The ceiling is the room’s most overlooked surface, the one that gets painted once and ignored for decades while every other surface in the same room is rethought, repainted, refurnished, and reconsidered in successive waves of home improvement energy. Most…
The toy bins in my toddler’s room used to multiply like they had a mind of their own. Every birthday and holiday brought a fresh wave of plastic toys that never had a real home, so they ended up scattered…
There was a solid month where I couldn’t walk into my son’s playroom without stepping on something: a stray puzzle piece, a plastic animal, a single sock that had somehow migrated three rooms away. Toys lived in three different bins…
The toy situation in our playroom had evolved, gradually and then all at once, into something that required a system rather than just a tidy-up. The baskets were full of mixed categories of craft supplies sharing space with building blocks,…
The well-intentioned fall afternoon craft session has a way of becoming something nobody planned. The glue goes on the table before it goes on the paper. The scissors end up across the room. The child who was enthusiastic five minutes…
My living room used to be a color experiment gone wrong. One wall was a “bold accent” navy blue I regretted within a month. Another had a leftover streak of “greige” from a sample pot I never finished. Add in…
The bedroom had been white since the move-in. Not a considered white, the default white of a rental that had been painted over three times with whatever was cheapest, the kind of white that registers as absence rather than choice.…
Choosing a paint color for the outside of a cottage-style house sounds like it should be the easy part. Easier than replacing the roof, easier than regrading the drainage, easier than the dozen structural decisions that consumed the first year…
The brick had not always looked like this. There was a period, probably in the first decade after the house was built, when the color was right, or at least right enough, and the exterior communicated the warmth and solidity…
