Naomi – Author at Plaster & Disaster

I guess this is Mom tribute week here on the blog! Today I have the fun of sharing the living room in my parent’s home, which my mother recently renovated and redecorated. As an environmentalist and someone who always lives her beliefs, she did so using healthy and sustainable materials.

Her style centers on light colors based on nature, tone-on-tone color palettes, and a lot of vintage finds. She uses a lot of natural wood and plants, which add life, shape, and contrast to the light colors to kick the rooms from sweet to awesome.

The center of any good living room is of course the couch. Hers is a sectional from Lee Industries, who make sustainable and environmentally friendly furniture. It is made without added flame retardants, which have all sorts of health dangers and are actually dangerous for firefighters, too. She had it upholstered in a fabric made from organic cotton and bamboo, which is generally more durable than the other sustainable choices, like linen or cotton alone.

It is a beautiful fabric with several shades of green, and is the piece which defined the color palette for the room.

The green wall color is custom (mixed not by a decorator, but by my mom trying and combining shade after shade until it was perfect), and lifts a one of the light shades from the sectional fabric. It was painted in Benjamin Moore’s Natura line, which is green and no-VOC.

A lot of people might use a rug to tie the seating area together, but that complication would be totally missing the entire point of this living room (and entire house), which is this little creature:

Honey is my parent’s havanese and constant companion. This room is as much hers as theirs. She has her own dedicated seat on the couch, perched atop one of the back cushions.

This provides the perfect vantage point from which to keep a close eye on the activity of all the rabbits who frequent the back yard at dusk.

Instead of a rug, the seating area is held together by a substantial, weathered coffee table.

This actually used to be a small farmhouse style table, and so was a lot higher, but had its legs chopped off to be coffee table height. My mom kept the beautiful weathered finish, which stands up well to guests and regular use. This is not a “fussy” room!

The table also features a collection of acorns, bark, and leaves, which she collects on her long walks with the dogs (they also have another, a papillon named Inara) and brings back to identify. There is apparently a lot of time to look around and think about trees while the dogs sniff everything and anything.

And there is, of course, a television suitable to watch the Patriots on (my Dad lives here, too). The small TV stand was a find from a local consignment store.

It is flanked by a truly majestic fiddle leaf fig. My mom is a genius with houseplants. She bought this as a much smaller plant, and has since needed to chop the top off several times to stop it from growing into the ceiling.

The shades on the french doors and windows are made by Earthshade, a small company specializing in good quality, green window coverings. They sell very low-emitting roller shades (they say the lowest emitting in the world), chemical-free roman shades, and un-coated, recycled mini-blinds.

The other side of the room is the dogs’ bedroom, play area, and storage for books and plants.

She has had these extraordinary glass covered bookshelves for a long time, and I totally covet them. I LOVE the look of books shoved casually behind glass.

They are casual, old-timey, and organized, all at the same time. And they have these great little brass details.

Over it are three of the five antique paintings which my parents found by combing flea markets and thrift stores (the other two are over the sectional). They all feature New England landscapes.

The beautiful light in this space is an antique fixture, restored by Rejuvenation and fitted with an LED bulb. Isn’t that shape amazing!?

Of course, like every room of the house, we have an explosion of plants. She sets them on an assortment of vintage and antique side tables scored from thrift stores and flea markets.

The tables don’t match, but they share a similar wood tone and swooping shape which ties them together in an eclectic way.

And of course this space has to work for the pups! Her love of reuse and dogs comes together in this antique ceramic washbasin used for toy storage. I was with her when she found it and thought the idea was absolutely crazy, but it totally works so well!

It holds a ton of toys (these are lucky dogs) and is low enough that they are able to go over and grab the ones they want without any help.

Also, can we talk about this flooring? I don’t mean to brag, but my parents are total hipsters… or at least, they were making things out of salvaged pallets before it was cool.

I’ll go into more detail in a future post, but this floor was put in nearly 20 years ago after being remade from old shipping pallets, and then refinished about 5 years ago. It features old nail holes and other imperfections that make it really special.

I’m so blown away by what my mom pulled off in decorating this room! I could probably talk for another thousand words about it, and I know I could talk for many more posts about this house. I’ll definitely share some of the other great spaces and eco solutions in the future!

(Sharing at Tip Me Tuesday, Think and Make Thursday, Your Turn to Shine, August Before and After, Link Party Palooza, One Project at a Time, Remodelaholic, and Two Uses Tuesday.)

As I shared when I wrote about my diamond cement push pins last week, I have been wanting to play with cement for a long time. However, I was also pretty nervous as it seemed much more hardcore than most of the crafts that I do (which mostly involve gluing stuff or looping yarn around stuff).

So I was excited to find this mold (affiliate link – read our policies) which I could use for a pretty easy and entry-level project. The mold is actually intended to make shot glasses out of ice, but I thought could be used to make a set of cute little cement bud vases.

Cement is actually pretty toxic and dangerous! Breathing it in is harmful, the dust can irritate your eyes, and prolonged contact with the wet cement mix can burn your skin.

To be extra safe, I wore a respirator, goggles, and nitrile gloves.

Those are exactly the sort of pictures of me I want floating around the internet, by the way.

As I did with the push pins, I used Quikrete Hydraulic Water-Stop Cement for this project, which is great for impatient people and craft projects because it dries very quickly. This is more expensive than regular cement sand, but at about $8 for 10 lbs it is still cheap enough not to matter to me. When I start mass producing this stuff and selling it at an insanely high profit margin I’ll go for the cheap stuff and deal with the extra drying time.

With cement, the set-up and clean-up are totally the hardest part, and actually doing the project was very easy. I just mixed up the cement in small batches, making it slightly more liquid-y than the package called for so it would be easier to fill the molds.

I carefully poured it into the molds, jiggling the sides to help it fill in and break up air bubble.

Since these would be sitting flat eventually, I used an old paint stirrer to smooth the top into a pseudo-flat surface.

I made four, and then let them sit for about an hour (because it was fast-drying cement) before popping them out of the molds to check them out.

Awesome! This was the fun part. It is so fun to see the strange cement gunk turn into a real object.

Don’t they look cool? To think, they were just strange (and slightly toxic) dust just hours before.

I decided to make three of them into a set of vases. I let them sit in my scary garage for a couple days to be sure that they were absolutely dry, and then brought them upstairs to paint.

To complement the modern shape, I decided to paint three stripes of varying heights on each. I started by taping off the first two stripes (one along the bottom, and one a tape-width up), and then carefully filling these in with white craft paint.

I had some trouble getting the tape to form a tight seal on the cement, so I painted with a downward motion to avoid leakage under the edge. The stripes came out nice and sharp.

Next, I taped off a third stripe on each, in the middle of the two white stripes.

I then filled these in with black, yellow, and turquoise (channeling Sage). After the paint had dried, I coated them with a cement sealer to protect the craft paint and avoid water leaking into the cement.

…and of course I had to go get flowers to celebrate my amazing new bud vases!

I love the way the stripes turned out! They’re fresh against the dark and dingy cement.

Working with shot glasses, I was worried that the flower arrangements wouldn’t feel substantial. But I was able to fit a lot in there.

These are just the right size to brighten up any space. Filling these only used about 1/3 of a small bouquet from the grocery store, but they can have a big impact. The cement base makes them feel more substantial, too.

I had a ton of fun with this easy project, and am definitely more comfortable working with cement now. I can’t wait to take on more ambitious projects!