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How-To Hang A Hammock Indoors
Marc Held When I was a teenager, I hung a hammock in my room. I don’t know how I got the gumption to do it, but I’d brought a simple cotton hammock back from Mexico and somehow found a pair of strong...
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Soften an Angular Modern Space with Rounds
bohemianhomes.tumblr.com Many modern spaces, including our own Laboratory, suffer from having so many right angles, rectangles, linearity, that they can be a bit harsh. The simple solution is to shake...
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The Unexpected Beauty of a Matless, Glassless Picture Frame
Maria Robledo Recently, we gave our dear friend Maria Robledo a silver picture frame we’d had for many years. It was handmade and so beautifully and simply wrought, we’d never put a glass or mat in...
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Serene Sheer Linen Bed Spread
François Halard We clipped another lovely, doable idea from the idiotic New York Times T Magazine article a few weeks ago about the Axel Vervoordt-designed “wabi wabi” penthouse at NYC’s Greenwich...
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DIY Silverware Drainer + Dish Drainer Hack
Sally Schneider When we renovated the Laboratory, moving and installing our 25-year-old kitchen cabinets for the 3rd time, we had to also install new countertops. We choose original white colored...
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Good Idea: Keep Track of Water Glasses with China Markers
Sinnae Choi Recently, our friend Jane Lear wrote us to say “This great tip stuck in my head, and I finally had a chance to reference it in this week’s food advice column for TakePart about ways to use...
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Line a drawer with Cloth not Paper
Sally Schneider Looking for a skillet to fry some eggs in at Maria Robledo’s house, we opened a drawer to find a brilliant idea we never would have thought of: line a drawer with a cloth, such as a...
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How to Keep Cast-Iron Cookware Naturally Nonstick
bestmadeco.com This image of vintage cast-iron reminded us how much we love the endlessly-useful, impossible-to-destroy cookware. We’ve been using it for years having inherited many pieces from...
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Window Shade Room Dividers
aqqindex.com This Venetian blind room divider created by interior designer Jose Juan Belda in the 70′s got us thinking about how useful window shades can be as mutable room dividers. When we were...
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Introducing Improvised Life’s New Store
Over the years, Improvised Life has featured some seriously good stuff, from books about design, art, productivity and poetry to all manner of tools for making and living. Since these wonderful items...
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Leftover Tiles Morph into a Trivet for Hot Pots and Pans
Sally Schneider We chose plain white Corian for the countertops in the Laboratory kitchen renovation and love working on it: it presents a “clear” palet of a work surface that is a pleasure to prep...
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Find: HUGE 100% Cotton Dish Towels Have Many Uses
We stumbled on these HUGE dish towels and ordered a set to check out, having learned the hard way that the real thing is often way different than pictures. We washed them and…they are great, 100%...
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Sea Shell Salt Cellar
Virginia del Giudice Our friend Virgina del Giudice sent us a lovely vacation email with the subject line: “Improvising“: We were on vacation in La Pedrera, Uruguay (very beautiful place!) My husband...
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Back to Basics with Homemade Household Products
GreenMed Here’s something to put up on your refrigerator door: a chart showing 72 practical uses of common “core” ingredients that make up our (far more expensive) store-bought soaps, lotions and...
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Stylish, Cheap Socket and Shade Lighting Formula
After Remodelista touted the virtues of the vin ordinaire hardware store porcelain light socket, we were reminded of the one that ended up on our wall during the Laboratory’s renovation. Overwhelmed...
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Clever Hardwood Board Uses (with Resources)
? This clever bread board bird feeder reminded us of the endless odd permutations on the theme of bread boards we’ve written about before, and of the vast possibilities for using wood planks in...
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BIG Leaning Mirrors Expand the View
myscandinavianhome.com I’m crazy about how mirrors can animate a room and bring it to life. Particularly oversize, leaning mirrors. I thought these were beauties. … You don’t need to do anything — no...
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Open Source Systems for Everyday Objects, Food + Living
(Video link HERE.) Bio 50 has applied open-source thinking to electronic appliances we use in our homes everyday. They’ve prototyped of a system built upon standard components that offers the user the...
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How (and Why) to Make an Emergency Spoon
(Video link HERE.) Master life-hacker/improviser Dave Hax shows how to make a spoon out of a plastic bottle. It reminds us of “Found” the beautiful metal-coated plastic cutlery by designer Oscar Diaz...
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Interlocking Cardboard Disks for Building
Luke Hayes As great admirers of the infinite possibilities of ordinary cardboard, we love British designer Torsten Sherwood‘s simplified single-component system that encourages instinctive building....
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