My boyfriend has an addiction to Perrier. NO PELLEGRINO (it has sodium). Only Perrier. Our fridge is always stocked. Decided I should start using them for something. And what’s easier than spraying things white…

1. bottle of Perrier / 2. flat razor blade / 3. goo gone / 4. white spray paint / 5. a paint pen that is made to use on glass and ceramics

SO! You start with an empty bottle of Perrier. I used large, but I’m going to try making one with the small size too.

I scraped off the labels with the razor blade. This part was so not fun. Once the labels were as gone as I could get them, I used a paper towel with goo gone on it to remove the residue. Then washed it off.

Take it outside and spray paint the hell out of it. Let it dry for hours and apply a second coat if necessary, but who bothers with second coats?

Once it’s super dry to the touch, bring it in and devote the next couple hours of your attention to tediously drawing a pattern on it. I had some Bravo shows on my dvr waiting for me. And that’s it!

I drew from the bottom up and kept wondering on every line if it was enough. Eventually, I just stopped. As you can see from the darkness inconsistency, the paint pen was a total punk. I had to shake it maybe a million times and ended up making a puddle of it to dip into like a calligraphy pen.

Next time, I’m going to use a glass etcher on the top to score and break off the rim.

Has anyone bought this?

Don’t. It makes you crazy. It makes you want to redo your medicine cabinet. So I did!

Our medicine cabinet was cluttered, and ridiculously overstocked. The medicine cabinet does not need products we don’t use every day, let alone every week in there. I started by removing it all and only picking out the essentials. Then, I removed the labels on most of them. Sorry boyfriend.

And then… I painted it.

It took me about 15 minutes to decide whether or not to paint the shelves. But I went for it. I used leftover paint from my Rast Hack (Anvil by Martha Stewart).

Because we live in an old craftsman, windows are painted shut and all the paint jobs have been painted over and painted over. I totally should have sanded before painting. Oh well.

UGH. Now the problem with making the prettiest thing in your bathroom be something that is normally hidden behind a door is that you don’t want to close the door.

My hairdresser Stanley wrote a cookbook. Yes, he does hair AND food. I’ve had the cookbook for a year but this is the first recipe I got around to trying. It turned out super moist, but like he says in the book, it is better to serve one day after making for texture and taste. Well I actually think even 2 days is best.

The recipe was simple, I only had two obstacles! The first was my zesting! I don’t know my own zesting strength and always over-zest. But it tastes perfect in the cheesecake.
Um, thats WAY too much zest right?! OOPS.

The second was measuring 12 ounces of cream cheese. Ok, so the packs come in 8. This means I buy two 8-ounce packs. Then I cut one in half.
But is that half?! Which one is more half?! I had to Sophie’s Choice this one.

Lime Cheesecake
(adapted from Completely Delicious by Stanley Penner)

first layer:
1 graham cracker crust pie shell (9 inch)
12 ounces of cream cheese (he recommended for easier blending, warming in the oven for 5 minutes)
½ cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
zest of one lime
2 tb fresh lime juice
dash of sea salt

second layer:
12 ounces sour cream
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 325°. Blend the warmed cream cheese and sugar in a bowl with a fork. Add one egg and blend. Add second egg and blend again. Blend until smooth.

Add vanilla, lime zest, lime juice, and salt. Blend with a spoon.

Pour mixture into the pie shell and bake in the center rack for 30-35 minutes. When the outer edge of the cheesecake starts to split, it’s done.

While that’s baking, prepare the second layer. Blend sour cream, sugar and vanilla in a bowl and set aside.

Remove cream cheese pie from oven and pour the sour cream layer on top. Start pouring in the center and spread about in a circular motion with a spatula.

Continue to bake for 10 minutes more. Remove from oven, let cool, and then cover before refrigerating. Definitely wait a day or two for eating.

What’d you do today? Spray paint all of your office supplies? Yeah, me neither. Yes I did.

How dare these objects be so useful and take up so much space on our desks but usually look so ugly! In theory, I’d like to buy some nice vintage ones like this, but there are like 5,000 other things I’d like to buy on etsy, so spray paint works. I wanted to mix things up and spray some white, some gold, but Gideon refused the gold as usual. So I decided my tape dispenser would be the lone gold.

Jeez! Taping these things up is a pain in the assssss.

The real show-stopper.

OMG White.

And VOILA. Our desks are 20% nicer to look at now!

My best friend started redecorated her bedroom and abruptly stopped after she painted the walls and thought she made a mistake with the color (which I recommended – oops!). Here is my plan for what she can do to spruce up her room and love it again.
1. “what’s up tiger lily” vintage movie poster / 2. hemnes dresser / 3. venetian mirror / 4. vintage floor lamp / 5. ruffle duvet cover / 6. ikat silk pillow / 7. flamingos throw pillow / paint : solitude by behr

When we first moved in, the office was definitely the afterthought. As you can see from the before picture. It was a mess. And quite yellow!

Since then, we replaced our huge eyesore expedit shelf (the first thing you saw when you walked in was a huge black thing. Ugh.) with another… expedit, we switched rugs, got 2 matching pillows, hung a Confetti System garland (christmas gift from boyfriend slash me winning the fight for it), and the worst task of all… cleaned up. A little. The room came out super colorful, unlike the rest of our house. Gideon wanted to get the rug in the baby blue color instead of grey. It arrived way more saturated than photographed on the site. I tried bleaching it twice, but it didn’t really fade it anymore. I think grey would have been a better choice.

We also organized the hell out of the closet. That right there is prior to shelving being put up.

Woo! ORGANIZED! Just don’t look up or down.

Here’s the wall next to my side of desks. Yes, we have tandem desks. Hanging are mementos of trips (The Parker Palm Springs map, a Luau photo, the menu from our dinner from Chez Panisse, AND my beautiful love art from age 6!)

And our little sitting nook. Yes, we always keep those blinds closed. We live in the streets of Hollywood.

What’s that? You don’t have huge oversized fawns hanging in your house? How weird!

So it’s probably not the first thing I’d hang in our office, basically taking up the entire wall, but look how it is underneath!

This tapestry from Urban Outfitters was our cheapest and easiest option for now but it’s not really working for me. No idea why you wouldn’t want a wall sized photograph of fawns. We’re trying to figure out our options for covering the door and we don’t want to spend much doing it. 

chalkboard. We could buy a large piece of plywood and paint it with chalkboard paint. But then we have to buy some kind of huge frame and yada yada.

a memo board. We could buy Homasote and cover in fabric… Gideon thinks this is too girly.

vintage american flag. Since Photoshop doesn’t make things to size for me, I have no idea if and where you can buy a huge vintage flag, but I’m guessing ebay.

oversized antiqued mirror. I found this tutorial on how to do it with mirror panels, which given the size would probably be the easiest way to handle DIYing this bad boy.

UGH!

See how we covered the door in our living room.