Yo Ottawa, what’s up?!

People say Ottawa is a boring town. I say… well, yeah, kind of. BUT, sometimes there’s cool stuff to do around here. Like this weekend. I’m going to start my Saturday off checking out the New Art Festival…

I went last year, and walked away with these two beautiful pieces of art:

“Pacifica VIII” by Roz Hermant

“Petit Puff 4” by Susan Bailie

Then tomorrow afternoon, it’s the Take The Plunge fundraiser for various Ottawa-area rescue groups…

Catahoula Rescue Ontario will have a booth at the event, and we’ll be there with our new foster, Gizmo. Well, his official name is Marshall, but he looks like a Gizmo to me so we call him Gizmo :-)

And on Sunday, I’m planning to go down to Brockville (about an hour from Ottawa) to check out the Tall Ships 1812 Tour…

Hope the sun stays out all weekend long!

Do you have fun plans for the weekend?

Whatever you do, have a good one!

When Hollywood came calling

Back in 2008, I posted pictures of my newly-decorated living room on the Rate My Space web site.

A couple of months later, I received an e-mail from the alleged producer for HGTV’s upcoming TV show, “Rate My Space”. She said that they were interested in using my living room as an inspiration location for the show. Uh, yeah, right, sure – I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck!

But being the curious sort, I had to at least play along. And after doing some spy work, it turned out that this was totally legit – OMG, Rate My Space wanted to put my living room on TV!

There were papers to fill out and a video to make and a couple of months of excitement and anticipation, and then it really happened – Rate My Space came to my house. Well, OK, to be honest, one camera man named Dan came to my house. But still, it was pretty freakin’ awesome! Dan was such a great guy – he was even willing to wear my crazy Canadian springy things on his head.

Our Skype interview with Rate My Space host & designer Angelo Surmelis didn’t happen because he was laid up in bed with a bad back that day. But I got to talk with Tayo & Mark, the couple that was getting a martini lounge makeover on this episode of the show. They chose my living room as one of their three inspiration rooms because they  loved the party-potential of my furniture arrangement.

 

This is how Angelo interpreted my living room furniture arrangement in Tayo & Mark’s martini lounge.

The shoot took an entire day and in the end, my clip on the show only lasted about a minute. But it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and a fun day of feeling like a Hollywood star :-)

If you’d like my living room to appear on your TV show, give its agent a call ;-)

Boone Hall Plantation

Chances are, you’ve seen this house before:

It’s Boone Hall Plantation, which served as Allie’s family’s summer home in the The Notebook. It was also in a little movie called North and South. It’s located about 30 minutes east of Charleston and is really close to where we stayed on Isle of Palms. It’s also the home of the beautiful Avenue of Oaks.

Boone Hall Plantation dates all the way back to 1681when a land grant of 470 acres was given to Major John Boone and his bride Elizabeth as a wedding present from Elizabeth’s father, Theophilus Patey. But it wasn’t until 1790 that a house was constructed on the plantation. The original house is long gone – the house that’s standing here now is actually not all that old – it was built in the 1930s by Canadian Thomas Stone.

Thomas Stone had to return to Canada around 1940 and never returned to Boone Hall. The McRae family bought the plantation in 1955 and it’s still owned by the McRae family. They live in the upper storey of the house, so only a few rooms on the main floor are open to the public. Cameras aren’t allowed inside the house, and this is the only picture of the interior that I was able to find online (thank you Julia at Hooked on Houses!)

I’m guessing these pictures are pretty old, because the rooms are quite a bit different now.When you're looking at the front of the house, the dining room is to the right of the front door. I want to say it’s red – I’m almost positive it is! To the left of the front door and a few steps down is the library. It’s got a super-high ceiling and the walls are painted a really dark purple that looks almost black. Close to this colour – AC139N Aubergine from Color Guild

There’s gorgeous crown moulding and trim. and tall built-in book cabinets around the room painted white. And lots of old furniture and knicknacks.

Straight ahead of the front door is a curved floating staircase. Under the staircase and through a doorway is sort of a conservatory. I REALLY wish I could have taken pictures of this room – the ceiling has curves and arches and is made from brick, and the floor is brick too. A wall of windows and doors look out over a brick patio.

The plantation was open to the public in 1957 and great efforts have been made to preserve the original structures and gardens. This smokehouse is the oldest building on the property – it was built in 1750 using bricks made on the plantation.

Something that we don’t seen on brick structures here in Canada – mortar with shells!

There are also nine of the 27 original slave cabins still standing that date back to around 1800. This section of the plantation is called Slave Street. For me, Slave Street is the most fascinating part of Boone Hall. Each cabin tells a part of the story of slavery, from the very beginning right up to the end of slavery in 1861. The story continues from post-slavery right up to icons of the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. I spent a long time reading the plaques on the walls and watching & listening to the presentations in each cabin. Very sad, but fascinating as well. Slaves at Boone Hall Plantation grew rice and indigo crops, and they also made bricks. The slave cabins were made with the brick “seconds”.

The Gullah Theater is outside of the last cabin. Artist Zenobia Washington delivered a wonderful presentation about Gullah. Slaves came to America from different areas of Africa and spoke different languages. The Gullah language and culture evolved primarily in South Carolina and Georgia from all these different African languages and backgrounds. Zenobia makes and sells these colourful dolls at her presentations (I bought the dolls in the middle and on the far right in the bottom row).

I could have spent the whole day at Boone Hall Plantation, exploring and taking in all the history and culture. If you ever go to South Carolina, definitely make time for a visit.

Happy weekend!

Easy as A-B-C: Home office makeover

Well, maybe not exactly easy (and it definitely wasn’t fast!), but this makeover was a lot of fun :-)

Have I mentioned that when we moved into our house in 2001, almost the whole house was painted green? This was the previous owner’s gun room. Seriously. There were bullet casings sitting on the ledge when we moved in. The green walls and orangey wood trim is just icky. Not crazy about the parquet floor either.

At one point, I repainted the room brown and turned it into a guest bedroom. But that didn’t work out so well because nobody wanted to sleep in the basement. The purple guest bedroom on the main floor is way more popular! So I decided to turn the room into a home office. I love to write I wanted my office to be creative and inspiring, so I used this nursery that I found on Rate My Space as my inspiration:

The colours for my office came from the striped rug you can see at the bottom of this picture (I ended up returning the rug because it just didn’t fit properly in the room).

All the paint colours are Sico. From left to right – the walls are Powdered Iron 6173-31, the light letters are Iron Salts 6173-11, and the dark letters are Iron Rod 6173-52.

I created a letter mural in Adobe Illustrator. Hubby borrowed a projector from work one weekend, and we used it to project the AI file onto the walls. Good thing he’s so smart – he figured out how to project the image off a mirror and onto the wall to get it big enough :-) Then we traced all the letters onto the wall. And then it was the fun part – painting every single letter by hand. UGH! I taped off as many letter as I could, but the big C and the big Q were pretty much done all free-hand.

It was a big job and it took a LOT of patience. But I did it in chunks of a couple of hours at a time, and I got the letters painted in about a week.

Our dog Carbo died while I was working on the letter mural. Can you see my tribute to him at the right end of this wall??

I tried painting the small letters to spell words (see Laugh and Goals above?), but it was really hard painting the small letters, and they came out kind of sloppy. I found a printer in Ottawa (Business Cents) that could print the words for me on silver vinyl. Much faster and easier to stick the letters to the wall than to paint them!

 

As you can see in the two pictures above, the parquet floor is gone. We planned to have the parquet refinished. But when Luigi the flooring guy started to work on the floors, he discovered water damage that we weren’t aware of. Crap! Well, 50% crap – this meant we had to pull up all the parquet and replace it, which delayed things. But that gave us an excuse to get rid of the parquet that we didn’t like anyway :-) We got a deal on zebrano laminate at Home Depot. It was discontinued and they only had about 27 boxes, but that was enough for my little office, my craft room, and a friend’s sunroom :-)

At this point, there was a long gap in time before we made more progress on my office. Eventually, hubby drywalled over the steel I-beam and pipes that you can see in this picture:

And then we had to do something about that unfinished basement ceiling. We eventually came up with a design for a drop ceiling that looks like a coffered ceiling. Hubby also removed the one bulb in the middle of the room and replaced it with four pot lights.

The office door was originally a pinky oak pocket door in the kitchen. Hubby cut it down to size, and then I primed it and painted it white. I also painted the brass trim around the windows black, to emulate the black steel doors & windows that I love :-)

A tassel specially made by my blog friend Angela dresses up the door perfectly:-)

And then it was time to put the room together. Weeehoooo! At the time, I needed a drafting table for the Drafting course that I was taking, so I had to arrange the furniture differently than I’d originally planned. But that’s OK, because the revised layout works great. So with no further ado, here’s my finished office…

See the mirrored birds on the walls? They’re magnetic, and I attached them to the wall simply by finding the drywall screws – the metal screws attract the magnets :-)

 

I really wanted the Vika Glasholm glass desk top from Ikea, but none of the legs that I liked worked with this top. So, we designed and built the desk base :-) It’s walnut with purple heartwood in the corners. The glass sits on little rubber pads that are stuck to the top of the desk base.

As you can see, the glass top continues the alphabet/word theme :-)

I wanted a rug on the floor to add some softness and warmth, but I didn’t want anything too big because I love the zebrano flooring and didn’t want to hide too much of it. This faux lambskin rug from HomeSense is perfect :-)

I created a number of vignettes along the ledge. My mom made these A & Z ceramic bookends years ago, and now I have the perfect spot for them :-)

The two purple paintings are by my friend, New Brunswick abstract artist Matt LeBlanc. I made the turquoise painting years ago, but never found a place to hang it. I thought it would work well with Matt’s paintings…

The purple & turquoise of the paintings are repeated in the picture of the Amos Pewter shop in Mahone Bay, NS (might have to paint that frame one of these days)

Just to keep it real, this is how my office REALLY looks most of the time!

Hahahaa! Yep, I’m a slob! It’s all part of the creative process ;-) One last look…

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