WINTER IS COMING.

Do not let these balmy 70-degree days and week-long tropical monsoons fool you.  Winter is coming and preparations must be made.  Getting the backyard ready for winter has been a laborious, Sisyphian task, mostly because the neighbor's giant oak tree dumps about 6 trillion pounds of leaves into my yard on a weekly basis.  I've spent an average of three hours a weekend raking and fishing rotten foliage out of the koi pond, doing my best to avoid the cat scat and stuffing the the whole mess into a whole box's worth of contractor bags. At the end of the day, I'll feel relieved and accomplished and then wake up Monday morning to exactly nine feral cats squatting in another 6 trillion pounds of leaves and have to do it all over again.  There's probably one more weekend's worth of work before its really finished, but today I've had enough of this game.  No more of this battening down the hatches business; the leaves and the cats can wait.  Its been a while since I came up with a good ol' hare-brained DIY project and its high time I got down to business.

Over the holiday, I was inspired by my mother's "Winter Garden" in the foyer...she'd put together a lovely collection of trees and flowering plants and I decided I'd like to give one a try this season.   I already have some aloe and succulents sitting in the kitchen window and that weird little baobab tree I got from IKEA seems to be hanging in there too.  My mom gave me a handful of paperwhite bulbs that I forced in some water so there might even be some real flowers growing here in a month or so.

Couple methods happening here.  Will see which grows best.

This morning's "Winter gardening" episode culminated with the purchase of a Spruce tree for the holidays which I arranged nicely between Our Lady Guadalupe and a pair of darling garden gnomes.  It sure is festive, but if I'm being really honest, this place is looking more and more like a hoarder's den every waking day. So I took it upon myself to start clearing out some of the more superfluous furniture.  Now that there's a teepee in the kitchen, I need to let the rest of the house breathe a little, know what I mean?  So I removed a couple old lamps, got rid of a bedside table, stashed a couple poster tubes in the closet and voila! Although, in all honesty, you can't really tell the difference. But that's just the plight of a maximalist for you.

And the last thing on my winter to-do list?  Ever since I re-upped my lease for another year, I've been wanting to do a little upgrade to make things feel fresh and new again.  Now, I know what you're thinking, and the answer is no.  I have officially given up on the bathroom.  Outside of a total gutting of the kitchen/bathroom/hallway area, there is nothing in the world, not even IKEA, that can make it a better place.  I'm not going to cry about it, its just the way it is.  Showering at my house will always feel, at best, like camping and, at worst, like climbing into a water-coffin, and it will always be possible to sit on the toilet AND wash your face at the same time.  You won't ever do it, but you'll always be thinking it.  Every time you go.  But thats just the way it is at my house, and if you want to hang with me, you're going to have to deal with it.

So instead, I've decided to give my tired kitchen cabinets a quick little refresh.

I've been recently inspired by all the gold kitchen accents featured here and here by Apartment Therapy.  I was also quite taken with this this fun, little vintage kitchen from Design Sponge complete with an eye-popping toe-kick.

How easy it would be to swap out my nasty, plastic cabinet handles with some art deco-inspired hardware and paste some gold contact paper to the kickboards on the bottom of the cabinets!  After pouring through scores of vintage drawer pulls and cabinet handles, I settled on these bad boys:

Give 'em a fresh coat of gold spray paint and pair it with this fun vintage contact paper and wowee. Or so I hope.  Now I just need my landlord to agree to a brand new SMEG refrigerator in mint green and all my vintage kitchen dreams will come true.  Results to come!

 

 

**UPDATE***

The Etsy shop wouldn't sell me 10 of those floral handles so I found something even better for less. These slender enamel and gold pulls are more delicate, don't require tacky spray paint and they even come with free screws. (That's what she said.)