A Free Home Renovation

Feat. an unused ironing cupboard to sweet gardening cabinet makeover

Hi my pals! This weekend I’m in Chicago celebrating the wedding of one of my very best friends, Leila, so I thought I’d offer more of a *visual essay* about a recent home project! We’re almost two years into living in this house and many of our bigger projects have been tackled (though god there’s still an empty corner where a dupe or vibe-match of this perfect cabinet should be), but one dangling to-do was to rehab this built-in ironing cabinet:

Not pictured: 100-year-old ironing board covered in the kind of old felt that gives you the heebie jeebies when you touch it.

Though I love the charm of a vintage built-in, in reality we aren’t big ironers (I’m more of a steamer guy?). Plus, the ironing board was, how you say, nasty. However we are big gardeners, and soon got excited imagining our Secret Garden Cabinet.

At first I thought we would cover the interior with peel-and-stick wallpaper for the renter-friendliness of it all, but quickly realized a. whatever changes we make will require some patch-ups no matter what, and b. I hated the idea of getting a whole roll of peel-and-stick to just use a little swath of it and then carry the rest around for what might be the rest of my life. So I decided to tap into one of my favorite old hobbies: using the leftover wallpaper samples from my mom’s interior design business to decoupage my little heart out.

An Artist’s Date in my mom’s office: coffee, jazz, and one hundred billion scraps of patterned paper.

Thanks to my recent journey with The Artist’s Way (all done, but I’m sure you can tell 😌), I remembered that in college and beyond I loved to collage. I was never particularly confident with a pencil or paintbrush (fine, I’ll do The Artist’s Way again!), but loved to decoupage wallpaper samples and magazine cutouts, repurposing shoeboxes into colorful storage containers I still use to this day.

My mom’s office is a treasure trove of pattern, texture and beauty. Every time I’m home I love to take a tour, always discovering something new or just refilling my aesthetic bucket. But when I went to New York this March, I scanned her office on a mission: hunting for patterns that would make our tools feel at home.

I brought my bounty back into her kitchen, and my mom and I set about deciding on the vision. I wanted botanical nods without being toooo cute, cohesive patterns, and a vintage feel. We quickly honed in on a green/pink/blue color scheme, which was too bad because I could have played this game forever.

When I got back to LA, Jesse and I started art directing this abandoned crevasse in our home. As is our rhythm, I captained obsessively-matchmaking-patterns and Jesse was in charge of cutting-or-gluing-anything-at-all-so-it-would-actually-look-good. Chip and Joanna WHO?!?!

The fully-papered backdrop! The ironing-board-holder is impossible to remove without drilling into the wall but believe me, we tried.

Next, we knew we wanted to add shelves. I thought that some colorful metal mesh ones would look so cute, but the spirit of the project was to use-what-we-had, and I didn’t have any yellow, custom-sized wire shelves lying around. But what we did have were some planks of wood, which Jesse miraculously fashioned into shelves while I was out one day.

Gorjana, pero missing something perhaps?

We debated painting the wood, but ultimately decided to collage the nooks and crannies of the little shelves with our leftover wallpaper scraps. Jesse was-understandably- decoupaged out at this point, so I took on this task, which means that they look completely fine. Next we installed, and then we stored!

Yeaaaa baby! No more dirty tools stashed on the washing machine!

I had gotten two ornate golden hooks from a local hardware store when I first moved to LA- stores were still boarded up because of the pandemic, so when you got there you just had to describe what you wanted and see if they had it. I was shocked to discover that these were the only hooks they had, but I had walked thirty minutes to the store so I figured I would buy them to support a local business and put them in a bag for never. But Jesse dug them up and they are, in fact, the perfect fit! He screwed them into the top of the cabinet so our garden gloves have a home to hang.

Et voila! A much-needed functional space in a formerly-unused corner. Maybe someday we’ll find some little baskets or storage containers to stash our tools in. But until we find them for free, I think she’s pretty cute as is.

Hope you have a wonderful weekend. It’s supposed to be hot hot hot and very humid in Chicago- hope you’re staying cool wherever you are ❤️

xx Olivia