apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

If you've ever found yourself looking at a fifteen-dollar plastic bath toy and thinking, "What the heck?" then this post is for you. Sure, it's easy to drop hundreds of dollars on cute toys, but in my experience, the most popular bathtime toys are the following items scavenged from the kitchen cupboards:

It's Week 1 of the Apartment Therapy Spring Cure, and we're excitedly poring over reader-submitted photos in our Flickr pool. Right now, everyone's bravely posting their "before" photos, and this one caught our eye. Joyce is expecting a baby girl in May and she and her husband are planning to convert their small office/loft space into the nursery. She's looking for your ideas.

Think this looks like one of the highly covetable but rather spendy toy treehouses on the market these days? Think again. What would you say if we told you this lovely toy was made from a few inexpensive craft-store items and some tree limbs salvaged from a debris pile?

Here is everything we love in a family dining room. A fun (yet not too wacky) color palette. Surfaces that are uncluttered without being stark. Lovely touches like the handmade banner and the Spool birds. And oh my, that gorgeous sunlight.

When Christie, of the blog A Lemon Squeezy Home, asked her little boy what theme he wanted for his fifth birthday, he said "aliens". And boy howdy, Christie delivered. She single-handedly designed and created everything from cute invitations to a "Pin the Eyeball on the Alien" game, and somehow she even found the wherewithal to make individual stuffed toys as goodies for guests. Our reaction: Beam us aboard!

We've featured the amazing reverse-engineered building plans of self-taught woodworker Ana White before. Since then, Ana has updated her site with dozens more plans and ideas. We were particularly struck by this stunning armoire. Intimidated? Don't be. Says Ana, "Its a gigantic bookcase, with doors."

If you've ever tried to demystify your little one's sleep cycle so that you can figure why he or she wakes up at the drop of a pin at some times yet can sleep through a car alarm at others, this nifty little downloadable widget may help you get to the bottom of things.

A couple of years back, we featured the artwork of Jonty Bloom when it was available exclusively at Modern Tots. Now Jonty Bloom has beautiful new work for sale (at even lower prices!) on Etsy. We're in love with the "City Sunset" print pictured above, not least because we can imagine it fitting in just as well in the rest of the home as in a nursery.

If you have the space for it, keeping school and craft supplies in the kitchen is a great idea, especially if you have younger children whom you'd like to trust with the paints while you're making dinner, but you're not quite there yet. Ohdeedoh reader se7en sent us an email letting us know about the "kitchen dresser" she keeps stocked with everything her children might need to do their schoolwork or special projects.

Add these awesome tubs to our list of bathroom storage solutions. Made of galvanized steel and available in three shapes and sizes, these decoupaged beauties are available in dozens of patterns and can be used to hold everything from towels to bath toys.

If you're anything like us, you occasionally turn to cooking and baking as a way to while away an otherwise long housebound day. For just such occasions, we've rounded up a handful of our favorite treats that are as fun to make as they are to eat.

One of our favorite sights: the look of serious concentration on the face of a child who is hard at work on a project. Add a cute apron to the mix and ka-pow. That sound you hear is our hearts exploding. These beautiful quilted aprons from Ciuccio complete this mental picture quite nicely. (Don't worry about our hearts. We're used to the explosions by now.)

Could it be that front-facing book displays are vying with play kitchens for DIY popularity here at Ohdeedoh? We're starting to think so. Ohdeedoh reader Julie sent us these photos of the beautiful bookcase she built for her children. Love that red paint!

In a recent email chat with Joel, we mentioned that we feel like we're blog-stalking him (see our previous posts here and here), but it's his own darned fault for posting so many amazing projects. Somebody get this man a contract with a toy manufacturer already! This time, Joel has made a wonderful set of colorful discs, all set for your free-form sculptural projects, and he's provided a downloadable template on his site.