Makeover House Reveal-The Dining Room

Today I am sharing with you the dining room makeover.

There were just a few challenges in this room...all which were easily remedied:o)

In it's former life, this room was a bedroom. As the family grew, they added on, and decided to make this space the dining room. They knocked through the wall and opened the space up to the kitchen. 

One of the challenges of this room was the new furniture layout wasn't really flowing for this particular space.

 The wall color was also a challenge. The room was very cave-like because it was so dark. That was definitely an easy fix. The homeowners were kind enough to have all the painting done prior to the hubs and I coming in.

 This is the "after" shot. It is truly amazing what a new wall color can do for a room, isn't it? 

 So, here is what we did. We had the homeowners remove the leaf in the table and change the direction, so that the table fit the space better. When they have a large group over, they can always add it back:o)

 I cleaned out the china hutch, and displayed a pretty butterfly set she had tucked away. I also pulled out her silver tea set. You can see it through the glass panels. Before, the homeowner had multiple plates, bowls, serving dishes, and glasses filling the china hutch to the brim. I lightened the load to make it more visually appealing and less of storage piece. 

 The homeowners collect spoons on every vacation, and they were displayed in the entertainment room. I thought a better spot for them would be in the dining room, only because you use a spoon more in the dining room than in a t.v. room...great logic, right?:o) I think they work really well in the space.

 I found the plate racks at Old Time Pottery for $8 a piece. This was the only thing I hung in the entire house. My fingers were so sore after that, that I decided the hubs had to be in charge of the rest of the hanging:o)

So one last look at the before...

and the after...

Next up for the reveal series will be the Hallway.

Makeover House Reveal-The Living Room

Well hello there. It's been quite some time since I last posted. You wouldn't believe what all has been going on around here. And things won't be slowing down until next week. (keeping my fingers crossed;o))

Last week I re-decorated a friend's home....with the help of my very wonderful husband. Without his help, I would not have been able to finish even one room...Why, do you ask? Well, I'll tell you why. Because last Saturday, I decided I wanted to repaint the upstairs bathroom. I removed the HEAVY contractor grade mirror to make sure that the entire bathroom was painted. When I tried to put the mirror back, bad things happened, and I ended up with 2 stitches each in my index and middle fingers on my RIGHT hand...grr! So I have been a "lefty" for the past week.

So I heavily depended on the hubs to help me work on this HUGE undertaking. I had to redesign 5 different spaces in one week. I still have one more room to complete. We ran out of time and steam:o)

Because there are soooo many pictures, I am going to post on each room individually. 

LIVING ROOM

BEFORE:

This room was difficult to lay out because of the location of the front door and the fireplace. The front door couldn't be moved for obvious reasons, but the fire place was able to be relocated. 

 Here is another angle of the living room. All of the furniture was lined up against all of the walls.

 AFTER:

I wanted the homeowners to actually use their fireplace instead of walk past it every day. This seating arrangement is definitely a lot more intimate. They will be able to enjoy sitting in front of their newly relocated fireplace this winter. The furnishings in this seating area were already apart of the home. I "shopped" the house for the accessories...my favorite kind of shopping...FREE. The only thing I purchased was the ottoman. 

 This is where the fireplace had been. I moved this desk in from the entertainment room. The large picture above the desk was a yard sale purchase....for $25..SCORE!

 Since I moved the couch off of the long wall, it looked extremely bare and it needed to be filled with something, but it couldn't be large because it was a walkway. Enter small console tables. I found the matching prints at Old Time Pottery, and the tables and metal wall hanging from Hobby Lobby. Now the space is filled, but not obtrusive.

Here's a shot of the room showing the front door.

So, one last look at the before...

and after...

I'll be sharing the dining room next.

Stay tuned!!

The Business May 16th 2012, "The Tallents of the Fantastic Dr. Foxmeat" Edition (with extra Vannini!)

The Business gets feral this week. Our corporate office will be inundated with wild animals, as Sam Tallent, Cameron Vannini and Dr. Foxmeat get all up in our habitat.

Since all bios for Dr. Foxmeat have been either scratched into bark or howled at the moon, there is no written record from which to draw data. What we can conclude is that he is from Arcata, California on some kind of southward trek (which is weird, cause harvest isn’t for months).

Cameron Vannini is a dapper, young SF comic and philanthropist. Also known as the San Francisco Treat, Cameron performs regularly at the SF Punchline and is a AAA card member (even though he doesn't have a license). He has been spotted at Cobb's Comedy club, the San Jose Improv, and the Sacramento Punchline. Ingredients include the 2010 SF International Comedy competition and semi finalist in 2010 SJ Improv comedy competition.
Sam Tallent's from Denver. Alex Koll and him have done some very bad things together. Sam has been described as 'the black flag of comedy' and a zine in Denmark said 'Sam is the surreal voice of an earnestly silly generation'. Reggie Watts, TJ Miller, Joe Rogan, Kyle Kinane, Sean Patton and other quality gigglesmiths have worked with Sam and not complained to management. His home club is the Denver Comedy Works and he curates Too Much Funstival! at the end of August in Denver. His interests include Genki savory crepes, short haired women and writing in the third person.”

We will miss Chris Garcia and Bucky this week, but never fear, they will return from their walkabouts with new stories of misadventure and poop.

Bring your burritos and $5 to the Dark Room and get your wild thing on (RIP, Maurice). Come on, when’s the last time you had Foxmeat?!?

Is the future of digital journalism an outside job?

Making small digital news providers sustainable has become the holy grail of journalists and the search continues for workable business models and revenue streams.

Advertising may produce some revenue, but it will never generate sufficient resources to support digital journalism because so little advertising money is available for sites with small audiences. About three-quarters of all online advertising goes to the top 10 sites and Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo account for about 60 percent of all online revenue. This leaves very little advertising expenditures to be contested among all other players--of which news providers are only a small fraction. At the same time, the prices paid for online advertising are falling because there are so many sites offering advertising, the advertising inventory is nearly infinite, and audiences continue fragmenting.

This means the majority of funding for start-up digital journalism must come from elsewhere and online news sites—especially start-ups—are having mixed success trying to construct multiple revenue streams from philanthropy, memberships, events, consulting services, and payment systems. Both large legacy news organizations that dominate provision of news in the digital space and free automated aggregators are hampering efforts of small sites to develop audiences. The primary successes that can be observed have been for start-ups carrying out special forms of journalism or concentrating on highly specific topics.

The answer to sustainability may not lie in the business creation and business operational approach. The key to making emergent digital news providers sustainable may lie in the 18th and 19th century approaches to journalism, in which journalism was an avocation and not a profession (or at least only a part-time profession).

If one reviews the history of newspaper start-ups around the world, one finds that the bases of journalistic compensation were not journalism itself. It many cases it was funded by public employment—serving as postmasters, teachers, or other civil servants—or by operating commercial endeavours—such as printing firms, taverns, and retail shops (Even brothels funded the costs of newspapers in some towns in the Western U.S. during the nineteenth century).

The current inability to effectively fund small-scale digital journalism means that we all need to be thinking more broadly about how we can support the functions and people involved in them. If the past is a guide, we may need to return to provision of local journalism as community activism, political activity, or business support service—all of which played significant roles in establishment of news provision in years past.

Let’s face it: in most industries, firms pretty much do the same thing

In the field of strategy, we always make a big thing out of differentiation: we tell firms that they have to do something different in the market place, and offer customers a unique value proposition. Ideas around product differentiation, value innovation, and whole Blue Oceans are devoted to it. But we also can’t deny that in many industries – if not most industries – firms more or less do the same thing.

Whether you take supermarkets, investment banks, airlines, or auditors, what you get as a customer is highly similar across firms.

1. Ability to execute: What may be the case, is that despite doing pretty much the same thing, following the same strategy, there can be substantial differences between the firms in terms of their profitability. The reason can lie in execution: some firms have obtained capabilities that enable them to implement and hence profit from the strategy better than others. For example, Sainsbury’s supermarkets really aren’t all that different from Tesco’s, offering the same products at pretty much the same price in pretty much the same shape and fashion in highly identical shops with similarly tempting routes and a till at the end. But for many years, Tesco had a superior ability to organise the logistics and processes behind their supermarkets, raking up substantially higher profits in the process.

2. Shake-out: As a consequence of such capability differences – although it can be a surprisingly slow process – due to their homogeneous goods, we may see firms start to compete on price, margins decline to zero, and the least efficient firms are pushed out of the market. And one can hear a sigh of relief amongst economists: “our theory works” (not that we particularly care about the world of practice, let alone be inclined to adapt our theory to it, but it is more comforting this way).

3. A surprisingly common anomaly? But it also can’t be denied that there are industries in which firms offer pretty much the same thing, have highly similar capabilities, are not any different in their execution, and still maintain ridiculously high margins for a sustained period of time. And why is that? For example, as a customer, when you hire one of the Big Four accounting firms (PwC, Ernst & Young, KPMG, Deloitte), you really get the same stuff. They are organised pretty much the same way, they have the same type of people and cultures, and have highly similar processes in place. Yet, they also (still) make buckets of money, repeatedly turning and churning their partners into millionaires.

“But such markets shouldn’t exist!” we might cry out in despair. But they do. Even the Big Four themselves will admit – be it only in covert private conversations carefully shielding their mouths with their hands – that they are really not that different. And quite a few industries are like that. Is it a conspiracy, illegal collusion, or a business X file?

None of the above I am sure, or perhaps a bit of all of them… For one, industry norms seem to play a big role in much of it: unwritten (sometimes even unconscious), collective moral codes, sometimes even crossing the globe, in terms of how to behave and what to do when you want to be in this profession. Which includes the minimum price to charge for a surprisingly undifferentiated service.

Big Moments...

We have had a lot of "Big Moments" going on around here lately. Two weeks ago, I ran in my first 1/2 marathon...It was the most excruciating experience I have ever encountered. The hills and the heat were absolute torture, but I survived (barely) and have the medal to prove it:o)

These were the girls I ran with. Had it not been for my great friend Shannon(far left), I wouldn't have made it to the end. She is such a great source of encouragement and an awesome friend!!

Another big moment was my little sister graduated from college. She is the first in our family to graduate from a university. She graduated with a double major on Saturday & we couldn't be more proud of her. Especially since she was the first. My parents didn't go to college & I only went to junior college and then cosmetology school. My brother will be graduating in two years, so we are really looking forward to that!! 

The weather was wild that morning..it started out raining...and then the sun came out. Along with the sun came high humidity, high heat, and biting bugs:o) We're still scratching;o)

Here are a few candid shots of the big day...

I love this shot of my parents:o)

 The kids posing with their aunt...S.R. was freezing, so she wore my sweater.

 Here is my sister receiving her diploma.

 This is the cake I made for her. This poor thing traveled many miles to make it to it's final destination. It was two days old by the time we were able to eat it, but it was still delicious..if I do say so myself;o)

We have been so blessed with all of the big events happening here lately. 

Next week I will be completely redecorating a dear friend's house. I can't wait to share before and after pictures with you all! I am really looking forward to it!!

Have a great day!!

The Business May 2nd 2012, "Seregina & Dhar" Edition

This week the Business loses Chris and Chris, but welcomes back two local faves Anna Seregina and Rajeev Dhar to make up for our Chris-less-ness.

Anna Seregina is a San Francisco-based stand-up comic and performer. She was born in Moscow, Russia, which could explain her deep-rooted cynicism. It could also explain nothing. After being involved in theater and improv for nearly a decade and being funny for nearly a lifetime, she decided to take the plunge into stand-up comedy. Her style can nearly be defined as vocal and un-lady-like, drawing heavily on what little life experience she has. She has been described as having the “worst aura.” Most facts about her are true. Most truths about her are facts.

Rajeev Dhar (Phd) has a Tumblr page, but it's password protected, so I couldn't lift his bio from it word-for-word like I did Anna's. Regardless, he is very funny and runs the Tuesday night comedy show called The Break Room at Amnesia in the Mission, not far from yours truly. I've only caught him looking in the mirror at himself once, but I don't blame him.

Bucky returns to us this week from Portland, and Alex, Caitlin and Sean will also be on hand. Will Hologram Bucky confront his flesh-and-blood counterpart? Come down and see.

As always show is at 8pm, only $5 and all burritos welcome.