Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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New Year, nothing new
A few months ago, I was “tidying” the guest room before my sister-in-law temporarily moved in with us. During this more or less successful tidy, I came across a box full of old journals and planners. My dad loves to keep old family calendars and his own personal planners to look back on. Whether this…
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The Front Yard: Edible Landscaping
Since buying our house, I’ve realized that there is one area that goes completely to waste. The front yard! Front yards are such a bizarre concept with, as it turns out a fascinating history. Unfortunately in my neighborhood and, I suspect, many others throughout the US, front yards are essentially wasted space, not to mention…
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How I thrift: home goods
It’s no secret that I love to thrift. I have been thrifting since I was a teenager, and many of my favorite possessions are thrifted. It stands to reason then that when we bought our house in April 2020, I tried to furnish it with primarily thrifted goods. Of course thrifting home goods is somewhat…
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The Library Redo!
Our library redo is finally complete! We were on a bit of a tight deadline once we started because the library doubles as one of our guest rooms, and we had family inbound! Like I mentioned in my first post, we used Ikea Billy bookcases, shellac-based primer, and Behr Trellis Vine to achieve a lazy,…
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Fall Cleaning
For all of my adult life I have been either in school or teaching school, so springtime has always been a ridiculously busy time, leaving zero time for spring cleaning. By the time the weather warms up, I am usually sliding as fast as I can into summer break, and if anything is clean or…
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Library Update
As I mentioned in my last post, we are finally doing some updates to the library and, hopefully, alleviating the book storage issue. This issue, of course, has nothing to do with my book store addiction. Nothing at all. But seriously, what do you get when two liberal arts graduates with Hermione Granger-like research habits…
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Why I Thrift
Let’s go back to the beginning. The very beginning. It’s 2004. I’m ten, and I’ve gotten a pile of Kit and Molly American Girl books from the library (remember these?). I fell in love with the Depression and WWII eras, in particular the resourcefulness and creativity of people who lived through these challenging times. Growing…
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Bring on the personality!
The last, and perhaps most important, part of designing our house was deciding how to incorporate our unique style into the process. Obviously we wanted to preserve and/or restore some of the house’s original character, everything that had drawn us to it in the first place, but our house is first and foremost our home,…
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Bring on the authenticity!
Bringing a sense of authenticity back into our home was, as I have mentioned before, a challenge, because our home had received a number of unloving “facelifts” before we bought it. The original bathrooms are gone as is the hardwood flooring, wall paneling, and other features that we can only guess at. Restoring these features…
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The white paint debacle
When I first began dreaming about decorating this house, roughly twenty minutes after the open house, I was so sure that I wanted a green color palette, and I had every intention of painting the main areas with a neutral green. As we lived with the house, however, green seemed less and less appropriate. The…
Got any book recommendations?
Mid Century Messy 