Life is Good

What more can you say? As Jodi just pointed out, we just hit our one-year mark and, though we're frazzled with activity (what else is new?), it's been great. This new home is just one big project for us to do together and we're having a great time with it.

Get married, if you ever get the chance - I highly recommend it.

So, a quick techie update: we've got our Apple TV. I have been ripping movies for I-don't-even-remember-how-long now. We're on the tail end of it all and, naturally, I've run our of available hard drive space.

As luck would have it, I just purchased a LaCie Ethernet Big Disk for use at work and it's a very interesting device: 1 terabyte of storage, gigabit Ethernet connectivity (as well as USB 2.0, but Ethernet is still king of the hill for throughput), a web-based admin utility that gives you access to all sorts of stuff. (acct. mgmt., HTTP and FTP-based file access, built-in AFP, etc.).

One very interesting capability is the devices's "MediaServer" facility - it's able to search itself and present any movies, music or photos found as a network shareable volume, accessible to any media programs or devices on your network. For example: turn on the MediaServer function and it'll index any music found on the drive. Now open iTunes on your machine and the drive will appear as a playlist!

So I'm waiting for mine to show up so I can finalize our home storage.


One more acquisition: Airport Extreme Base Station. Gigabit Ethernet switch. 802.11n wireless. Automatic USB drive sharing. These are good things. The bad thing is that it's been kind of twitchy with our DSL connection. Oh, well - I'll figure it out.

The bottom line is that our little hideaway will be very 21st century when it comes to our music, movies and (someday) photo collections!

P.S. - Have you ever noticed that, no matter how well you try to plan and budget a project, it always spirals out of control?! Life is good, yes. Predictable? No.

1st Wedding Anniversary

Hooray for us!!!
Or more accurately, "Wow, I cannot believe it has been a year since our wedding."
Well, time flies when you're having fun, right?

We have been married one year (two weeks ago, today). And traditionally, first wedding anniversaries are marked by paper-oriented gifts. The modern version says that first anniversaries are celebrated with gifts of...clocks. Well-isn't-that-convenient? Because we have been wanting a certain piece of lovely design history for some time.

On the weekend of our anniversary, as a gift to each other, we went to DWR in Cambridge and ordered the Nelson Ball Clock. There is a wall between our dining and kitchen that begs for this piece of whimsical yet seriously geometric timepiece.

Just over a week later, it arrived and I have to admit that Vitra sticker on the shipping box just gives me chills (design weird-o alert!). Check out Vitra's history, too. It is where many of the design greats were manufactured in Germany.


Don't fear the multi-color. At first we were thinking orange because we have a bit of that in the dining room and table linens, but I am glad we went with the multi-color. It has a way of not matching any of the colors in your home yet instantly pulling everything together because of it. It's such an icon!


Here it is on our wall. Like I said, it's already been a year of marriage for us, so we look at it as a reminder that time really does fly, so live it up in the moment!

Going Dutch with De Stijl

When you formulate ideas about what you love to live in, you also find that the inspiration was always embedded in your brain: stored away, waiting to resurface as some influence for something as simple as your living room walls. I felt, right away, what I wanted to paint our living room "nook" that sits under the loft level. I definitely wanted the living room to feel cozy. Modern cozy. I love clean spaces, but we also really do "live" in our living room -- watching movies, having friends over for games, eating, drinking wine, etc.

{ BEFORE }

It had started with some paint chips in shades of tomato red and warm charcoal gray and then this mood board, with influences by everything from the Corbusier print on our wall to artists and designers such as Alexander Calder, Piet Mondrian, George Nelson, Armin Hoffman, and Gerrit Rietveld:

Moodboard, ©Jodi Vautrin (if you Pin it, credit it. Thanks!

While most people think that designers such as Corbusier were anti-color in their work, adhering stringently to white in their buildings, they actually did use color in new ways. White was significant in allowing the geometry of their work to take precedence. However, with the influence from Dutch modern architects participating in the de Stijl ("The Style") movement, color was introduced into architectural space to emphasize planes and iterate the composition. Rather than paint the whole room in a form of decoration, color was applied as a design mechanism that emphasized the architecture. When beauty makes sense, even subliminally, it just feels right to me.

{ AFTER }

(still in progress: photo wall on red, new furniture and color accents, etc.)