Elizabeth Licata's Profile

Oh, the skull bottle isn't a Crystal Head vodka bottle, but it was originally designed for alcohol. All the liquor shops in town have collections of proprietary spirits like armagnac, absinthe, kirsch, sherry, and some clear liquors that I'm a little afraid to drink because I'm sure they're positively deadly. They're priced by volume, and you buy a bottle or bring one in and fill it up from the tap at the store. The skull was one of the bottles the nearest store was using for that.

The blue stuff is innocent, though. It's just Listerine. I couldn't fit the Listerine bottle in the storage baskets, so since it was going to have to be out anyway I I just transferred the liquid to the skull bottle.

The counters are actually just a pretty low-end laminate. It's not even IKEA level, really. My husband is laughing because they apparently look good in photos, when in real life they're basically a big woodgrain sticker. I think they're probably from Bauhaus, which is like a Home Depot.

The bust vase came from Pip and Estella; I think it's vintage. I had a little collection of head-shaped things going on for awhile. It sort of freaks my husband out, but I love them.

@artnerd - the ladies are all crying because Danjûrô VIII is dead. It's a big picture celebrating his celebrity by showing all his various distraught female fans mourning him. There's a nun in the crowd, and a high-end prostitute. There's even a crying cat! (It's unsigned, but likely attributable to Kuniyoshi, because the cat stands in as a signature.)

I did this recently, and my total came out to around $700, all-in. (That included buying paint and caulk and some tools I didn't own, like a saw and a hammer.) Mine is five Billys wide, plus height extenders on top. I love it, though. I'm very happy with the results. Also, I'm renting. These aren't really attached to the walls, they just look it. And nothing permanent was done to the space, so when it comes time to move I can just pry off the molding, dismantle the Billys, and go.

I just do it in the middle of the floor and then try to walk around it. I really need to stop spray painting in the apartment, but I don't see that happening in the near future.

I ask my husband's opinion whenever I do anything, but it just stresses him out. He's wholly not visual. For years, whenever he would buy furniture or rugs or anything he would buy the most neutral thing in the store, and I was really nervous. "Are you secretly into minimalism and neutrals and just haven't been telling me and going along with all the crazy things I bring home? I can work with that if you are!" But he was like, "No, I just can't tell what anything will look like next to any other thing unless it's there. So I get the plainest thing in the store so I don't have to worry about it."

I was still worried until I realized he liked the crazy things I brought home and thinks everything I like is fantastic. He's just utterly visually inept and can't imagine things on his own. (He can't draw or pack a suitcase, but he plays seven instruments by ear so perhaps he min-maxed his attributes.) He doesn't match his clothes, either, and wanders around with a big burn on his trousers that he put there with the iron. I don't understand how he can't visualize a red pillow on the couch, but he doesn't understand how I'm tone deaf. It all works out in the end.

I also am in love with that green lamp in the last picture.

Hmm. Mine says I'm Vegas Baby with a touch of Boho. Hmm. I don't particularly like Vegas, but I do like all the pictures it put up to illustrate. And I am gold-leafing everything in the house. So maybe it has a point.

For what I'm not? Nautical and a touch country.

Ha, neat. I'm in Heidelberg, and our place sounds almost exactly the same. Want to be friends? The closet thing is a huge problem; I don't know how we're going to deal with it when the rest of our stuff arrives. But I think the biggest problem is the tiny, tiny little freezer space in the tiny, tiny refrigerator. How does anyone make cocktails when the freezers only hold like four ice cubes?

Hahaha, I was worried that might happen. I can almost never identify songs without lyrics. (I really am tone deaf.)

Ha! That's true. When I was in the Bay Area, I was happily ensconced in grad student housing that to this day might be the nicest apartment I've ever had. (Views, balcony, storage unit, no bugs or operational issues of any sort.) But my friends and I used to read the real estate listings and laugh, because they always cost a million dollars per bathroom, literally. If you took the number of bathrooms in a listing and multiplied it by a million, you'd invariably get a rough estimate of the cost of the house. It was completely crazy.