another inspiring craftsman in southern california

james sent me this beautiful remodeled craftsman bungalow over on remodelista, by simo design.

almost everything i love about this comes back to color. whites, blues and greys throughout with dark wood floors. it's very similar to the colors i dream of our house being. the use of white and grey painted trim is particularly eye-catching in its attention to details. it really makes me torn, since we've always wanted to do stained wood trim, but the painted white trim i've seen in renovated craftsman houses has me second guessing it!

i really love the spare but pop-y use of color. painting just the ceiling and the parts of the walls above the picture rail is a brilliant idea. it keeps the lines in the room still very clean and bright, without that boring or sanitary feeling.

i am also so impressed by all the detail put into the built-ins in every room. it really drives in the sense that everything has its purpose and its place, that this was meant to be a home and not a cookie-cutter house.

anyway, i've said enough. to see more of this beautiful home, visit simo design!

all images by joe schmelzer.

smart light bulbs for a smarter home

for those that don't know us, james and i tend to be (or at least consider ourselves) pretty tech-savvy. we love when technology makes our lives simpler. one thing we are terrible at doing is turning on and off the lights in our home. mainly just the outdoor lights, and a light for sanford when it gets dark.

we already had a way of manually turning on the living room light for sanford when we're away from home, but we'd often forget. and waiting until we got home to turn out the outside lights could mean stumbling (i'm a bit of a clutz) and fumbling our way from the garage to the front door in the dark. and the light on the street side of the house, well - it's switch is in the guest bedroom, and near the floor, where you would expect an outlet. needless to say, i never turned that light on, which meant it would often stay on, or stay off, for longer than intended.

so when the belkin wemo home automation system came out with smart light switches that you could program with IFTTT, we jumped on that train immediately. except when we opened up the electrical switches to install them, we realized that the electrical in our house is so old it's not compatible with them!

then, the other week, belkin released their smart led light bulbs! it requires a small central link that controls the bulbs via wifi, but would allow us to have programmable lights even without having to update the electrical! we bought the starter kit (with wemo link and two smart bulbs) and two additional bulbs immediately.

let me say right off the bat that we had a lot of trouble getting this set up, and that the system still needs a lot of work. the system is technically really easy to set up. plug in the link, install the lightbulb and turn it on, open the wemo app, connect to link via wifi which walks you through the rest of detecting the light bulbs that are on and emitting a signal. however, just our luck, we tried it with just one light bulb first, and it was busted. we didn't know it was busted though, as the light itself functioned, but the link could never find it. after several frustrated attempts and restarting of the link, i decided to try another light bulb. voila! it worked. 

also, the app itself is slow. and buggy. rules are easy to set up, but once set, we haven't been able to change them. the app just hangs. our workaround is to delete the rule and create a new one. plus, for now, you can either set them to come on/off based on time, or sunrise/sunset. it would be great if we could make time-offsets (eg. 30 minutes before sunset).

all that being said, once we got it all set up (minus the one bulb we need to return, but that's okay because we got 4 total so we'd have an extra) it's been great. we have the outside lights set to turn on at sunset and off at sunrise. it's be so nice to just not have to think about. 

not as pretty as an edison bulb, but i'll take the convenience over pretty in this case.

so yea - it's a bit of a mixed bag, but totally worth it in our opinion. hopefully over time the software will only get better. and when we get the electrical in the house upgraded, we'll be able to use those switches instead, and use these lights in other spots around the house.

inspired by a craftsman bungalow in silverlake.

i'm feeling really inspired by this craftsman bungalow in silverlake that apartment therapy featured today! it has so many details that we want to integrate into our home, and it's done in such a beautiful, eclectic yet cohesive way.

first of all, all the trim! the beautiful, chunky, craftsman trim. it's a major detail missing from our home that we are very excited to put back in one day, though i think we would go with stained wood trim, as opposed to painted trim. also, can you spot the pinball machine peeking in from the left in the image above? james has been talking about getting one for as long as i've known him. when i showed him this house tour, his exact words were craftsman/industrial/geek can work! needless to say, i think he loves it too.

another component we loved was the dining room buffet below the high, wide windows. our dining room already has windows like that, and we've been discussing buffet options from day one, so seeing this made us really happy.

i think we'll go more craftsman/industrial and less eclectic than this particular house. we want to pull in many more original craftsman features, with industrial accents (wood and metal are just such a great combination). i just love the feel of this house. the feel is definitely in line with what we want for our home, even if the exact details and choices are not the same.

one last thing - i love the bath/shower combo they have! we've definitely discussed how we could have a clawfoot tub without having to use shower curtains (we hate shower curtains!) and have even talked about maybe making the bathroom a full wetroom. the clawfoot in a wet area of the bathroom is so nice - i wouldn't be surprised if something similar shows up in our home in a few years...!

so yea, i'm feeling super inspired this morning because of this house. make sure you check out the whole tour over at apartment therapy for even more details (the beautiful yard! the geeky office!! so many beautiful houseplants!!).