hemp house.

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Grassroots Modern posted about a super cool house today. I would be totally happy with an exact replica. Well, almost exact. I would like big windows in the front. But I like how it fits into the surrounding wooded area, and it is on a big hill, much like our future house will be. Read more about the super green building materials here. They say it cost $133 per square foot, but I have no perception of house costs, is that good or bad?

drool.

Anyone else catch the amazing homes featured today on Grassroots Modern? The post was about photographer Eric Staudenmaier, but I'm as captivated with the homes as I am with the photography. I especially love the turquoise shelving with turquoise chandelier. Eek!

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Really, who wouldn't love to have a library like this? My cousin recently posted about her current library and her dream library. I'd like a library in our someday house, and would be totally satisfied if it looked like this. I don't have nearly enough books (I'm more of a book-borrower than a book-buyer) but that can change. Time to start combing thrift stores for my favorites.

I also want to share with you a short email conversation I had with Mr. Nielsen's architect brother today, who introduced me to Grassroots Modern.

Me: Have you seen today's post on Grassroots Modern? I'm drooling over those houses. Any photographs of those houses would look amazing.

Architect Brother-in-Law: Marta, the ultimate goal is for you to have a house of your own that you drool over.

Amen to that. Maybe then my house will be featured on Grassroots Modern.

all i want is a room somewhere.

Well, actually that's not "all I want." The other day I saw something on Design*Sponge that I loved. I thought to myself, "I must go back later and post a link to this on my house blog." Well guess what, I forgot, and now I can't remember what it was. I mostly love everything on there.

Instead I'm going to share a list of "wants" for our future house:

• I want it to be easy to clean. The floors (and counters!) in our current home have lots of ridges, including wide grout lines, and I strongly dislike trying to clean the gunk out of said ridges. Grout lines are difficult to sweep and mop. I want our future house to be so easy to clean that I'll actually want to do it. If anyone has suggestions for how to do this, please leave them in the comments section.
• I want our future house to be tight. There are environmental and economic reasons for this (tight house means less leakage in and out of cold/hot air) but those are not my main reasons. I don't want to feel like I'm camping in our future house, meaning no giant caterpillars, no big spiders, no earwigs in the microwave, and no mice. Period. I want it to be so tight that these suckers cannot get in.
• I want to have storage. I want things to have a place. Somewhere for the wrapping paper, somewhere for the food storage, somewhere for the coats. I want to be able to easily put things away.

Those are the main points on my mind right now (mostly because we have had multiple critter encounters in our current house to the point that I'm ready to move in with the parents).

fancy crap on the walls.

Art is really lacking in my current home, and is something that I want to have more of in our future home. Right now I have a Minerva Teichert print and two prints from Hearst Castle in California (one photograph, the other an architectural elevation drawing of the same building). I mostly refrain from decorating my current house (at least lately) because I don't want to wast time, money, and effort decorating a house that I don't plan on living in for much longer. I want to save that time, money, and effort for decorating our future permanent residence.

So anyway, I have been following the blog of a local designer, Caitlin Creer. I really like her style. She mixes contemporary with antique, a look I really like. Well she recently decorated a model home, and used this awesome poster.

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I think fish (specifically coy fish) are sort of trendy, but I still really like this poster. Caitlin even posts a link to a $4.50 version. This is one of those "can't afford not to" deals. I'm even thinking of ordering it now. Do you think it is a bad idea to start collecting decor without a specific plan for where it should go since our house isn't even designed, let along built yet?

gearhead.

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Mr. Nielsen is a gearhead. He has a degree in Automotive Technology. I love this about him. I came across this picture on Design*Sponge, showed it to him, and we both loved it. This is something I would totally recreate in my home.

(Mr. Nielsen says he could easily get some gears, and a few days in the elements would make them look nice and rusty like these!)

this will be me someday.

Check out this awesome couch redo from Freshly Picked. I see this and think to myself, I'm going to do that someday. I think Susan and her husband took a reupholstering class to do this project. Someday, that will be me. Check out her blog to see an awesome time-lapse video of the process.

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Funny thing is, the couch I have sort of looks like the before, except it is a four-cushioner. I could spread out on it with my arms extended above my head and still not touch either end. At this point, I feel it is a little too big, and therefore does not qualify for reupholstering.

do-over.

I'm sort of interested in learning how to re-upholster furniture. I like the idea of getting a cool mid-century couch (think clean lines, usually ugly fabric) and giving it new life. I did some browsing in the ksl classifieds today, and here are the ones that I think would fit the bill:

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Well, can't look for more examples now, but expect more to come.

dwell

I spent some time looking on the website of a magazine called "Dwell" today. It is all about modern living, from architecture to decorating and design. Here are some things that stood out to me.

I've included two views of this home. In all my dreaming (and bored sketching during class) I've imagined a pergola attached to our house. This one is particularly cool. However, they have floor to ceiling windows in the bedroom, with no visible curtains or blinds. I don't think I could do that.

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Here's the other view. I like how the garage is so subtle. I'm the first to admit a dislike of snout-houses (those with the garage as the main facial feature) but I actually like this design! And again, what a neat pergola.

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This is an interior of another home, in Sweden, I think. Almost all surfaces are knotty pine. I don't know that I could stand that much natural wood, but I do want to include some in my future home. It is so funny to see all this wood, even on walls, when on most cutesy interior decorating sites, they have so many examples of people who paint over wood paneling. I also really love the big windows and natural lighting in this space.

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What do you think of all that wood?

nordic embassies, berlin.

Here are some more images of the Nordic Embassies in Berlin. They really are so inspiring. I think (if I remember correctly) the designs were selected by competition.

The picture below is looking up inside one of the embassies.

The interior spaces are stunning. I was most impressed with the muted color scheme (mostly the copper-blue and the color of natural wood) and use of materials. Notice the seating below, it is all a sort of nubuk leather.

See the detail of the copper on the curved stairway?

Each embassy building is built with materials you would find in that country. The one for either Iceland or Greenland (can't remember now which) has concrete molded into the wavy shape of corrugated metal, perhaps I should post a picture of that one!

The copper curtain around the entire compound was designed by some students. You can see it through the window in many of the pictures.

Below is inside another building. It used more white less wood, and didn't feel quite as warm, but I loved the openness of the main space, and again, the use of natural materials.

I'm still trying to convince Mr. Nielsen into having natural wood on the outside. Doesn't it look great?

like pb&j.

Subway tile and white cabinets together? Thank you, Chelsea. I now have another site to obsess over.

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a-train.

The other day I was playing around on the website of the 100k House, which lead me to Postgreen Homes, where you can customize your own home. Essentially, you pick from their projects which house you prefer, and then get to choose what flooring, countertops, paint, lighting, etc. that you want. I really like this process because it shows the cost difference between materials, and also detail out their "greenness." Doing this also gave me some great inspiration. It was there that I first decided I kind of like subway tiling for a bathroom. I also found some good examples of it on Design Sponge today:

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After uploading all these pictures, I realized that I chose almost every picture from the original post! At first I only noticed the subway tiling in the bottom image. The contrasting grout lines make it stand out. Then I noticed that many of the featured bathrooms have the subway tile, crazy! Am I onto another trend here? White cupboards in the kitchen, and white subway tile in the bathroom?

(Note: Postgreen Homes also got me interested in white Ikea cabinets for the kitchen.)

pretty on the outside.

Mr. Nielsen and I are so lucky. The land we hope to build on (currently his parents' backyard) is right next to a city park, and is wildly beautiful. These beauties, my most favorite, are in my future front yard:

Here's why else we're lucky. Mr. Nielsen's brother is a talented architect, and can design us an amazing house. Not one of those beige mcmansions found in all new suburban developments (not that there's anything wrong with those, well actually, there is, but if you like it, more power to ya) but an energy efficient, unique, modern house that fits the topography and blends well with the landscape. We don't plan on having much say in the outward design of the house, because we trust our architect brother, but we do like looking at houses. Here are pictures of some that Mr. Nielsen (who has refused to contribute to this blog, so I'll just have to do it for him) emailed to me:

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Here's what we like. Windows. Here's what I like. Natural wood. Here's what Mr. Nielsen likes. The green siding house. Here's what else I like. Copper, like at the Nordic Embassies in Berlin. Let me show you:

I love how the copper turns that turquoise-blue. There are panels of copper surrounding all of the Nordic Embassies. They also use it in some of the interiors. I may have to do a whole post around these buildings and others in Germany, they truly inspired me. (I visited Germany with a school group in October of 2009, it was wonderful!)

everything but the kitchen sink.

While browsing the Ikea website, I also fell in love with this sink. It is called Domsjo, and guess what? I can't find it in their product listings. In the article that features this picture collage, it lists prices for all these sinks. The Ikea on is only $25o, and is pictured top right. The other sinks range from over $800 to as much as $1300. Crazy! Ikea, please get more of these sinks by the time I will need one, in 1-2 years. Thanks.

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in the kitchen.

Lately I'm loving white cabinets. Ikea sells them, and they are very inexpensive, which is good for me. The word on the street is that they are very trendy right now, which may not be so good. Is white timeless or trendy?

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I am also contemplating stainless steel counter tops. This was the only picture I could find with a combination of stainless steel and white cabinets. In the article that lists the picture, it says that stainless can get dents, is expensive, and often looks streaky. I didn't think of those things, so I may have to reconsider this option. Thoughts? Opinions?

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My friend Emma posted this picture on her blog, and I have to agree with her, it is fabulous! Did you know blue is an appetite suppressing color? I'm thinking that would be good in the dining room. Colors like red are good in the kitchen because they induce energy, which is good for cooking and cleaning up big messes. That being said, I love the blue ceiling. And the white cabinets! The marble (or granite?) counters look great, but I don't know if we can afford something like that.

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