Want to class up your camping area or backyard patio? Maybe you live in a dorm and want to get away from the whole neon inflatable chair and beanbag thing.

A nice blow-up Chesterfield might just be what you’re looking for… if you have more money than you know what to do with, that is.

The surprisingly elegant looking Blofield Inflatable Chesterfield Sofa is portable and crafted from the same stuff life rafts are made of. Having five very pointy cats, however, I hesitate to call it truly durable, at least when placed in the home of pet owners. Or people with children.

The same goes for the Blofield Inflatable Chesterfield Armchair, which admittedly also looks quite fancy when viewed from far away.

Still, I’d skip it, considering you could get a serviceable set of living room furniture for the same price.

Though to some extent they’re a dying breed in the U.S., glass bottles remain plentiful and easy to find. I only say that they’re on their way out because we use plastic soda bottles, you can buy champagne in cans, and plenty of jugs of gin are sold each year. In Costa Rica and elsewhere, soda is still sold in glass bottles and beach glass remains plentiful. Why am I bringing this up? Because decorating with bottles is easy and generally quite inexpensive.

For example, a few antique bottles (easy to find on eBay and elsewhere) get a chic makeover with papercraft labels and vintage jewelry, as created by Brenda Walton.

When mixing bottles and modern decor, try Jeff Crandall’s Poet’s Bottles, which are sandblasted with text that provides the user with contents and instructions like “Hope (warning: do not abandon).”

Country Living suggests outfitting your fizzy water bottles with paper jackets that match your party color scheme or decor.

And if you’re decorating a beach house, think beach glass. Ballard Designs‘ Azure Beach Bottles Set is reminiscent of pale blue beach glass, which is (in my opinion as a long time collector) the rarest color of all.

Another modern take on the humble bottle repurposes wine bottles into sleek vases. Green Wine Bottles from David Guilfoose are an eco-friendly way to store loose collectibles, display flowers, or give your space a touch of green.

Finally, there are these. They’re not for everyone, but if you like them you can find the DIY instructions for them at Crafty Chica.

Trying to figure out just which shade of paint to put in the living room, bedroom, bathroom, or den? While the sample color pots that a number of paint companies are now selling are great, sometimes you’re just not ready to throw a square of color up on an otherwise not-quite-ready-to-paint wall. But those tiny little paint chips from the Home Depot (or wherever) just don’t show you how the room will feel in that color, and to find the right paint hue, you want to view each prospective shade in all the different kinds of light the room will get, from full sun to electric.

Nantucket-based interior and architectural designer Deborah Timmermann has a solution perfect for those who’d rather keep their walls looking pristine before painting. She suggest that to get “an accurate assessment, paint pieces of shirt cardboard to make large samples and tape them to a wall. Stand eight to 10 feet away with your back to them, and look at them in a hand mirror. It helps you see the color in perspective.”

I love this tip!

Fish gotta swim, bird’s gotta fly… and sometimes stuff has got to hang. Like coats. And keys on lanyards. Diaper bags. Even sneakers. Round these parts, we’re partial to using the largest size planter hooks as coat hooks because they end up looking interesting and different, but they cost a lot less than some other interesting and different options. Which isn’t to say that most coat hook options are that pricey. Check these out:

My favorites are the dart coat hooks and the weird eyeball one. (As always, click on the pic for more info.) Now you tell me, where do you hang your hat?

One of the easiest ways to refresh old furniture or give a fab vintage furniture find a makeover is to paint it. Painting furniture isn’t hard, though admittedly it is easy to get a ‘meh’ result if your entire project consists of nothing more than slapping on a few coats of paint. I’ve painted furniture the right way and I’ve painted furniture the wrong way, and I speak from experience when I say the former furniture looked a whole lot nicer.

So what is the right way to paint furniture? Young House Love put together a step-by-step list that pretty much sums it up, from when to sand (or not) and the benefits of finishing furniture with a few coats of water-based polyurethane to how long to wait before integrating your newly painted furniture into the house. Young House Love doesn’t allow excerpting, so you’ll just have to go check out their instructions.

But I can tell you that it really is as simple as it sounds! If you’d like even more direction, I recommend Furniture Facelifts: A Step-By-Step Guide by Liz Wagstaff and 50 Ways to Paint Furniture by Elise Kinkead. Both are full of great ideas and are easy to follow.

Sometimes people live in small spaces out of necessity, and sometimes they do it for the challenge. I’m not sure why out-of-work architect Sergio Santos chose a small space lifestyle, but I have to admit he’s doing it more effectively than most. He rents a converted electrical closet in Delray Beach, Florida for a mere $150 per month. At five-and-a-half feet from wall to wall, you can touch both walls at once.

When you live in a space that small, there’s nowhere to go but up. The bed, television, and closet are suspended above Santos’ office space, and yet he still found places for a mini kitchen and a window sanctuary. Not even wallspace is wasted, provided you don’t call art a waste. Even the shelves have a second purpose, serving as the ladder to the upper level.

Santos built a small seating area, which he calls his terrace, below the room’s only window. It’s the homiest spot in the tiny little space he calls home. The only thing that’s missing is a bathroom, which I hope for Santos’ sake exists somewhere just outside his miniature living quarters.

I’ve dreamed of owning a piano for quite some time, but two things have deterred me. One is of the cost of moving the darned things from one home to another. You may not know this, but a lot of people give away pianos on sites like Craiglist. Acquiring a piano can be as easy as paying to have one hauled to your home. But then there’s the second deterrent, but which I mean the crazies who are giving away the pianos.

While I’m sure some of the wannabe former piano owners are perfectly sensible people, the ones I have met were not. Sorry, but you cannot ask me to give you a cash deposit for a free piano that I am taking off your hands so you don’t have to pay to move it into your new fifth-floor walk up. And if you call me five times a day while I’m still finding a piano mover to ask if I’m actually going to take your piano, the answer will be “No, I’m not. Stop calling here.”

Can you tell I’ve been burned on this? No matter, I’m still dreaming of the day I can take someone’s unwanted piano off their hands. It’s just a matter of finding the right person and the right piano. Leah, of Futuregirl Leah Riley’s Art Shop, obviously found the right piano (possibly from the right person). It just needed a little… something.

This is what she started with. Her piano was yellow, which many people might like, but she didn’t like it, and that’s what’s important. It wasn’t just the color that was lacking, however. This piano needed personality!

After a bit of sanding, the piano was primed and ready to accept proper paint. How to paint it was the question, and to come to an answer, Leah conducted a poll letter her blog readers choose between two potential faces.

Faces, you ask? Yes, faces. Monster faces. Adorable, super fun monster faces.

After two coats of Robin’s Egg Blue flat, the piano was looking quite nice and was ready to get its new mug. Had Leah stopped there, it would still have been a successful project, in my humble opinion.

Leah had this to say about her monstrous creation:

The finished piano monster paint job – I didn’t want it to beat you over the head with its monster-ness. Just some subtle monster suggestions. Here it lurks just around the corner, waiting to trip you, pounce, and eat your hands!

Very cool!

Many people look forward to summer’s end for it means a period of slower growing grass that doesn’t need frequent mowing and trees that won’t need to be pruned. Others look toward autumn as a time to plant cold-weather flora or to lay down the foundations of next summer’s garden. Me, I think of summer’s end as a time to let the last tomatoes rot in the vine while I hole up inside trying to adjust to the change in temperature, but I’m a weenie like that.

But if you’re the French botanist Patrick Blanc, you never stop looking for new opportunities to dig down into the dirt. Or upside down into the dirt. Or even sideways into the dirt like he must have done to create the recently completed facade for the Athenaeum hotel in London.

What is it, exactly? It’s an eight-story antigravity forest composed of 12,000 plants from 260 species and covering more than 15,000 square feet. Most are evergreen, but some of the plants are seasonal, and the placement of each piece of foliage was carefully planned to ensure that all the plants get just the right amount of sun.

Blanc uses a kind of techno-trellis as the underlying structure: A plastic-coated aluminum frame is fastened to the wall and covered with synthetic felt into which plant roots can burrow. A custom irrigation system keeps the felt moist with a fertilizer solution modeled after the rainwater that trickles through forest canopies.

Like the look of vertical gardens? Then DIY your own!

Throughout history, people have been obsessed with the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. In other words, Pi, which is the subject of David Blatner’s The Joy of Pi — a book I am currently devouring. And what better way to devour a book on Pi than with one’s very own Pi plate?

Ceramics guru Maria Neal has a knack for imbuing pottery pieces with a little quirky fun and this Pi plate certainly does not miss the mark. While there are other Pi plates out there, this one is by far the prettiest and most appealing to me, since the design is subtle enough that both math geeks and non math geeks can enjoy it.

UPDATE: The artist’s web site can be found here!

Using white on walls and in decor can be tricky. Too much white will often end up looking institutional, like an old fashioned mental health ward or a hospital hallway. And let’s not forget how temperamental white can be in more ways than one. For example, any notion I had of decorating using white went out the window when I decided to adopt five cats of different colors and have kids, to boot. Then there’s the fact that white is not just white. There are shades of white ranging from quite dark with cool and warm undertones to stark and bright. The good news is that it’s not at all difficult to integrate one or two white pieces into almost any room, no matter what the color. White furniture and objets d’art are amazingly eye-catching in otherwise dark or colorful rooms.

Here are five interesting and beautiful pieces from Tonic Home:

A pierced white resin round cocktail table from Oly Studio can serve as the focal point of a living room, but could also nestle snugly next to the arm of your couch in an unobtrusive corner.

Oly Studio’s frost white cast resin bird chandelier features darling, playful birds that gaze down upon your daily life. It’s chic, but not formal.

This wood carved antique white frame sofa sports eight legs and a casual raffia fabric that keeps it from looking too fussy.

I love this Marco Grasscloth side table from Bungalo 5. It’s finished with lacquered white glasscloth and embellished with nickel nailheads, giving it an old fashioned, classic feel. There’s a matching larger table, but I like the subtlety of the smaller version.

And finally, a wannabe Eames Molded Plastic Rocker that actually costs more ($650) than the repro original ($449 at Modern Seed). I’m not sure what that’s all about, but I love it in white.