Monthly Archives: March 2011

You don’t have to be a kid…

Posted in Velvet Love by

…to appreciate these rooms.

While we’re not quite ready to make the jump from hubby + wifey to mama + papa, I LOVE browsing through images of fun + modern kid’s rooms. Long gone are the days where kids rooms are painted in powder blue or baby pink; there are so many ways to make them fun without compromising on the design.

Stay tuned for some upcoming posts on my niece and nephew’s room that I’ve been redecorating recently.  It’s lookin hot!

 

Yellow-striped nursery, courtesy of Domino Magazine

Domino Magazine via Interiorly

Domino Magazine Flickr Group

Domino Magazine via Elegance Redefined

Feathered Nest Interiors, LLC via Houzz

Design Dazzle

 

Let’s sell this house already!

Posted in Our Home by

Adam and I live in a gorgeous loft in the heart of the Plateau, in lovely Montreal, Quebec.  The condo has 11-foot ceilings, over 1400 square feet, and a killer view.  But a few short months after our wedding, I started to feel an itch. An itch for more storage space, a few bedrooms with actual doors, and a kitchen with oh, say, more than 1 drawer to store food.  And to be quite honest, I have run out of areas to decorate.  Sure, the occasional DIY project kept me somewhat satiated and decorating my niece and nephew’s guest bedroom at my parents’ was a fun learning experience, but I was ready for something big and new.  This was an itch that no back-scratcher could fix. So we put our condo up for sale.  And now we wait… and wait…

Here are some pics of our current home:

Front Entrance Sitting Area

Front Entrance

Armoire

Hallway

Office space

Coffee Table

 

Shoes

Jewellery

All pics fancified with instagr.am

Hello world!

Posted in Velvet Toolbox by

Meet Mel.  Author of velvet toolbox and lover of all things design.

I can’t quite pinpoint the exact moment in time when I started to love interior design.  It was more of a slow and natural progression, from friend to crush to love.  The tipping point must have been when I discovered Domino magazine.  I was living in NYC at the time, and this magazine opened my eyes to such beautiful and creative spaces.  I caught myself saying “I want this dresser”, and “wouldn’t it be nice to have a kitchen like that”.  Next thing I knew, I was paying attention to every little detail at each restaurant, store, and lounge I went to – curious to know how they built something, where they came up with THAT incredible idea, or where I could get my hands on THAT thing.  Fast forward to today: my curiosity and passion for design is greater than ever.  I don’t have any official credentials to flaunt, and this passion has only manifested itself as a hobby, but what I have invested is a heck of a lot of “sponge time” – thousands of hours of HGTV viewing time, hundreds of magazines-worth of perusing, and countless blog post readings.

Meet Adam.  beloved husband and muscle-clad handyman.

Every day, I am more and more amazed by my husband.  Sure, we’re still newlyweds, but I am surprised each day by his level of knowledge about everything.  Want to know every possible motorcycle model ever made? Adam can recite the list to you.  Want to know how to sail a boat?  Adam can teach you.  Want to convert a double bed into a single one?  Adam sure knows how.  This guy can spend hours on end surfing the web and tinkering in our mini “workshop” (more like our storage locker) to understand how things are made.  He will disassemble objects to their bare bones and then reassemble them just for fun.  Needless to say, I am VERY happy to have someone like Adam around.  I suspect that my parents are pretty happy too (“my favorite son-in-law, can you help us put up these shelves?”  ”sweet adam, we need help with setting up Facebook profiles, please!!!”).

Meet Velvet Toolbox.

There are many things that Adam and I do well together, home projects being one of them.  We bounce ideas off each other, bicker a little bit, bicker a little more, and then finally come to an agreement about the best way to tackle the task at hand.  What makes our chemistry work is that we each have something different to bring to the table - I have the eye for design, he has the technical know-how.

Now that we’ve gotten a few small DIY projects under our belts, we’re ready to take on a larger scale project: an entire home reno and design.  In this blog, I’ll be sharing tidbits of inspiration and creation, as we turn our house into a home, one room at a time.  I should mention here that our house only exists in our minds at the moment; we are still anxiously awaiting the sale of our condo before we can begin our exciting new venture.  Until then, I’ll keep ya’ll entertained with some of the projects we’ve done to date as well as awesome links to cool stuff and hot spaces that will hopefully inspire you as much as they do me.