first estate sale loot

As I already mentioned on Monday I went to my very first estate sale with Santa from homestilo.I don't know why I have never been to one but now I am hooked and I want to go again. We were there on the last day only a couple of hours before they closed and were able to negotiate all items down at least 50%. With these sales it is probably hit and miss but the first one was a success and I bought a metal cabinet, metal box and two travel books with amazing photographs of places I might never get a chance visit. I am still on the fence on what to do with the cabinet, should I paint it or keep the patina? The colors look great together but maybe another color would work as well. Guess first I will have to give it a good scrubbing and see how it will look once the grime is off. Any suggestions about keeping the patina or giving it a new coat of paint?

My parents are arriving tomorrow and will stay for two weeks. Looking forward to spending time with them! I haven't seen them since January...

 

yayoi kusama exhibition at the whitney

It is finally time for my post about the Yayoi Kusama retrospective at the Whitney here in New York, I can not believe that I visited the exhibition over two weeks ago already. Unfortunately photography wasn't allowed as always in museums so I headed over to the Louis Vuitton store on 5th Avenue to take some photos for my post. But there is also an installation called Guidepost to the New Space (2004) located at Pier 45 of Hudson River Park, where you can touch, feel and even sit on her art. Another spot to check out her art within the city landscape is on 14th Street (close to the corner of 9th Avenue), where a construction site is covered with in her Yellow Trees. I haven't checked out the building cover in the Meatpacking District yet, so I have no photos to include but there are lots if you click the link I provided.

The exhibition covers her work from the 40ies until the present and includes one room you can only enter if you snatch an extra ticket for it. As per the artist wish only one person can enter Fireflies on the water at a time and spent one minute in the room. Unfortunately we were not able to get our hands at one of the timed tickets. When we got to the museum around 11:20am on a Sunday morning, just twenty minutes after it opened the line to get in was pretty long and they were already handing out the time slots around 3pm. When it was our turn they completely had run out of tickets. Bummer!

I am not an art critic nor do I claim to know much about art but my favorite pieces from the exhibition were the Infinity Nets, large, white and monochromatic paintings that have no beginning, center or end. After reading that Kusama painted them directly from the hallucinations she suffered, it felt quite weird looking at them because to me they felt calm but in her hallucinations they engulfed everything, which makes it sound more suffocating than calming. Her art was both a release and a form of treatment for her psychological issues. Really interesting to me was also her stay in New York where she started to create happenings in the mid sixties and even opened her own boutique with Kusama clothing and textiles. It seemed that the artist and her art melded together, as she appeared clad in polka dots in front of her art, painting polka dots on nude performers etc. In the 70ies she moved back to Japan, where she continues to live in a psychiatric hospital with a studio nearby to create her art. If you like you can watch the trailer to the upcoming documentary Kusama: Princess of Pola Dots here.

 

 

 

 

long island city

As mentioned in my weekly recap on Monday I spend some time in Long Island City last Sunday. First me and the girls had brunch and after we finished eating we took a walk along the water. The park is called Gantry Plaza Park and you can still see reminders of the industrial past of LIC. Those cranes have been used to unload barges, the load was transferred onto trains that served all of Long Island via the Long Island Railroad tracks. The Pepsi-Cola sign used to sit atop a Pepsi factory which has now been replaced with highrise apartment buildings. There seems to be a lot of construction going on, I guess the easy access to Manhattan makes it a good location to live but one of my friends told me she looked at the prices for an apartment in that area and they do not come cheap by any means, they were even more expensive than her place in Manhattan. From the park you have a nice view of Midtown Manhattan. LIC is also home to the MoMa PS1 museum, which hosts Warm Up parties in the Summer. It's on my list for this summer and hopefully I am able to make it. I have been to the museum but not to any of their summer parties yet. Also on my list since moving to NJ is the Noguchi museum, can not believe I haven't visited it yet! And when researching for this little blog post I came across the SculptureCenter and Socrates Sculpture Park and had to add it to my list of places to visit as well. Looks like I have to venture out to Long Island City again soon...

Have any of you ever been to any of the places mentioned?

 

vacation

As I have already mentioned P and I will leave for a nice vacation today. I had planned to post on my regular schedule next week but the last two weeks have been quite busy, last week with having fun hanging out with friends and this week with the preparation for the trip. Why will I never learn and start prepping early enough, think about what I want to pack etc.? Already had started posts and took pictures of a small DIY project but realized it is too much to handle and I would be stressing out until sitting in my seat on the plane. That is why I have decided to take a little blog vacation next week, the instant I made this decision I felt relieved and ready to go on a trip.

In the meantime you can find me on Instagram, I will try to take some photos and upload them on the road. Also will taking lots of pictures with my DSLR camera, of course I had to order a zoom lens before leaving as well as some other camera related goodies. I will share some photos when I am back!

Hope to see you all back here again when I get back! :)

a little round up of travel related items from etsy

1. Bryce Canyon Souvenir Pennant 2. Handmade Leather Journal 3. Souvenir Pin 

4. Vintage Map of Utah 5. Personalized Lake Powell Poster

weekend reading material

Yesterday when I read Santa's post on her blog homestilo about the special edition of Domino I remembered I had bought it about two weeks ago and had totally forgotten about it and never opened it once. The last couple of weeks things kept just piling up and I feel a bit overwhelmed trying to get to the bottom of the pile. This upcoming weekend will be the first weekend without any plans and I'm really looking forward to it. Maybe I'll have time to catch up on all the magazines I have lying around, my favorite blogs, finish one of my many started furniture projects and maybe kick back and relax...

The Martha Steward magazines were in a little goodie bag that was handed out at the end of last month's  apartment therapy design evening, which hosted Pilar Guzmán, the editor-in-chief of Martha Steward Living, hence the MS magazines. You can check out the interview over on apartment therapy. 

What are your plans for the weekend?

breaking the bank

The piggy bank that is. We have this collection of piggy banks from Old Navy and all loose change floating around will end up in them. Although only the three big ones were full we brought them to our local supermarket where they have a Coinstar machine which sorts your money and when you get a voucher you don't even have to pay a fee. We chose an amazon voucher because they have e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g! We ended up with over $230 that we can spend on amazon. Yay! :) Not sure what exactly we'll use it for...

Don't you think the second guy from the left kind of looks like Magnum P.I.? I loved the show as a kid and wanted to grow up and be cool like Magnum and maybe even get Dobermans named Zeus and Apollo although they weren't his dogs. Did you have weird childhood/teenage crushes too?

Have a great weekend!

advent 4th

Today we tried out our new Muuto Gloria Candleholder that I bought at the Design Within Reach Outlet in Secaucus yesterday.

We drove there to look for a new chair for P's desk because now that my work space is almost finished we can work on setting his space up. He found one and was already standing in line at the cash register when I took another look through the store and then I saw the candle holder. I had to have it! Already had spotted it in magazines and on blogs but thought the $99 price tag was a little too steep for my taste. The one at the DWR Outlet had just been marked down to $40 the day before and with an extra 20% off on everything in the store that day it was mine for only 32 bucks. Yay! :)

another one bites the dust

On Saturday we (actually I didn't do any of the work, it was P and R working) tore down the existing ceiling in the basement below our kitchen. Turns out above the wood planks were tons of dirt which blew very fine dust into every room in our house even though I taped the basement door shut and the openings to the kitchen. The dust was worst in the kitchen but it traveled everywhere in the house so we spend our Saturday and our Sunday morning cleaning. When I first saw the mess in the kitchen I had a little bit of a melt down but now that everything is back to normal I'm happy again, although all muscles in my body are sore. And I thought that this would be a relaxing weekend...

You may wonder why did we tore down the ceiling in our basement. The answer is that we added insulation underneath the kitchen floor because the basement below gets very cold in the winter and therefore the floor gets very cold as well. We will see if the kitchen stays warmer once it really gets cold here, so far the weather has been pretty balmy.

With the house there is regularly work waiting for us and inevitably renovating is not always a pretty sight ;)

ohny - part V

Ok, this is the last OHNY post I promise...

After sending our group to Williamsburg to check out two sites after our tour of the Wunderworks Design Studio and finding them closed because I wasn't able to read the schedule correctly we headed back to Manhattan to check out the Hotel Americano near the High Line. Like the Nolitan it just opened its doors. We toured two of its rooms, checked out the rooftop terrace with pool, the bar and party rooms in the basement, as well as the restaurant and bar on the first floor.

The interiors were designed by Paris based Arnaud Montigny of MCH, this project was his first in the US and the architect was Enrique Norten of TEN Arquitectos. The Americano Hotel was not the only project by TEN Arquitectos to be showcased during the OHNY weekend. Also included were Cassa Hotel and Residences and a showroom for Mercedes Benz.

ohny - part IV

We started Sunday morning with a nice breakfast at Petit Albeille and walked over to our first OHNY stop of the day which was a tour of the Wunderwurks Design Studio. Tony Wurman the designer currently sells some of his pieces through Room & Board. All pieces basically consist of melted glue, you can find more specific information here on what is used.

Six of us were able to create our own bowls. Melting stuff is so much fun! I could do it all day. You can see me turning my bowl and some pictures of the finished product as well.

The first three photos are from the Room & Board Website and the photos of me turning my bowl are courtesy of Roswitha Graser.