textiles's Profile

I assume since you are selling in a few years, and don't want to spend a lot, that you are primarily going for resale value. In that case, do not change the cabinets, appliances, counters or floor. Here's why. If I'm a buyer that likes wood cupboards, I'm not going to appreciate your painting them. If I am a buyer who wants painted cupboards, I'm likely not going to want the color you painted, and that's just one more layer of paint on them that I'd rather not be there. (If I don't like your wall paint color, well, that is more easily changed, and needs repainting periodically anyway. Cupboards aren't easy to paint, and never need painting if you don't ever paint them.) If I'm going to rip out and do a remodel, then I also won't appreciate your spending the time or money to paint at all. For this reason, don't spend to add higher cupboards either. Ditto with counters - I won't like what you use, most likely, I'll perversely want something else, and so won't value any change if I'm doing a remodel. Ditto floors. And if you replace with stainless steel appliances, you likely won't put in ones as expensive as I want. Or if I'm remodeling, I may want different sizes of appliances. See, you shouldn't redo those expensive things if looking toward resale. Or even some of them - I hate new counters on most old cupboards, and I hate new appliances with many old cupboards. In my opinion, these things should be replaced together, when replaced.

Here's what you should do.

1. Definitely get rid of the vertical blinds - they are hateful and make the room look cheap. Look up Luminettes from Hunter Douglas - the best combinations of blind with curtain qualities. They can be opaque when closed, if you want them to be. I like these better than curtains for your use. They make similar ones for the window in horizontal, if you want them to match, look up their Silhouettes. Others make the window type ones as well, they may make the vertical ones for the doors, I just haven't seen them elsewhere, but I haven't looked. Expensive, likely, but not appliance-expensive, and totally worth it. It will totally change the look of your room, and they do look expensive. Better than curtains in terms of functionality for this use. I had some similar horizontal window ones, and they were great. Add a flat fabric valance over the window one if you want. I would not choose roll up bamboo shades - they look cheap to me, not expensive. Look at the smith and noble site for other ideas for good looking windows. I wouldn't make the windows one match the door ones, I might prefer something more easily cleanable over near the sink and stove, and go for wood, or fake wood (better for steamy locations) blinds above the sink, either in offwhite, or a lighter wood color (something like your table color, or the color of bamboo.)

2. Get some better lighting. It doesn't have to be expensive, just nicely designed. Not recessed or can lights. Add undercounter lighting, too. Lowe's, Home Depot work, and cheaply, if you choose well.

3. Get some rugs in there, flat woven ones in cotton, or outdoor ones, easily cleaned ones in any case. What your kitchen lacks is color. The brown and the white will look much better with color. If you hate rugs on tile kitchen floors, ignore this one, and just add color with little appliances, towels, paint, and artwork. But if you can deal with rugs, they will soften all the hard edges and tones in here a lot.

4. Paint the walls. Not a beige, grey, or brown - those are neutrals, you need to add color. The brown cabinets and white appliances will look better with color. Pick the paint and then choose rugs to go with it, or get rugs first (at least one under the kitchen table, if not also another in the main kitchen area to add color instead of the light neutral floor. I love bamboo mats underfoot in the kitchen, they add a level of softness, and are easy to wipe clean (the kind with thick slats glued to a backing, not the woven kind). In the medium color brown, sometimes called charred, the color we think of when we think of bamboo, they will tone down your dark brown cabinets, if you can't deal with color on the floor (though I prefer color in floorcoverings, and you definitely need color, not bamboo, under that table, as it is too close in color to bamboo. ) Or pick the rugs first, and choose a paint color from it. I would not go light, pastel color paint, or dark color, but a medium hue color, saturated but not really dark. With enough color to stand up to the brown.

5. Don't change the sink if you like what you have. Definitely don't change it just to change it if it is stainless steel - many of us prefer that. Do upgrade your faucet if you have a standard cheap one. Add some bells and whistles there - soap dispenser, good sprayer, etc. If you change the cabinet knobs, make sure that the faucet and the knobs are in the same metal color and finish, and have styles of the same era to complement each other.

6. It is hard to say without knowing your house, but if you have a style of house where crown molding would look good, then that would be a definite upgrade. If you have a modern house where adding crown molding would be a travesty (I've seen it), then don't.

7. Don't paint your table and chairs. I assume you like them just fine. If you don't, replace them. But don't paint them - that won't change their style at all. Just get new seat cushions in a lighter tone that goes with your new colors.

8. Add more color, in towels, artwork, pots, etc. Don't add color in the window blinds, stick to white/off-white there. Unless they are a bamboo colored wood tone for the window blinds.

9. Add a backsplash in tile if you like but don't go expensive, stay classic and cheap - remember, I may be planning a whole kitchen remodel. Don't get fancy - don't add accent tiles, or fancy patterns or borders (subway is not a fancy pattern, and would look fine, but I think regular square tiles - what are they, like 4 or 5 inches square, would look good here). Don't spend a lot, I may be ripping it out. But don't be afraid to use color here, you've got enough neutrals in here. Or skip it, and just paint the wall in your nice new color.

Your builder's kitchen looks better than any kitchen I've ever had, since I've lived in really old buildings that I prefer. You don't need to change much, really.

It totally depends on how much you want to spend. I haven't read the reviews of that sofa, but no cheap upsholtered furniture is going to have great reviews over time, it just isn't. It doesn't wear well over time. If you want something that will last, you have to spend more. If you want something cheaper that looks good for now, that's another strategy, just don't expect to look good for long, or last over time. That said, world market stuff looks pretty good for the price range, as does pier one. I wouldn't go walmart, west elm, or most of cb2 (some cb2 looks sturdier, depending on the model). Ikea is a mix of good and crappy stuff, you have to choose well, but good ikea is better than most or all of west elm, in my experience. Room and board seems good for the price on most sofas, as does crate and barrel. There is something about this sofa's design though, with its pillows resting against a low back, that makes me think the design wouldn't hold up well with use over time, unless it was made by someone very high end, like roche bobois high end...gus modern looks like good quality to me.

Just don't add more beige or brown. Seriously. You don't say whether you have furniture already, or not, or are open to getting rid of (beige and brown) furniturne and starting over.

Obviously, if you want to paint, find out if you can. But depending on how long you will be staying, I'd think twice about bothering to put in the time or the expense. I found that colorful artwork, rugs and furniture could brighten up brown walls I hated in a rental (which I could have painted, but only at my expense using landlord's painter.) I invested instead in colorful furnishings I could take with me, and I'm glad I did - they made those brown rooms look great, and look good in my next (not brown painted) place as well.

You know what bugs me more than beige paint and brown wood accents in a room? People who buy all neutral furniture that looks all brown and beigy - there they at least have a choice to choose color, and they choose not to. This idea that color has to be limited to pillows and accents, and only one or two colors, drives me nuts. As does the idea that your couch has to be neutral, or even one color. Don't go beige, camel, brown, or even dark green, red, or burgundy...yuck. Go with a blue couch - there are gorgeous ones out there, and it will look good with or a your browns, or a multi-colored classicly beautiful fabric (this is what I did). Then you have lots of colors to pick up on all over the room. Or choose any other lush color - gold, yellow, orange, tomato red, purple, whatever you like that isn't dark, but rather deep and saturated color. I haven't done this, as I can't live with carpeting due to allergies, but I hear people put nice oriental rugs over beige carpeting (just use the proper padding underneath for such) to cover up the beige all the time. Or start with a rug you like, and then pick up on colors in it for your couch and other chairs. Add curtains. Normally I like offwhite or linen, but in your case, I'd add color, and possibly suble pattern as well. Painted furniture you can buy looks really nice, for a piece or two, but you may not need it with all the fabric colors and artwork you are going to add - you may very well be able to add brown furniture and have it look fine. And don't limit yourself to one color (white is not a color I'd add with all the beige), pick at least 4 colors you like together, and go town adding variations of these colors.

I think it would be really cute, depending on your decor. It could be your take off for your style - a sort of slightly untidy classical british upper-crust thing, where the fine things are in a state of decay (and I mean that in a good way.) And I wouldn't line them up evenly at all...spoils the effect. I'd only apply them by sewing them, like I used to sew them on the elbows of my shetland wool sweaters in college.

I think many of us are talking apples and oranges here. References to putting stuff in the attic, garage or basement, or machine room, make that clear. Apartment dwellers live differently. We have none of the above (unless our apartment comes with a storage room, or we pay to rent one, but I say why pay to store junk, I'd rather get rid of the excess, but then it is challenging to have the time and desire to do so.)

Raised by thrifty, depression era parents (who had an attic, garage and basement, which is why the house could be tidy), I still feel I should keep things I may have a use for again, even when I've intellectually realized that doesn't work with apartment living. Sometimes it works - the rug that sat rolled in the closet for years, because I didn't have room for it in my last apartment, with me telling myself all the while I should get rid of it since I wasn't using it and it was just taking up space, worked perfectly in the hallway of my next place, and I still loved it. Sometimes it doesn't work so well.

Apartments (including most condos and coops) never have enough storage space for those raised to store - even larger apartments, as there are never enough closets to make up for the lack of attic, garage and/or basement space. When my "friends" who own houses cruelly comment on something I have around, I say I'd be fine if I just had a basement, a garage or an attic to store stuff in, just one of them would be enough. They envy my wonderful city locations - there's a trade off in space in that choice, not always in living space, but definitely in convenient, home-based storage space. I've realized I have to rent an offsite storage space to make up for it, and that I have to be OK with that expenditure. Still, that's a pain for stuff you want to use without having to travel to.

I'm trying to reduce stuff as well. I was tidy as a child because I was required to be and was allowed to have basically nothing. I don't recommend this as a strategy for raising children. I still feel like I deserve to have nothing as a result, as that's the message I got, (no matter how well-adjusted we looked to those outside the family, and boy, did we really, really did appear to be, whatever was going on at home), which is why having stuff I like feels so good to me now. My mother adhered to her cleaning schedule daily, until we were old enough that she could make us clean and do laundry and iron and cook and bake for hours on end, but she was totally unemotionally available to her children. She never saw the need - was never raised with that herself. There are more important things in child development than keeping a house really tidy and clean, and keeping your kids' stuff to a bare minimum. And it isn't just using the time you might otherwise spend cleaning to have real relationships with your children. If they are going to pursue interests that shape them, they will have too much stuff - be it collections, sporting equipment, musical instruments and sheet music and music recorded on media that takes up room, or art supplies and artwork, or whatever. This is what allows a child to develop their own interests and become who they are, to grow up feeling like they can be a musician, an artist, an athlete, or whatever their passion is. You can't do this well when you aren't allowed to have any stuff. It seems highly narcissistic to prevent children from developing their talents because it interferes with parents' ideas of what children should have, or do, or become. I have a friend whose apartment is rarely tidy, often a mess, overstuffed with her kid's stuff, to the point where I come up with ideas to have a place to store everything for her, but her child can confide in her mother about most things and feels loved, and also is free to pursue her talents in music, art, and sports, and whatever else she fancies as her current projects. That's the better way to raise a child, if something has to give (and in an apartment, something usually does have to give.)

Due to huge student loans and years of self-funded education, and living in expensive cities, I didn't have enough disposable income to have stuff for a few decades after I left home. I was still really, really tidy then. Once I had some money, I got stuff. But I was working all the time, and had neither the time nor the energy to organize it. So I became less tidy. Life changes one. We don't all end up the way we started out. The only time I would really want to clean then was when I had to go to work on the weekends...then I wanted to stay home and clean. (If I didn't have to work, I'd want to go do something else, not clean.)

I like organing stuff and finding a place for everything, but that is a time consuming task, and it is usually expensive to buy the stuff to organize and store stuff into in new apartments each time I move. And it feels wasteful, as the stuff I bought to organize and store stuff in the kitchen and bath and closets often doesn't fit in the next place. I buy it anyway, to get organized. Someday, I'll stay put, and once I get stuff where I want it, I won't have to redo it all by moving again every few years. But if I'd stayed put all these years, life would not have taken me the interesting places it has taken me. There are choices we make in how we live, and many trade offs, and no reason for the tidy or the untidy to be smug about their choices, really. We all do whatever we feel most compelled to do, whether we even think it is how we ideally want to live, or not. Many of the choices we make about this stuff are not conscious, or even consciously under our control.

Of course you are worried about security with a mostly glass door - but you have large windows right next to it. How do you secure those windows? Do you have them on alarms? Would you be comfortable with a glass door on alarms, or do you want a more sturdy door? Because it seems to me that one could just as easily come in through a window as a door (though they might be a bit more obvious to passers by as housebreakers, so I can see why a more secure door would be wanted. Though I'd also secure those windows with something more than locks.

Also, with a mostly glass door, it is nice that it lets light into the home, but for privacy reasons, you'll likely want to cover the windows up with curtains or blinds, so you might as well go with a more solid wood door instead. Unless this opens to a small entry foyer with a more solid wood door a few feet behind it like some older houses - is that the case? In that case, a mostly glass door might make sense.

There are period appropriate doors that are mostly wood, with three small panes like you have there, only in a horizontal line, with trim that is appropriate to an older period. I'd look for salvage doors from old homes in similar sizes (they can be altered some to fit your door opening.) And if I couldn't find one that worked, I'd design one from photos of ones I liked (or actual doors that aren't the right size), and have a carpenter make one from scratch for me.

Depends on what sort of person you are, and how you want to live in the space. If you the sort who would leave the bed open almost all the time, and just close it up when you have company, or want to use the space differently yourself, then I wouldn't get a murphy bed - I'd get a sofabed instead. Murphys are really expensive, and comfortable sofabeds can be gotten much more cheaply. Also, a sofabed (especially one that can be taken apart when you move) will have much more applicability in your next places, if that matters to you. Besides being expensive, a murphy must be securely fastened to the wall, which can present other problems (getting it done well to begin with; fixing the wall back when you move), and may not fit well onto a wall in your next place.

I'm of the sort who would never do a murphy except in a space too small for a bed, or in a pied-a-terre. For a place I slept all or most nights, I'd want a real bed. I'm lazy, and don't like to open and close things all the time. And, I like a really comfortable mattress to sleep on. So I'd likely go with a real bed.

The options mentioned above of putting the long side of the bed against the wall with big pillows and using it as your couch is a good one, especially if you like firm beds (get a foam one), as is the time-honored way of dividing a long studio (also mentioned above) by separating the room into two spaces by placing the headboard in the middle of the room (works well with a couch on the other side of the headboard, but could also work well with two armchairs flanking a small table, or a desk, or a small dining table, or a harvest table (long narrow table that opens up wider with a long flap) that could flexibly be used for work or dining, or as console when closed.

Because I like a comfy mattress, I likely wouldn't go with a sofabed here, as you've got the room for a real bed.

If you have a phobia about people seeing, or sitting on, your bed, then go sofabed or murphy. Or if you don't want to see your own bed, and are sort of OCD about closing and opening stuff every day, and want to do that all the time, go for it.

Yes, it sounds like you rented it furnished, but I'd never sleep even a night in that small space. It will never feel anything but claustrophobic to you, if it feels claustrophobic to you now. Sure, there are people on here who don't find it so, but you aren't them, or you wouldn't be writing this post. Sleep below.

If there is, or you can add, a sofabed, below, sleep on that. If not, take that mattress down and sleep on it on the floor below. If the space is too small, stand the mattress up against the wall during the day (behind a couch works well with those ikea mattresses.)

Use the loft for storage, or a lie-on-the-floor-and-do-relaxation-exercises space, with some walls lined with very low shelves (1 shelf high) - it isn't fit for any other use by an adult...which I presume you are. Small children (old enough to not fall off) could have a blast doing all sorts of things up there, but you? sadly, no.

I get the anxiety thing, as I'm one who has gotten messier as I get older, as my life got considerably more stressful. I also think that it is harder to keep neat as you age and (usually) collect way more stuff. When I had little stuff, it was easy to keep it neat. In my poorer college years and twenties, I could always have people over for dinner spur of the moment in a neat home, with just 10 or 15 minutes to tidy up first.

I'd like to get back to that. I think that will require two things (and I don't want to be cleaning for some period of time every day, as articles suggest is necessary) - that would require (1) reducing significantly the amount of stuff I have - all the stuff that can tend to get disorganized - because, I find, that even if I create an organizational system, with a place to put everything, if there is a lot of that stuff, it is too hard to keep it organized all the time, even if there is a place for everything. So, stuff needs to go - this includes clothing, papers, kitchen stuff (dishes, pots, etc.), bathroom stuff (medicine cabinet and grooming stuff), and, unfortunately, books - I've got too many to organize anymore; and (2) once I reduce enough to create more order, hiring a cleaning professional to clean for me. Then, I figure, with someone else doing the actual cleaning, only the keeping things organized is left to me. I do like a place clean, but I clean really well, and don't feel like organizing stuff after I'm done with cleaining - I'm ready to go out and do something else.

I didn't stress about organization when I led a more minimal life due to lack of finances (or rather, the focusing of all of my finances on education and then paying student loans), and I would like to get back more toward to the minimal home style. I do think that would make for less stress. It is a circle - life/work got more stressful, so I got messier at home, which creates its own stress after a point.

I tend to be on the messy (but clean) side, but I do like creating organizing spaces where everything goes somewhere. I tend to have an organized kitchen, so I can find stuff to cook, and an organized bathroom (as that's where I have to get ready to look good and leave the house.) When my kitchen gets messy, I find I don't want to cook in it much until I get it clean and organized again. Because I have system of organization in there, that is possible to do when I have both the time and the desire to do it. Same with the bathroom. These are the first two rooms I get oganized each time I move.

Moving every few years creates its own organizational challenges. Sometimes, I have to buy kitchen and bathroom furniture to create storage in old homes that lack it - or get things to retrofit inside cabinets to make them useful - finding stuff to fit properly is something I enjoy, but it is terribly time consuming (not to mention expensive.) It takes a lot of time to get organized each time I move - so I don't think I will ever be truly organized until I settle somewhere more or less permanently.

I have yet to get an organized system for my papers at home. I was one who always had neat and organized files at home through my twenties, until I went back to school and started much for stressful work - all the organizing of the voluminous paperwork necessary at work made me stop filing and organizing when I got home (and I wasn't home much, as I worked longer hours). Getting papers organized at home again is a long term project I'm still trying to master. I know I know how - I did it for years - just lost the will to spend my spare time doing it. So the desk/office at home is uncomfortably messy, while at work I'm productively messy. The answer to both, I think, is to go digital. But the organizing of files on computers takes as much time as organizing paper ones, and you have to spend the time looking at a screen. I would like to have a life and work less document oriented, though that may not happen, as the need for documents (paper or digital) seems to keep increasing.

I think you will have to go with furniture that you assemble, or that comes apart easily, because even a slim sofa like the chloe, or slim danish modern one, if it fits through your second floor hallway, will have a tough time angling into the third floor, with that slanted wall just at the top of the stairs, and the wood wall next to the stairs. You could demolish that half-wall to get furniture up (as people often do with similar walls or railings to fit furniture down basement stairs), but it is likely not worth the effort here, since you will be bringing the furniture back down again when you remodel the top floor.