Can we forgive a semi-tacky website, if it’s showcasing a very cool product? Yep, when it’s NeatSheets –  “as seen on TV,” as the saying goes. And what the heck are NeatSheets, you may well ask? 

Fitted bed sheets with a side pocket! 

Two pockets, actually, with elastic at the top… a bit like some models of recliners are made with a pocket on the outer side to hold your magazines and empty chip bags. Same concept. Except, of course, in a fitted sheet.

Now, this just makes such good sense to me – pockets to stash all that stuff your cat likes to knock off the nightstand, like tissues, phone, flashlight, iPod, all that kind of can’t-go-to-bed-without-it stuff. You can keep all your necessaries so conveniently close to hand, if you’re lounging in bed on the weekend or home sick with the sniffles. And for me, as for other writers, who doesn’t love the idea of a convenient place to stash your notebook and pen –  you know, for those middle of the night inspirations?

Prices start at $50 US for twin size, which is certainly not out of line for 200-plus thread count cotton bedding with French seams and all that sort of dainty detail. Your friendly neighbourhood  Domestik Goddess has no problem shelling out the clams for a lovely set of sheets – if sheets are actually needed.

But what if you’ve already got enough sheets, and you’re just craving those pockets?

Idea: DIY Bed Sheet Pockets

She who walks on the frugal side – and/or has limited space for linens storage – might think about just taking a fitted bed sheet already on hand and adding a handy pocket to the side. 

Even a beginner at sewing can hem a rectangle, fold it over at one long edge to make a casing for a piece of elastic, and sew the pocket onto the side of a fitted sheet. 

Truly.

And if our stitches aren’t perfectly even and tidy, hey – who’s going to notice in the dark?

So, you want your kid to have a bedroom that’s decorated to match his dreams — but you don’t want to spend much money?

Sensible!

Especially if the kiddy’s wished-for bedroom decor is based on the latest from Disney or Pixar or whatever video game is hot in the school yard this week…

What to do?
Well, here’s one incredibly frugal solution to that decorating dilemma…

Block Posters lets you send any image from your computer (up to 1 MB size file), slice it up, print it out, and turn it into a giant wall poster — free!

Check the gallery of other people’s posters (like the lovely Nemo wall art that Phil made for his young daughter’s bedroom) for inspiring ideas like these:

• Leave the white edges of the paper on for a cool tile mosaic effect;
• Decoupage the pieces onto a room divider screen;
• Frame each paper tile separately in black and hang them really close together to look like a piece of stained glass;
• Go black-and-white or monchrome for an high-toned artsy look;
• Blow up a smaller image for a cool blocky pixelated effect (turn a nature shot into modern camouflage, anyone?);
• Posterize yourself!

Okay, maybe your children don’t really want your face looming down at them from the wall above their beds while they’re sleeping at night… but you could do a nice family portrait, or a favourite pop star, or a role-model athlete, or even a screenshot from a favourite game…

Your imagination is the only limit!

Or, to be factual, about 8 feet x 10 feet is the limit, finished poster size-wise.
But you don’t really need a larger poster than that, do you? Unless you’re making a mural to decorate a great room… hmm….

You know how real estate agents are always rattling on about their professional expertise in showing off a home to its best advantage?

Curb appeal?

Staging a home so it looks good to potential buyers?

I’d always half-suspected that they were just putting fancy names to common sense, to encourage home sellers to hire them.

Turns out, maybe they’re not kidding…

A guy named Leif Swanson has convinced me that common sense is in very short supply, when it comes to making a home look attractive to others.

Leif sells real estate in Arizona — a place I’ve never visited. I have, however, spent a good bit of time visiting Leif’s hysterically funny (and inspirational, in a what-not-to-do kind of way) Ugly House Photos blog.

And you absolutely must set aside the better part of a lunch hour to check out the What Were They Thinking?!?! category, at least. There, you’ll find such treasures as:

• Taxidermy and plaid couches;
• Improperly stored firearms in the kiddies’ room;
• Amateur paintings of nekkid babes;
• Stripper poles;
• People who should really have left the room before the photo shoot began;
• The world’s ugliest fireplace surround; and
• much much more.

But that’s just the beginning! The whole site is a glorious encyclopedia of how not to decorate a house that you’re hoping to convince someone else to buy. As Lief says, how you want to live is your business — your taste in decor is your own, after all — but it’s a whole different thing if you’re trying to sell the house.

Take these bedrooms, for example:

The ones that really get me the most are those bedrooms where someone obviously tried hard to create a certain ambience. Tried really really really hard. Apparently, with the aid of a Target sale on bed-in-a-bag bedding, inspirational photos from a Sears catalogue saved from sometime back in the disco era, and subconscious longings to see what Disneyland would look like as an 1800s bordello…

The moral(s) of the story? There are two of them.

1. There’s a place in the world for vanilla.

Plain and beige — don’t knock it! Neutral is good when you’re trying to help someone else to imagine that they could possibly go into hock to the bank for decades to come because they so badly would love to make your not-quite-dream home into the home of their dreams.

2. In real life, you’ve really got to keep your decorating opinions to yourself, you know.

Sure, on the internet we can look at these photos and laugh. All these pictures were put out there for the purpose of selling a home, knowing that people would be looking and criticizing and snickering and generally being judgmental about it all. But would you want someone to point a finger at your own weird eccentricities of decorating taste? — heck, no!

Or am I the only one with an amazing fridge magnet collection, garish Mexican tin Christmas ornaments around the top of the kitchen walls (year-round), and more dog-bed in the house than there are beds for humans?

The decadent rose-colored stonewash velvet quilt is at Graham and Green.

The Versailles bed with button-back raw-silk headboard is in my wildest decor dreams…

And just see how that fluffy white faux-fur rug keeps the whole room from taking itself too seriously.

Nice!

Janet and I had so much fun decorating her boy’s baseball theme bedroom — and young Josh is having so much in his own personal “Fields of Dreams” space — we’ve been looking around for more ideas to make the room even better…

Today’s useful find was a retro clothes locker at Stack and Stacks. With a removable rod and a shelf that you can adjust to suit the kid, it’s “made from industrial strength powder coated square tube, bar stock and sheet steel with a silver finish and decorative powder coated door color.”

It comes in several colours — either the red or blue will please our young Red Sox fan, and give him some much-needed storage in his bedroom.

What Josh really really really wants, of course, is a photograph wall mural of Fenway Park at night — but at $400 (it’s official Major League fan gear at MLB.com) he’s going to have to save his allowance and chore money until he’s about ready to graduate from college, before that’s going to happen!

But lying in bed at night, pretending to be right there in the floodlit stadium, hearing the roar of the crowd… it would be kinda cool, wouldn’t it?

Technorati Tags: baseball, themes, decorating

What are the odds that the next hot bedroom buzz comes ‘Out of Africa’?

Not the classic Isak Dinesen memoir, Out of Africa, nor the steamy 1985 film with prime Redford and wanna-be-her Meryl Streep — we’re talking West Nile virus, here.

And just as every other major world event affects the fashion world, it’s inevitable that the bed canopy and mosquito net make a reappearance.

Practical protection to meet a growing concern about the mosquito-spread virus… and at the same time, so romantic… you think so?

For those truly obsessed with all thing Harry Potter, IVY has announced The Wizard’s Chamber a complete set of wall stickers in the magical Hogwarts theme:

• Owl: 28 x 60 cm
• Rat: 30 x 25 cm
• Spider on Web: 5 x 36 cm
• Spiders Web: 67 x 42 cm
• Broom Stick: 22 x 102 cm
• Gothic Window: 18 x 55 cm
• Candles (x4): 12 x 43 cm
• Stars (x8): 10 x 10 cm
• Selection of Magic Books: 48 x 28 cm
• Goblet: 12 x 20 cm
• Bottles of Potions: 37 x 22 cm
• Gothic Bricks (x5): 18 x 8 cm
• Wand: 40 x 3 cm
• Star Cluster: 50 x 37 cm
• Hour Glass: 13 x 30 cm
• Cauldron: 24 x 30 cm

A quick update for your Junior Wizard’s bedroom decor. Easy to apply on any clean smooth wall, the graphics are almost as easy to peel back off again when the spell is lifted  — like, when Junior discovers girls…

£39.95 GBP to international customers, for your choice of black-and-gold or silver-and-blue colour schemes.

You know how a successful room decor can be based around one perfect object or piece of furniture? When I saw this little fire truck desk, it struck me as the only significant investment you’d need to make to create the popular firefighter theme for a little boy’s bedroom.

The fire truck activity desk is quite a practical piece, for all its character and whimsy — it incorporates book shelves and storage bench, with a nice flat surface for playing games and coloring with crayons. The rest can be done with paint, and a few imaginative accessories.

Match that fire-engine-red paint at any good home-improvement store, for example, and update the nursery bedside table to match. When your little guy moves up to a youth bed, you might paint it a shiny lacquer-black: it’ll fits in fine with the firehouse theme, for now, but won’t restrict your choices when it’s time to redecorate as his interests change.

Use a metal “fire bucket” for a wastebasket, and cover the curtain rail in a piece of that formed-foam pipe insultation (it’s a black tube with a slit down one side, made to slip over a water pipe) to simulate a fireman’s hose…

Fire stations don’t have those slide-down poles anymore, do they? But it’s still part of the traditional image, so we’ll want one!

You can easily create the effect of a pole with a floor-to-ceiling length of sono-tube, painted up in one of the convincing new metallic paints to look like shiny brass and attached to the ceiling or wall with L-brackets. But do set it in a corner of the room to discourage climbing attempts!

Or, if that’s too ambitious, you can always just tape off a vertical stripe of the wall and paint a trompe-l’oeil pole. If you tape off a narrower stripe along one edge, and fill that in with a slightly darker tone, it’ll help to give a rounded effect.

Don’t forget Spot, the fire dog! A big soft stuffed dalmation to wait at the foot of the bed…

Captain Jack Sparrow may be the summer’s hottest box-office draw, but what’s it really like inside his bedroom?Watch out for the skull and crossbones hanging from the ceiling. Be careful not to trip over the gold dubloons spilling out of the old chest by the captain’s bed…

In conjunction with next week’s release of Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World’s End Home-and-Bedroom.com is sponsoring a pirate-themed essay contest. Just let your imagination run wild, and give them your 100-word vision of a truly swashbuckling bedroom!

“Beds and bedroom sets are our company’s specialty, so we thought it would be fun to ask : What exactly does a Pirate’s bedroom look like?” explains Ben Weissman, spokesperson for the online furniture retailer. “Whether it’s Captain Jack Sparrow, Barbosa or Davy Jones, they all have a certain ‘Pirate Style’ to their quarters. We want to know what people imagine that would be like.”

The best 100-word essay that the company receives between now and June 10, 2007 will win a Disney Pirates twin bed comforter set (retail value of $100). For more information on the contest, visit Home-and-Bedroom.com.

My pal Janet and I put our heads together over the weekend to come up with some affordable ideas for a baseball theme room for Josh, who’s turning 12 and wanted a bedroom to celebrate his favourite sport.

It’s hard to get more baseball crazy than a glove-and-ball chair and ottoman set.

The baseball-glove bean bag chair is made from a durable nylon fabric, while the ottoman is made from vinyl to simulate the look and feel of an over-sized baseball. Both are stuffed with those polystyrene beads that are so much more comfortable than those original beanbag chairs that Janet and I grew up with!

It’s not a large bedroom (and Janet’s budget isn’t very large either) so we decided to keep the perfectly serviceable textured taupe carpet, drapes, and bedding — with the addition of a $20 bedside mat that had the logo of Josh’s favourite team on it (found in the home decor section of our local DIY store), and a few inexpensive throw pillows in the team colours (picked up on sale at Wal-Mart).

Inspired by a wall shelf with a decorative baseball bracket, we put together something similar using Josh’s existing bookshelf, a glue gun, and a few spare baseballs.

Finally, Janet cut an X-shape in two baseballs and fitted one over each end of the plain old department-store curtain rod, for a great finishing detail!

A particularly geeky pal of mine just emailed that he’s finished building a giant Starship Enterprise out of LEGO®, and that got me thinking… those plastic building blocks aren’t just for adults with a limited social life… What a cool theme for a little kid’s bedroom!

I’d start with 18-inch carpet tiles in bold primary colors, a kid-sized club chair with good solid lines, and perhaps a bright red duvet set on the bed. Patchwork pillow shams and bedskirt, in rectangles rather than squares?

If the bed itself was nothing very special, I’d paint it up with blue, red, yellow, white and green on the headboard, foot board, any exposed side rails or posts.

Actually, a captain’s bed with drawers underneath would be really cool here, with each of the drawers painted in a different LEGO-type color. High-gloss or melamine paint for durability and shine…

The truly ambitious decorator might even cut huge circles of foamcore board, like real estate signs are made of, and mount it in pairs on block-painted sections of wall to simulate giant LEGO blocks.

Absolutely, I’d want to build a custom lamp for the bedside, using the real-life building blocks!

I noticed that the online LEGO store also has block-shaped magnets which would be fun to use on a wall-mounted magnetic whiteboard… and an official LEGO® storage box to hold the toys!

Technorati tags: LEGO Home Decor.

Okay, it’s true that I just like saying Giraffe in a Bag!!

But seriously, anyone with an eye to home fashion can’t miss the fact that animal prints are hot this year, and just seem to be getting hotter!

And it seems like every shop’s got heaps of product in the zebra print, leopard, tiger, all that.

Looking for something just a bit different?

How about this giraffe print, one of the safari theme bedding selection at ImageBedding.com — not something you see every day, right?

The set (180 thread count) contains sheets, comforter, bedskirt, shams. Waterbed sheets, drapes and valance, reversible accent pillows, and even a matching shower curtain are also available, sold separately.

I think this giraffe would be a little easier to live with for a longer time than the stronger patterns like a bold zebra.

And it could be dressed up or down — funkified with bits of gold and lime green, or luxe and sophisticated with black velvet, or au naturel with layers of texture in soft neutral colors… changed up a bit for each season’s mood.