Dogs and Jen: Home Edition

Michelle and I left her kitchen today and went shopping. It was quite a productive outing that culminated at Crate and Barrel. I cannot express the depth of my love for C&B. It’s one of those places that makes me want stuff. I resisted many of my urges to drop lots of cash, but I still made out pretty well. I got juice glasses to match my big glasses and some mini ramekins. Michelle bought these for me, allegedly as a trade for the sweater I got her with some leftover gift cards I was never going to use, but I think I got the better end of that deal. I also got a new bamboo cutting board to replace my seriously warped and breaking apart IKEA cutting boards that are several years old. The least necessary of the purchases was two mini Parker Bowls (haha) in the same color green as my kitchen. They will look nice in the cabinets and will make excellent ice cream bowls.

Some day, I’ll give myself a few hundred dollars to go there and spend on things I don’t really need, but that I would use and that would make good upgrades to my kitchen. In the meantime, I think I’ve done pretty well today.

My problem of where to put the dog bowls after kitchen renovation is solved! These mission dog feeders from Orvis (found by fabulous Michelle) match my dining room table and chairs and the idea for what I want for the furniture there when I get some. I have a large double feeder on order. What style for my pooches!

What do you think? Is it them?

The doors in my house all have the original doorknobs and working skeleton key locks (and probably original hinges, too). All this hardware has been horribly mistreated. Some of it is totally painted over, and some just has careless paint on the edges. It’s tragic. Thus, added to my long list of projects is to restore these.

There are a lot of missing screws. Furthermore, no keys came with the house. That means none of the doors lock. That’s fine for me, but visitors will likely want to lock the bathroom doors and the like. So I took a gamble and bid on an auction for a lot of skeleton keys on eBay:

I tried all of them and one worked…kind of.

It will lock the doors, but it doesn’t unlock them because one of the teeth has broken off. Dad said he will help reconstruct this and make me some duplicates so I can have keys for all the doors that people might want to lock.

(Extra points to readers who catch the reference in the title of this post)

These rose bowls from Kate Spade are very pretty. Depending on my color scheme, I could see using either.

I love love love this piggy bank. It is perfect to sit on my end table. It would be a great replacement to the painted mayo jar that’s there now.