mentioned the problems we had when the sealer was applied over the rusted finish on this fireplace. All of the beautiful rust patterns disappeared and the whole look was destroyed. It was so disheartening that the homeowner, who'd applied the rust surface originally, couldn't bring herself to repeat the process and hired me to tackle the second round. We didn't seal it this time, so the question my photographer client and I were pondering was, would the unsealed rust rub off?

I called the fireplace client to get some reconnaissance info and this is the message she returned:

"I have no idea if the rust would rub off, but if you'd like me to go rub my butt against it to see what happens, I'm happy to do that. Love you!"

Do you see why I love my people?!

TGIF

You thought the Segue was a crazily-designed people mover? Get a load of the Conference Bike!

I'll take one in orange please! Seriously, how fun would it be to take this down to the veloway?!

Also on the design-related video front, IKEA has some adorable, animated cartoons ("IKEA Madness") that give you the background on how some of their products were designed. Some of them are incredibly informative, all of them are entertaining. As with everything else that IKEA does, these cartoons are simple, fun, and endearing. Click on floating Swedish designer heads and find out their stories!

A Desperate Appeal to House Hunters' Suzanne Whang

Dear Suzanne Whang,

Tonight's episode of House Hunters was the last straw for me. I cannot idly sit by while you continue to allow such hair and wardrobe travesties occur to your person. You may work for a cable network but it's the same network who gave Danielle Hirsch a rockin' do when she became David Bromstad's color assistant on ColorSplash, and both Hirsch and Bromstad flash pretty stylish attire on their show...so we have proof that HGTV likes a good fashion makeover. It's high time you lost the kiddie barrettes--you're not pulling off the cool indie barrette thing hipsters might sport--what you're doing looks like something I did back in the third grade. You know, where you take a little chunk of hair from the front of your face and clip it to the other hair above your ear? On both sides? Trust me, this is not a good look for you.

It's not really a good look for anybody.

And why, Suzanne, why all of the old lady knit polyester tops that appear to be from JC Penney catalog, circa 1983? That waist band line we see beneath your knitwear looks just as bad as a panty line. Seriously.

Now, I'm not going to suggest that I don't have reason to worry that Stacy London and Clinton Kelly will surprise me at any given moment with an offer to appear on What Not to Wear...but I'll claim a few hardships as a result of shopping issues due to my dress size and the fact that the fashion industry cannot get it through their thick skulls that there are plenty of voluptuous women out there who do not want to wear clownish prints.

However, YOU are adorable and tiny and have silky hair and a youthful complexion, but you're not doing anything with it. You have no excuse and you are wasting your good years by dressing like an old woman. What's next? Garish makeup colors and a bad dye job a la the retirement set? Incidentally, when I tried to find a picture on the Web to illustrate the badness that is your style...I could not find one single photo of you in those barrettes. There are tons of pics of you looking like this:


...so we know you know better.

Use your powers for good, Suzanne. That is all.

The Emperor's New Tree Slice

OMG, this definitely falls into some sort of alternate reality. They are selling this WOOD SLICE at West Elm for...

...wait for it...

...wait for it...

$29.

No, that wasn't a typo or a misprint (at least not here, you could make a case for it possibly being an error on their site). They are really selling a wood slice for nearly thirty bucks. ONE wood slice!

Now I can appreciate that the main office is in Brooklyn (I believe), and they did specify that it's an acacia wood slice--the implication being that this is a super rare tree slice and should be coveted accordingly-- but let me pass on a little secret to you West Elm people:

Trees and slices of same are readily available all over the country.

If you, the reader, are looking at this tree slice and saying to yourself, "man, I have really got to get me one of those $29 tree slices," then I will make you a deal. I will sell you a tree slice for $20 and we will both make out like bandits.

But let's keep it on the down-low. I still rent.

Honda Fit + Ikea = Luv

I continue to be amazed by my new Honda Fit. Today I brought home the following from Ikea:

1. A 58"x58"x15" cube-style bookcase, which will inspire organization in my workspace so my husband will stop comparing us to the cobbler's kids who have no shoes.


2. A 45"x30" desktop (attaches to bookcase), where the design magic will happen when I (a) find a sucker...er, I mean lucky recipient...to take my decrepit old desk for free, or (b) the Salvation Army comes to haul the trash...I mean valuable vintage property...away


3. A 15"x 20"x27" filing cabinet-slash-future-resting-place of the behemoth laser printer, which, come to think of it, only prints one color and yet is five times the size of the 6-printer-cartridge color printer


4. Two 25"x65"x7" shoe storage cabinets, for a client


5. Two rugs


6. Six curtain panels


7. Four curtain rods & various/sundry curtain rod parts


8. One $1.99 trash can purchased to replace our old and yucky-looking bathroom wastebasket but is sadly too large to fit in the space around the toilet


9. Ten storage bins (see number 1)


10. Two lights


11. Six chocolate brown magazine storage containers, which I'll have to go all the way back to Round Rock to return because I forgot they were in my cart when I discovered the bookcase/desk was available in black/brown finish and was too busy doing mental cartwheels over finding the furniture in a dark finish to think about how boring and sucky solid brown containers in a dark wood bookcase would look.


12. Media storage box. In solid brown. Yeah, that has to go back too.

It should be noted that I went to Ikea for items 4-7 above...otherwise I would've eliminated the following items from my car, prior to my trek to Ikea:

1. Two incredibly annoying Leap Frog child development toys given to us recently by a dear friend--who said, "Phoebe might enjoy these 'A-B-C' games," when what she really meant was, "get this the hell out of my house."
   
   
2. 26 plastic 3D letters that fit into the Leap Frog child development toys, thereby setting off their incredibly annoying and repetitive "dinks," "doinks," and songs that will never leave your brain, no matter how much Gnarls Barkley you drown your sorrows in


3. One pair pink Disney Princess sunglasses


4. One pair aqua Ariel (The Little Mermaid, to those not in the know) sunglasses


5. One Cinderella magnetic activity kit, which is all-but-impossible to open while driving and requires 47 minutes to pry the 246 magnetic "snap apart" Cinderella dresses/gloves/shoes/flowers from their original magnetic pages--which, based on personal experience, I don't recommend doing while driving


6. 1 purple sippy sport cup, last seen in 2007--which pre-dates my Fit, thereby proving that somehow the purple sippy sport cup has mastered teleportation and time travel.


7. Ubiquitous gargantuan child safety seat, the likes of which keep my precious 3-year old dumplin' safe. And I'm certainly not complaining about that, but if it were 1969 and my mom was taking stuff home from Ikea in her Honda, she would've been able to at least add a sofa to this list of carry-on items, because according to the gov'ment at that time, I could safely sit in her lap while she drove, and pretend to steer all the way home.


8. 35-pound monster purse whose straps refuse to stay on my shoulder and causing the re-emergence of chronic lower back pain because it is filled with designer tools I can never leave home without: i.e., mega measuring tape, digital camera, notebook, fat wallet stuffed with 10 lbs.-worth of receipts, at least one client file, and various fabric samples, paint chips, and tile samples


9. One beaten and torn Baby Style sack (classy!) containing 4,372 individual paint chips in several mangled Zip-lock bags (even classier!), which don't look half as sophisticated and designer-y as whipping out a couple of cute fan decks during a paint consultation, but are much easier to leave with a client (the sacrifices I make for you people!)


10. 23 children's books, which are infinitely less annoying than Leap Frog child development toys


11. 2 tool kits--one for work-related odd jobs, and one for the car--which I desperately hope to gawd never to need/use, especially in the rain or in the sweltering heat of the summer


12. One super huge light and tripod, rented so I can photograph a 2BR/2BA apartment in the Amli on 2nd Bldg downtown that I just finished decorating and want to add to my online portfolio (cue the shameless plug to watch for these pictures in next month's Room Fu email blast!)


13. Giant painter's canvas purchased in a fleeting moment of confidence/desperation when I couldn't find appropriate art for a bedroom I'm trying to finish and thought I could somehow channel my inner David Bromstead. (I could not.)

Who knows how much else I could've bought from Ikea if I'd kept a neater car.

Is 41 too old to be a PB Teen?

Jennsylvania beat me to the punch recently. After reading her blog entry about how much she loved the PB Teen catalog, I was reminded of telling Jeb a month or so ago that I wanted everything in their most recent collection. The couch above is so totally me, and would undoubtedly take a beating from my 3-year old. I also love their study area org stuff (although they're way pricey for what you're getting) and have long wished I were young and svelte enough to get up out of their low lounge sectionals without a lot of groaning and work involved. I just love their boxy, chunky shape. And this rug is too cool, I don't care how old you are:


I've been trolling the website and catalog periodically to find offbeat objects, but that last mailing--well, I felt like I was five years old again and going through the Sears Big Wish catalog. "I want everything on this page, and everything on this page..."

What does that say about me, that as a 41-year old designer, my guilty pleasure is the PB Teen catalog? I wish I could say I read it for the articles...

Speaking of the Pottery Barn, thank gawd they finally got out of the dang barn with this last catalog. I don't know about you, but the one before this was a little too Farmhand for my taste and went straight into the recycling bin. Sort of a poor man's Sundance Catalog...except I didn't even want to get all pretend cowgirl about it. Didn't want a thing in the Fall/Winter issues. Not that I'm a huge PB devotee or anything (aside from my recent obsession w/the Teen stuff), but this recent catalog is full of COLOR. And FUN! One might think the folks in the buying dept. must've gotten whiplash from the 180-degree style turn. Pretty smart too, and not just because of the change in seasons. With all the doom and gloom in the media lately, you can't help but smile when you see all this saturated color.

Top Design

As some of you know, I recently drove up to Dallas (and got 34 mpg in my 1-day old Fit!) to participate in open casting for Bravo TV's Top Design, their interior-design version of Project Runway. What an interesting experience that was.

First of all, I think I could tear down on this show. I'm a big Jonathan Adler fan and all, but this show exemplifies everything I'm fighting against in the world of interior design...the judges are so stiff and formal, the contestants are sent shopping with $50,000 budgets for a single room when most Americans wouldn't spend that chunk of change on the decor for their entire house, and it just flat out seems like a non-challenge to me to decorate and critique theoretical spaces, as opposed to rooms that have to withstand the test of actual use by live human beings. I know there are plenty of people out there with deep pockets supporting the industry as a whole so I'm not denying that the show is representative of an existing market...it's just not representing the majority of mine. I would love the opportunity to inject a dose of reality into that mix. After all, anyone can make $50K look good. (Some people can even make fifty grand look b-a-a-a-a-d.) To me, the bigger creative challenge is making $2,000 or $10,000 look like $50,000.

So back to the auditions...interviews...whatever you want to call them. I only found out about the open call 4 days prior to the scheduled date, when someone in Dallas emailed a bunch of Austin designers. I didn't even think about auditioning at first. I forwarded it to Jeb as an FYI and he immediately responded with, "you're gonna do it, right?"

Oh. Right.

I tied up my projects' loose ends as quickly as possible and dragged my application everywhere I went those four days so I could take advantage of unexpected idle time to answer their behemoth of a questionnaire. As with all things TV, they required a video, which I shot in the last five minutes before I got in the car. I didn't want to agonize over it for hours like I'd done when I tried out for HGTV's Design Star, Season 2. For this attempt I just wanted to be myself and not try to figure out what the producers were looking for. I'm willing to lay odds that what they ended up watching was a sweaty, nervous, freak because I'd just spent 15 minutes trying to do a 2-hr cleaning job on my living-room-slash-backdrop and I was anxious to get out of Dodge. I think I said something about being a designer who has stains on her rug (*gasp*, clutch pearls), introduced my three-year old to the camera and then yelled at her when she started running around screaming about what she wanted to show Daddy while I was taping. Looking back on it now, is it any wonder they didn't sign me up?

Oops, I let the cat out of the bag before I finished my story.


Things weren't supposed to start at the Dallas Market Center until 1:00 in the afternoon on the day of the casting call, but I had no idea what to expect in terms of turnout. When I polled a couple of clients, one said she'd get there the night before and camp out...the other said she'd plan to be there by 5 am at the latest. I couldn't hang with either of those options and settled on a 7 am arrival time.

I was the first dork in line.


All of the Top Design signage led to a darkened hallway, so I headed to the information desk to make sure I was waiting in the right spot. This matronly woman looked over her glasses at me and said, "they're not set up yet, I don't think they're starting until this afternoon." There was an unspoken emphasis on the idea that six hours early was about six too many. I said, "I know, I just wanted to make sure I had a decent place in line."

"Well, aren't you the early bird," she snidely remarked, still literally looking down her nose at me.

Yes, Snide Matronly Lady sitting behind your little podium/pedestal thingy, with your teased 1950s hairdo and your unfashionable glasses, I'm the one who's a dork in our little scenario.

I'm not saying I'm above Snide Matronly Lady, I'm just saying she's definitely not cooler than me and I'm already feeling fragile enough, what with the impending Judgement coming. She didn't have to make me feel like you-know-what because I showed some initiative.

So I sat in my little empty hallway with my Evian and my allotment of two Fiber One bars to get me through the day and waited for someone else to show up. I started debating whether or not I actually wanted to be first...was that a good thing or a bad thing? Would they mentally toss out the first applicant because there was no one to compare them to yet?

Thirty minutes later...just me.

An hour later...still, just me.

An hour and fifteen minutes later, two women unlocked the room and gave me another jab about being there so early. "I keep saying, it's not like American Idol, people," the blonde one muttered. As if being first in line was equivalent to waving my Crazy flag, screamin' and cryin' to get on TV.

Just as I started to take Blondie's advice and head over to the Starbucks kiosk, some pixie-ish woman showed up in vintage chic and my whole inner debate about whether or not I wanted to be first was tossed out the window. After waiting solo for nearly an hour and a half, could I allow this woman to be that cute AND first in line? But I already felt like a huge dork...wouldn't I clinch the doofus title by running after her and reclaiming my #1 spot?

Fortunately, the hallway was still bare when I returned with my chai. Pixie reappeared a few minutes later, and then there were two.

Applicant number 3 arrived about a half hour after Pixie Girl...a very average-looking woman from Denver who commented that it was unrealistic for them to send Season 1's designers to a garage sale or to Target--something that would "never happen in real life."

When I told her I was just as likely to shop at Target for my clients than anywhere else, she put on her nice face, when it was obvious she was thinking, "ew."

But I was also thinking, "ew," so we were even on that score.

It was at that moment I felt especially fortunate to work with the clients I have. I'm not saying I don't adore the jobs I get where money's not an object, because it's fun to run wild and live vicariously through that experience. But I find it infinitely more rewarding to break down the stereotype that hiring an interior designer is only for people who'd never buy home decor products from Target.

So no, you won't see me on Bravo this fall. But it was worth a shot, right?