Just a girl and her (huge, huge) ride.
If you're wondering why, exactly, I decided to rent a 16-foot truck and drive it from Los Angeles to San Jose, my feeling is that the answer should, at this point, be obvious:
For a chair, of course.
Every single plant you see in this photograph is fake. (Sorry, faux.)
Bonus: Spot the blogger in the mirror!
I've been singing the praises of fake plants practically since I started this site. There's a good reason for this: While I've gotten better at plant-parenting over time, I still kill about 30% of the greenery that enters my house. Sometimes it's nice to have a plant and not worry about killing it. But the past few months have seen my thing for artificial plants reach a whole new level, because apparently some focus group somewhere determined that there was a gap in the market for affordable plants that actually look real and are actually in cute pots that you'd actually buy yourself...and then Target went ahead and filled it.
Our bathroom is a dark, depressing cave. Both of them are, actually. When I decided to renovate them (and yes, I decided to renovate both of them at the same time, OBVIOUSLY, because why have one non-functioning toilet when you can have two?! WHEEEEEE), one of my major goals was to make them feel...well, like places I wanted to spend time in. As opposed to dark, depressing caves.
Which is to say: there is, at present, a large hole in our bathroom wall.
My hallway before I made it awesome.
I painted my hallway green before we moved into our house (or even saw it in person). I did this to a lot of things in my house, actually - painted them, tore them out, replaced them, et cetera - before we first stepped foot in it, because we bought it over FaceTime and I wanted to get as many of the bigger projects as possible done before we drove across the country and had to actually live in the place.
Sometimes this remodeling-via-WiFi turned out pretty well for me - with our light-grey floors, for example, which I continue to love - but the green hallway I regretted almost instantly. The color, which I'd envisioned as a cool mint, was a touch pea-soup-y in the non-existent light, and worked much better in my daughter's room - the spot I'd initially chosen it for.
OK, so perhaps this isn't "breaking," per se, as a Google search just informed me that H&M has been selling home decor stuff for...ahhh...a really long time. But whatever, I had no idea until yesterday, when my mom and I went into the H&M in midtown Manhattan and I just about collapsed from the gloriousness of all the pillows and candles and trays and mirrors, so we're calling it breaking news anyway.
IT'S SO GOOD, you guys. How did I not know about this before?!?! (The answer is that the H&Ms in my area don't have a home section, and H&M is one of those places that I tend to want to buy from in person rather than on the internet, so I can feel the quality for myself, so I'd never noticed the home decor section on their site, either.)
The pieces are chic and unbelievably well-priced - and there are a bazillion options for every room in the house, including a kids' department that totally schools Ikea's. And you know how H&M clothing is sometimes kind of "eh" in terms of its construction, and then other times you pick up a piece from them and end up wearing it over and over for years? The home decor items, from what I've seen, fall into that latter category: they're trendy, sure, but there are also lots of more classic-feeling pieces, and virtually everything I picked up looked and felt substantial and well-made. I'm serious when I say that I could happily decorate my entire home from the line. (...And since you can get all 20 of my favorite pieces online, I just might have to.)
