EZ Home: Weekend Finds
Between injuries, illness, and brutally cold weather, EZ and I spent a considerable amount of time inside these past few months. Being caught up on our regular shows, we watched a good bit of HGTV, specifically Dear Genevieve. Inspired by Genevieve’s redecorating, we constantly envision ways to make our space more functional and stylish.
With the slight uptick on the thermometer this weekend, we decided to explore some of the stores near our South End home. We plan to do a couple of in-depth post on the new and vintage home design offerings later, but thought we would share a couple of this weekend’s finds.
First of all, some background about our space: we live in a loft with huge tall ceilings and lots of windows, making it an interesting and challenging space. The biggest thing that we are lacking is storage. Without extra walls and closets, it is hard to hide all of our stuff in an organized way. We recently rearranged our loft into a wonderful open layout, but it left us with the open space pictured below. As you can see, it served as a catch-all for an assortment of items with no home or waiting for their return to a non-existent drawer or closet.
Living in a loft, each piece of furniture needs to serve a dual purpose of decorating and organizing, while remaining functional. Otherwise there is overwhelming clutter and chaos. Genevieve always impresses us with how she harnesses that chaos and clutter to create beautiful design vignettes in her projects. Our goal was to make this a space to display our keepsakes as we grow our life together, and simultaneously make storage less of an eyesore.
With this in mind, we went for a stroll last week, and dropped by the South End Exchange on Camden Road. This is a wonderful little consignment store that will certainly be included in our follow-up post. While inside, we noticed two rather large industrial-looking bookshelves that would be a perfect fit for our home. We instantly pictured all the different baskets, bins, and drawers we could use for storage, while also creating a perfect place for our vignettes. After marinating on the decision for a few days, and shopping around, we decided to return over the weekend, and purchased the shelves to place one by the bikes and one between the prints.
Excited about our upcoming delivery, we set out to find a few items to make the shelves more functional. We liked these filing drawers at Griffith Street Consignments, which happened to come from a preacher’s estate. They were full of note cards from the Minister’s Filing System, each containing references, quotes, and inspiration for sermons on a variety of topics. We decided we could use the drawer’s for organization, and we will see what we come up with for the using the contents of Minister’s Filing System.
Also, here is a surprise we found among the note cards when we looked through them at home, a collection of 1938 British Colonial Stamps!
Finally, here is a shot of the semi-finished space, with our initial decorations and storage. We are now at an exciting place in our home decorating, and look forward to exploring the awesome places to fill these two sets of awesome spaces. We plan to post more details about the South End shops, and this weekend we are heading to the Metrolina Expo to see what else we can find.
