With the spread of the new crown epidemic, a wave of house decoration has been triggered, and some creative homeowners can finally shape their own spaces according to their own visions.
The Translation Bureau is a subordinate translation team, focusing on technology, business, workplace, life and other fields, focusing on introducing new foreign technologies, new perspectives, and new trends.
Editor’s note: With the spread of the new crown epidemic, a wave of house decoration has been triggered, and some creative homeowners can finally shape their own spaces according to their own vision. This article is translated from The NewYork Times, author Ronda Kaysen (Ronda Kaysen), the original title is “Extreme DIY for Home Decor”, hope to inspire you.
Jen Rondeau did not intend to turn her laundry room into a psychedelic disco, but now it looks so much like it, and she is very satisfied with her masterpiece.
All this started in early January last year, because Rondo has been selling masks made by himself since the spring, but as the demand dwindled, the artist and musician found that he didn’t have a creative The exit. So she turned her attention to a practical gray room in the basement of her home in West Orange, New Jersey.
She spent three days along a wall and drew a medieval abstract design, boldly mixing red, blue, pink and orange. She was very satisfied with the result. She extended the design on the other side, put an orange chair in the corner, and installed a disco light machine, which will play a flashing light sequence with the music input from the Bluetooth speaker.
“I have a lot of energy and need to devote myself to certain things,” said the 43-year-old Rondo. She lives in this four-bedroom ranch-style house with her husband, 42-year-old freelance cinematographer, Paul Rondeau, and two young sons. Now the laundry room is painted, “I want to go there,” she said. “It makes me very happy.”
With the spread of the new crown epidemic, a wave of house renovations has been triggered. Some more creative homeowners interpret this moment as a creative moment, setting aside their expectations of what the house should look like in order to guide them The way of artistic energy renews their space, reimagining what is acceptable home decoration in the process. While many homeowners invest heavily in remodeling kitchens and bathrooms, these people are creating something unique and very personal, and they usually spend only a few hundred dollars on materials.
Can’t you go to the movies? There is no more suitable time than now to turn the basement into a home theater with a full franchise. Is there no place for a soaking bathtub in the small bathroom? Norelationship. Install it in the bedroom. Do the children already have solitary dwelling disease? There is no better time to build an ice skating rink in the front yard than now.
For these homeowners, DIY projects are a kind of liberation. It unearths undiscovered artistic talents or honed the artistic talents they have cultivated for many years. Their home is not just a space they want to occupy, but a space they can shape according to their creative vision.
“I see more colors and more sense of adventure in the selection of home improvement. People will say,’I have nowhere to go, let’s look at interesting things at home,'” designer Ingrid · Ingrid Fetell Lee (Ingrid Fetell Lee) said. She is the author of “Joyful: the Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness” (Joyful: the Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness).
Leanne Ford, an interior designer and star of the HGTV show “Home Again with the Ford”, believes that for homeowners, it is time to give up some of their pre-coronavirus expectations Up. What’s the point if there are no guests living in the guest room? “We don’t need to decorate our lifestyle a year ago. We need to decorate our current lifestyle,” she said.
This is also a time to showcase our creativity. No one will come to the house as a guest, and no one will comment on your weird choice. Ford said: “People care too much about what their brothers, sisters, mothers, and neighbors say.” But now, it’s time for this kind of judgment to pause, and some homeowners feel more at ease. “Concentrate on doing what you want to do, knowing that this is your own house, a force of liberation and creation,” she said. “No one is here as a guest now, so this is a better time to practice.”
After Rondo finished painting the laundry room, she moved her personal creativity to the wall. “What I was thinking was,’What’s next?’ It’s like being addicted,” said Rondo, who learned from muralist Racheal Jackson in Vancouver, Washington. Got some skills and found inspiration from him. Jackson has nearly 70,000 fans on the photo wall (Instagram).
Next, Rondo painted a mural in her son’s bathroom, which is a long and narrow space. She also thinks that the time for this experiment is ripe. But after five days of painting, the result was disappointing. The edges are not straight, and the color is difficult to match the brown tiles. “The imagination in my mind has not been transformed into this space very well,” she said.
But the boys, who are 5 and 9 years old, are very happy and satisfied. Therefore, instead of restoring these murals, she moved to the open-plan living room and dining area, where she painted the back wall-from the edge of the dining room to the living room fireplace-dark blue, emphasizing the vibrant lines, shapes and Circle. At the entrance to the living room, she drew a free-form design with black lines and colorful squares.
She said that the results of the painting have brought about earth-shaking changes, especially in her living room, where there is a vaulted ceiling and you can see the Manhattan skyline about 40 miles (about 40 kilometers) away. Previously, this room “doesn’t feel like a warm and friendly space”. It feels like we put a sofa in it, and then we closed,” she said. Now, “It feels good. I wake up every morning and drink my coffee before the kids wake up. I sit in the living room and watch the sunrise, overlooking the city. “
A real movie theater with a small shop
For some homeowners, the epidemic has provided them with time to deal with items that linger on the “honey-do list”. In 2018, Rineeka Sheppard and her husband Steven built a home theater for themselves in the basement of a five-bedroom house in Indianapolis.
But life is always busy with all kinds of things. They all have jobs, raising three teenage children and one five-year-old. But in April this year, 38-year-old Shepard lost her job of collecting outstanding student loans at the State Department of Education due to the new crown epidemic, and her work schedule was suddenly vacated.
“Finally, it’s time,” said Shepard. She is a person who likes to go to the kiosk in a movie theater. “In the face of new coronary pneumonia, I was finally able to take a step back and take a deep breath.”
When her 43-year-old mechanic husband was decorating the house, Shepard was looking for home improvement supplies on Facebook Marketplace. She found pretzel and nachos warmers, a snack display stand and a Mini refrigerator with glass cover. (She has already bought a popcorn machine on the furniture e-commerce platform Wayfair.) Every canteen needs a cold drinks cabinet, and she finally found one in a restaurant that was about to close. Through social media, she found a retired Coca-Cola repairman who was willing to install and repair the machine.
Steven Sheppard spent several months renovating the walls and floors of the basement, installing dry walls and new floors. He made a counter with wooden pallets and painted the room black and red. He increased the seats in the cinema from 6 to10, a row of risers was added at the back, and two recliners were added at the front.
“A lot of times, I think, ‘oh, man, I can’t do it,’” he said. Once, he worked from noon until 3 am the next day. “When I work in the basement, the time seems to be the same. Anyway, I don’t know if it is day or night. So I will continue to work.”
They completed this space in January. Rineka Shepard likes that the family can huddle together to watch movies. “If your stomach is upset, you can go downstairs and have a glass of Sprite.” She said, “When the movie is showing, we can go downstairs, and the baby can watch the movie while eating popcorn and candy. It feels like being in a movie theater. Same.”
Skating rink in the front yard
Some other homeowners have also started at home in the past few months, trying to replicate the activities of the outside world. In Eau Claire, Wisconsin (Eau Claire, Wisconsin), the outdoor skating rink is open, but due to the new crown epidemic, the indoor heating shed is closed. Therefore, if you want to skate, there is no place to use the bathroom, no warm place to change gear, and no canteen to buy hot cocoa. Therefore, 39-year-old Chad Rowekamp decided to build a skating rink for his two children.
In the early Christmas morning, Rowakamp installed a set of equipment purchased from the Canadian Rinkmaster Company and installed a 20-foot x 30-foot skating rink on the lawn in front of his house. Under normal circumstances, it takes a week for such a large skating rink to be filled with water and freeze the city, but as the temperature dropped from more than 20 degrees to minus that week and night, he completed this within a few hours. Work, the work was completed around 2 in the morning.
“I have never done this work before. I actually don’t know what I’m doing, but it just succeeded. It’s great,” said Rovacamp, a salesperson at PepsiCo. During the new crown epidemic, he gave his children a lot of outdoor activities, such as the plush toy zoo, which he completed on the lawn in front of the house in spring. The exhibits include monkeys and pandas, and he bought them for the children. And the decoration is placed in a nearby mailbox so that children can write cards and letters by themselves.
The built family skating rink immediately aroused the interest of his 7-year-old daughter. “Christmas is a Friday. By that weekAt the first time, she had been skating for 10 hours. “He said, “Go out the front door, slide as long as you want, and then come in for a cup of hot chocolate. It’s really great. “
Become a mosaic artist
In January of this year, Kristin Schlinkert (Kristin Schlinkert) finally completed her first home improvement project. This is an 8-foot-long, 7-and-a-half-high mosaic tile, which was based in Texas. Designed and assembled in the powder room of a four-bedroom home in Arlington (Arlington, Texas). In April last year, she started to make this mosaic made of 3/4-inch tall blue and white tiles. At that time, she thought she was going to work at home for several months. But the materials were not delivered until June, when she had already returned to the office to invest in commercial real estate.
On her way to and from get off work—it takes an hour and a half each way—she doesn’t have time to devote herself to this creation during the workday. But as her social life stagnated indefinitely and her weekends were completely free, she found herself immersed in a malleable art project for the first time.
“I am 53 years old and I have never done anything like this before,” Schlinkert said. She was deeply inspired by this project and plans to take art classes at the University of Texas in Arlington.
She used the entrance of the house as a workbench, and laid a 15-inch square grid on the floor according to the design pattern she found on the Internet. After completing the parts, she pasted them on the wall of the dressing room, creating a geometric design that turned what she called the “ordinary dressing room” into one of her favorite places in the house. “Now is this beautiful, whimsical, and outstanding space,” she said. Her next project is to design mosaics for the main bathroom.
How about a bathtub in the bedroom?
For two years, Sage Crawford has been considering a one-bedroom apartment in Aarhus, Denmark, where she lives, Install a claw-foot bathtub. But Crawford, a 45-year-old American from Connecticut, has two obstacles to overcome. First of all, this bathroom is less than 11 square feet (approximately 13 square meters), except for a simple shower room, the space is too small, and the claw-foot bathtub is not in this Scandinavian country common. Once, her best friend, a New Yorker living in Amsterdam, came up with a very New York solution: install a bathtub in her bedroom.
But life has been very busy until Aarhus was blocked last spring. My reaction at the time was, do you know? Crawford said through the video social platform Zoom. “I can’t travel, I have nowhere to go. I don’t even have anything to buy.”
After confirming to an architect that the floor of the 1911 apartment building she lived in could bear the weight, she found a Swedish company and made a claw-foot bathtub that was narrow enough to plug Enter her apartment. When the bathtub arrived, she hired a porter and moved it to the second floor. Finding a plumber is not easy, because most of the people she finds don’t know what a claw-foot bathtub is, nor can they imagine installing one in the bedroom. But Crawford insisted on doing this. “In the end, a friend said, ‘This sounds weird, but I’ll check it out,’” she said.
She wanted to install the bathtub next to an exposed brick wall in the corner of the bedroom, where she could overlook her balcony and an inner courtyard. The plumber extended the pipe of the kitchen sink to the inner wall and drained the waste water from the sink.
Now, in the months since it was the second lockdown, Crawford has no regrets about her weird project. Her bedroom now has a Parisian tranquility, which makes it easier to endure long and lonely days. At 6 o’clock in the evening, she would read a book on her Kindle in the bathtub, enjoying one of the 15 bubble bath scents she ordered online. “I’m really looking forward to it. This is a happy space that belongs to me,” said Crawford, who usually travels at this time of the year to escape the darkness of Scandinavian winter. “If I didn’t do this, I would be sad.”
Translator: TeresaChen