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Getting started with your Retro Renovation
The kitchen that started it all
Original finish... vintage... Geneva steel kitchen cabinets... salvaged... (after five years of searching)... from a former cooking school operated by nuns ... Yup, that's how this blog got started.
Readers & their bathrooms
Readers & their kitchens
The "Mid-Century Modest Manifesto"
Mid-Century Modern style gets lots of love -- but here, we love Mid-Century MODEST style too. In fact, there's lots of cross-over. Perhaps this describes your house?
12 favorites from 13 years of blogging
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Hazel Dell Brown of Armstrong Flooring — the most influential residential interior designer of the 20th Century (that you probably never heard of)
Was Hazel Dell Brown of Armstrong Flooring the most influential residential interior designer of the 20th Century -- that you probably never heard of? I believe that, yes, she was!
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The Retro Renovation® Encyclopedia of Vintage Steel Kitchen Cabinets
With help from readers, I have identified 90+ different brands of metal kitchen cabinets built before, during but most after World War II -- mostly steel, mostly in the U.S. You have arrived at the epicenter for steel kitchen cabinet history!
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Found in boxes never opened, 1948 Youngstown Kitchens cabinets go home to Youngstown, Ohio
When we broke the story last fall that a complete set of New Old Stock 1948 Youngstown Kitchens cabinets -- plus Cusheen countertops -- plus GE Airliner range -- had been found in storage in California, many of us agreed it should end up in a museum. And guess what: It did!
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The 14 beautiful homes of The Astronaut Wives Club — Production Designer Mark White takes us inside and behind the scenes — 33 photos
The story of the seven women on ABC-TV’s The Astronaut Wives Club is fascinating, but you know what we’re ogling: Their midcentury homes. Seven modest 1950s homes… seven glamorous 1960s homes – each, meticulously decorated to reflect the well documented lives of these “astrowives” as they rocketed to Mercury Seven Project fame.
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Dollhouse warming party: Kate’s 1955 Betsy McCall DIY Dollhouse tour — finished!
It has been five months since I began work on my built-from-scratch 1955 Betsy McCall DIY Dollhouse -- a project that has been labor of love and one that I didn't realize would take me so long to 'finish.'