Retro Renovation

I’m taking the last blast of summer Labor Day weekend off (gasp! yes!) If you land here anyway — be sure to vote for reader Eartha Kitsch to win the Kozy Shack contest:

–> Click here to Vote Daily through Sept. 15 — it just take 10 seconds (no registration required).

Why am I supporting Eartha aka Kelly? See her fabulous knotty pine kitschen! And she has a pink bathroom, too. And — I love to see us flex our Retro Renovation Community Muscle in support of fellow readers – just like we helped Leslie & Aaron get win #1 midcentury house in Los Angeles.

Congratulations to our Mel Bushner, our collage artist laureate / creator of our famous Love The House You’re In collages: She created a new work for CitraSolv’s “Freedom of Expression” contest — and won Grand Prize. I love collage, so know about CitraSolv — it’s a cleaner that, in its concentrated form, can be used to create wonderful effects on substrates (old National Geographics, in particular, I was told.) The contest asked artists to create an original work of art using Citra Solv that conveyed their pride, optimism and hope for our country. Here is Mel wrote about her work, submitted with her winning entry: Heck yeah there is more →

Over on her blog Home is A Four Letter Word, writer Gillian Drummond has been doing a series on mid century bathrooms, which will culminate in a big story in her newspaper, The Arizona Daily Star, on Sunday. In her blog post this week, “Penny Pinching with the Stars,” she talks about how living with the home you have, rather than defaulting to a gut-job, can save a lot of money. And, she marvels that Julia Roberts is a declared frugalista, too, who sews her kids’ clothes.
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Of course, when I saw the blog post’s tag: 1950 bathrooms > Julia Roberts > Pam Kueber >retrorenovation.com, I just had to capture it for infinity and beyond. Oh, and did I mention that Gillian mentions a “goddess” in the story — and that it’s errr, me, not Julia? I have to admit, that made my day. Month. Year.