The Burning House Dilemma

Grab your stuff - quick!  Your super annoying/fat cat knocked over your DIY beeswax candle and your apartment is burning to the ground!

You've imagined this scenario before, maybe when locking up valuables before a vacation or during a spring cleaning marathon.  The question often revolves around your more portable possessions: laptop, hard drives, personal files, photo albums, etc.  However, let's revisit the dilemma with the idea of minimizing your apartment clutter and determining what your space and lifestyle really require - only in design terms.  The idea is that your list of cherished possessions will help you recognize the design elements you wish to highlight inside your home.  After all, the scenario is really meant to prioritize and categorize the valuable, sentimental, and functional components of your life.  Let's get started! 

                              Your (priceless) Stendig calendar.

Did you spend a year on the waiting list for your coveted Stendig calendar?  If you did (or wish you did) it means that you value organization and precision in your work environment.   A realization that should help to prioritize the development and integration of an area within your home  that will promote this aspect of your personality.  Delineating a space for organizing your life (work, finances, social calendar) will greatly decrease your stress level, and create a more positive living environment.

                              A cherished (hard-earned) record collection.

Music collections are typically high on the list.  Whether it be a hard drive filled with mixes from your college years or an extensive record collection. It's personal, highly sentimental and offers direct correlations to memories and relationships constructed throughout our lives. They also offer us some much needed relaxation from a stress-filed day.  So why not emphasize its importance in your home? Carve a niche out to enjoy your music away from distractions. Utilize the spare bedroom or re-define an existing arrangement to include your new listening area. Pull a page from your childhood and re-create a space akin to those flashlight reading sessions of your youth.

                              A space for creating and passion projects.

If you're still reading this post then you probably have at least one personal creation on your  "burning house list."  Artwork and passion projects are things we creative folks can't live without.  Creativity requires freedom and creative freedom (while hard to define) requires a space where one can coax his or her ideas to fruition.  The space can be as small as a closet, or as big as a garage-turned-studio. Sacrificing your creative urges due to space limitations can greatly affect your life, so we creatives need to prioritize our needs accordingly.

There you have it, the "burning house dilemma" just helped you narrow the list of design priorities for your home. Now, get to work!

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Restoration Consultation: Put down the sandpaper, please.

Raise your hand if you are not a furniture restoration specialist. Again if you didn't mentor under a professional and you've never refinished a piece of wood in your life.  It's fine - don't take it personally.  All this means is that you're better off using simple techniques to maintain your furniture rather than an all-out DIY onslaught that will most likely do more harm to your furniture than good. In other words, put down the sandpaper and step away from the furniture. 

If you're one of the many who have turned to vintage and/or mid century items to fill your space then you more than likely have a piece that you believe to be made of "solid wood." Yes, your danish modern credenza is made of wood, but not solid wood, and certainly not solid teak. Most vintage furniture is constructed with a type of plywood and finished with a veneer. The veneer is typically thinner than an 1/8th of an inch, which means there's not much margin for error when sanding.  It is very possible, and even likely, that you will sand through the veneer and reveal the plywood below, which is very difficult to fix.  Unless you're willing to sand the entire piece painstakingly slow and even, please put down the sandpaper. You can do a better job with a couple of simple maintenance techniques.

Start by visiting your local hardware store and picking up a bag of lint free rags, 0000 steel wool, and a bottle of Old English Lemon Oil. Drizzle the oil liberally on the steel wool pad and lightly (using little more than the weight of your hand) scrub your furniture IN THE DIRECTION of the wood grain. I can't stress this point enough. NEVER scrub across the grain structure or use a circular technique.  Cover the entire piece of furniture with oil and let it absorb for at least ten minutes (keep your pets away from the oil). Use a lint free rag to remove the oil by rubbing across the wood grain. 

You will find that the micro abrasions made by the steel wool will help the furniture to absorb the lemon oil and mask the appearance of scratches, scuffs and shallow water damage in the piece of furniture.  Following this maintenance routine monthly will greatly improve the aesthetic longevity of your piece of furniture, and limit the possibilities of causing more damage to your furniture.