Last week, I promised you results. So today, I come bearing gifts: the outcome of four furniture refinishing projects completed over the course of a few months. The process introduced us to skills (and muscles) that we didn’t know we had; apparently, they were lying dormant, only to be revealed when our need for attractive home furnishings became too much to bear.

First on the project list was this cherry-colored mirror, which I thought would look more modern in a darker mahogany stain.

Before:

Little did we know that tackling this project might break us before we’d really gotten started. Unfortunately, the process of sanding and staining is much more onerous than sanding, priming and painting. As I advised last week, when you’re getting ready to paint a piece of furniture, you just need to sand it enough to rough up the surface for proper paint adhesion. When you want to stain a piece of furniture, however, you need to sand it first to the bare wood (see below). And that process, my friends, is no walk in the park.

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You might remember me grumbling under my breath somewhere in these pages, complaining about all our mismatched furniture. Sound familiar? If not, here’s a primer to bring you up to speed: poor twentysomethings rely on the generosity of parents to furnish starter apartments, compile collection of well-made but totally incongruous castoff wooden furniture from different parents’ houses.

There’s a happy ending to this story, though, in which the poor twentysomethings purchase paint and sandpaper, and with a little bit of elbow grease, start to turn things around style-wise. We’ve written this happy ending, word by painstaking word, over the past six months—and now I get to share the results with you!

Well, to be more accurate, today I’ll be sharing one of the results with you, whetting your appetites for a full reveal next week. And I’ll go through the step-by-step process we used to make over each of these lovely-but-tired pieces. Sound good? Then here’s the “before” photo for our first subject, the antique bureau I pilfered from my father’s house. It has some great history, having come originally from my grandfather’s home, but the years hadn’t been too kind to it (or its brass handles—read their story here). These pictures were taken after a light scrub with sandpaper, but paint a pretty accurate portrait of what we were dealing with.

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Decorating an apartment sounds like good, clean fun, but in reality, it involves a lot of sweat equity. There are walls to tape off and paint, furniture to refinish (more on that soon!), and—inevitably—way too many Ikea purchases to weld together.

In my opinion, the best part of the decorating process comes before the big move: picking out a color scheme! In our previous abode, I made the mistake of winging it when it came to the color palette, and those random stylistic decisions never came together as a cohesive whole. This time, I vowed to be more strategic about the whole process.

Here, my friends, is the result:

After living with blue walls that were just slightly too vivid in our old place, I knew I’d go for neutral paint this time. Enter: light gray, which is more fun than beige but just as low-key. A sane wall color would allow for pops of cheerful pigment elsewhere in red, gold, and navy—a modified primary color scheme. Against this palette, I figured that bright white trim and deep mahogany wood pieces would make for especially crisp accents.

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In a beauty contest pitting Chicago’s neighborhoods against each other, Goose Island wouldn’t exactly make the top ten. She might have some great insights to share during the interview competition—about the amazing beer brewed on her shores, or the fact that she’s the only island on the Chicago River—but even an evening gown couldn’t hide her homely features.

Nevertheless, I found myself walking around there the other week, around those streets flagged with banners proudly reading “Chicago’s Industrial Corridor,” in order to find Calumet Photo. It was there that a bespectacled guy named Fred taught me how to use my new Yashica Mat 124, loaded it up with a roll of Tri-X, and sent me out to capture the world on medium format film.

Unable to contain my excitement, I shot my test roll there without the guidance of a light meter. Somehow, the gritty black-and-white film, the striking square frames, and the eerie emptiness of the neighborhood made for some pretty cool shots. I can’t wait to see what else this thing can do!

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I’ve started writing a lot about home, an intention that I shared with you in February. But since I haven’t fully explained why I think these discussions are so important, or even exactly what I mean by home, I’d like to do that here today. Hold onto your seats!

Here’s the best definition of home that I can offer you: home is the place you always come back to. In a literal sense, it can be a physical place, defined by the boundary of your abode’s four walls, or a set of latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates you can pin down on a map. In an emotional sense, home is the place you come back to for comfort at the end of a long day (and who you are after your public or professional persona has been turned off). More broadly, it encompasses everything from the relationships you share with your partner, family, pets, and roommates to the community that surrounds you. In some cases, home might be a constant, something you could set your watch to—in others, it might be a fluid thing defined by some aspects more than others (like, say, your relationships, more so than place). So when I talk about “home,” I mean different things in different instances: your living space, your values, your people. It’s your personal sphere of influence, whatever that looks like.

As young adults graduating into the world, we don’t exactly lose our old homes, but we are expected to create new ones for ourselves—a heady task that probably requires more guidance than we’re given by our parents, educators, and society. I’m no expert on this matter, but that’s the point—none of us are. We’re leaving a previous life of structure for an undefined new existence. We make our way as best we can, and glean knowledge from our mistakes and experiences.

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A few weeks ago, I visited a tiny but beautiful exhibit of Uta Barth’s photography at the Art Institute. Uta Barth, as I learned, is a homebody, and she’s fascinated by the panes of light that move across her house. She stays inside for long periods of time, painstakingly tracking the progress of light on film; it seems that her sense of time is just different from most other people’s. Below, you can see the kinds of subtle, lovely things that catch her eye.

In shooting my first roll of film in four years, Uta Barth’s obsession with light served as my guiding inspiration. I pulled out my trusty Canon Rebel G whenever I noticed a flash of summer sun lolling around inside my house or just along its outside perimeter. Since light, it seems, reads especially well on film, I was especially grateful for Uta’s influence this week. A few shots from inside my little world:

An overgrown backyard as the sun sinks…

The salvaged piece of stained glass that hangs in our living room window…

The remaining half of a plum torte, lit by the morning sun…

The light in the hallway just as I left for work…

And a family portrait, of course (which showcases the other kind of light—love!—that brightens our household on a daily basis). I bet you’ve got all kinds of sunlight lighting up your home, too. So this week, try to notice it, record it, swim in it. It’s never going to fall in exactly the same way again.

As much as I’d like my (future) apartment to look like a well-style Pottery Barn catalog, I know it’s not in the cards. My furniture comes from about, oh, eight different sources; a few pieces are all matchy-matchy and modern, from a childhood bedroom set; others are eighty-year-old antiques that have seen better days. There’s a set of four blond wooden chairs thrown in there, too, and a dining room table that doesn’t work with any of the above.

I’m a girl who appreciates good interior design, so something had to change. I imagine I’m not alone? Most of us don’t live in magazine or catalog pages, and can’t afford to buy our way in. But, as I’ve discovered recently, we can take matters into our own DIY-hungry hands and, well, fake it till we make it. I’m embarking on a journey to refinish or paint all these clashing pieces until they work as a team, a process that I’ll eventually chronicle on these pages.

But I decided to start slowly on the DIY front: by removing eighty years of tarnish from my dresser’s brass handles. (See below—not so pretty.) The eco-friendly, fume-free solution? Not your traditional, harsh metal polish, but rather a homemade batter of sorts, found here; the chemical reaction between the acidic, salty batter and the brass pretty much does all the polishing for you.

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I haven’t been writing for awhile, because to my mind, there hasn’t been much to write about. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in suburban Illinois, broke off for six, and now here I am, back in that familiar land of childhood. Not much has changed about Wilmette; some shops close where new ones open, but the rhythms are always the same, and probably always will be.

But living at home after a period of independence is a slightly different animal than a pure regression to childhood. I live my life somewhere between the North Shore ‘burbs and downtown Chicago: I sleep on an air mattress in my old bedroom, but I earn my own salary (even if it’s smaller than I’d like). And, damnit, I make plans with my downtown friends to dine at Penny’s Noodles after work, because it keeps me sane. Once my loving roommates find gainful employment too, we’ll join those city-dwelling friends. Till then, I’m finding ways to bridge the gap between my babyhood and my future.

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In a recent act of reverence, I visited a synagogue. It was still Hanukkah, and I’d definitely say it was a spiritual event: Andrew Bird was playing at the 6th and I downtown. I’ve always loved the lush, layered qualities of his songs (and, of course, that whistling!) but wasn’t quite sure how he’d be able to recreate them live.

He was completely sans backing band, looking lonely up on stage amidst a sea of instruments and blue light. But apparently that didn’t matter, because he became his own band in a feat of musical and technological wizardry: by recording himself onstage, then looping the track as he layered piece upon piece of percussion, melody and harmony. He only started singing after a few minutes of this strategic work, once he’d created a backing track from his own musical building blocks (see the method for yourself here).

It was humbling, to say the least.

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Virginia, I love you. Passionately.

I’m reminded of that fact every time I visit Shenandoah, especially when it’s autumn and the bright leaves almost have me convinced there’s a forest fire spreading across the valley.

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