I love to blog hop, moving from one to another by following random blogroll links. It’s fun, it helps me to better understand the roll of my own links section, and I invariably find myself reading something awesome. It may take a few jumps to find those best-of-the-blog-world type sites, but the time I spend sitting at my desk nearly always proves worth it!

To illustrate, it was just yesterday that I happened upon It’s (K)not Wood, a blog celebrating all things “faux bois.” Written by Emilyn Eto and Jonathan Lo, this blog highlights the best in wood that isn’t actually wood.

The latest post introduced me to this faux wood wedge shelving from West Elm.

Neat, yeah? And not what I was expecting at all. If I were to create a blog about fake wood, it would probably be filled with lots of posts dissing the nasty faux wood paneling The Beard and I encountered in so many of the houses we looked at when shopping for somewhere to live. Ugh. You can paint over it in the short term without it looking too bad, but you’ll always know it’s there.

Luckily, faux bois is typically a lot nicer than that. Here are some of my (clickable) favorite things, all done up in white:

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If your hatred of Valentine’s Day runs so deep that you feel a pressing need to express it in your home decor, you could do worse than to order some sad, sad seating from Vermont Wood Studios. Designer Steve Holman envisioned and built these broken-hearted chairs out of figured maple, topping them off with velvety red fabric.

Should it happen that they are too cutesy for your tastes, don’t let that stop you from browsing the rest of Vermont Wood Studios’ wonderful pieces, which encompass everything from sophisticated and sumptuous carved tables to furniture crafted from reclaimed barn wood…a material that is ever so close to my heart.

A while back, I talked about using tools to help you plot out a room’s worth of furniture. Software is just one option. There’s always your handy dandy graph paper. I even knew one guy who’d cut out little pictures of couches and end tables and move them around the miniature room he’d sketched out.

But here’s an option I never realized existed…

Yep, that’s right. It’s pre-fab flat paper “furniture” that lets you guesstimate the footprint of your stuff and then move it around until you find a configuration you like. Move it without giving yourself a hernia, I mean. Back when I was in high school I would move my bedroom suite around every few months, never taking the drawers out of anything or the mattress off the bed. I’d shove, shove, shove until I’d gotten everything just right, probably ruining the carpeting in the process. Sorry, mom!

At about $30 a room, the sets are fairly cheap, which is good considering that they’re basically heavy duty paper. You could go to your local arts and crafts emporium, get a bunch of off-the-roll paper, and DIY, but art supplies tend to be pretty expensive and you may end up spending just as much. The upside of sourcing your own paper is that you can cut it to match your actual furniture instead of having to rely on someone else’s standards.

I can admit, even as a dedicated veghead, that I love the shape of icky dead animal hides. I guess, having said that, I can also say that I think vintage moose heads, elephant leg chairs, and polished horn letter openers are pretty neat looking, too. I wouldn’t actually buy any of these things, but I do like looking at them in antique shops and in magazines.

Thankfully, Catherine David Designs of New Zealand lets me get my skin fix without giving any animals a one way pass to the netherworld. The ‘cow skin’ and ‘sheep skin’ rugs are actually made out of pieces of cool vintage carpet cut to resemble their “naturally grown” counterparts.

I wonder if I could make one using the inexpensive carpet leftovers one finds at flooring shops?

The NYT Home & Garden section (a bit of rad I recommend everyone read) had a wonderful piece on Eliphante, a Cornville, Arizona home built by an artist and his wife over the course of twenty-eight years. When the late Michael Kahn and Leda Livant began building on the property Eliphante inhabits, they didn’t even own it. Driftwood, stones, pottery, shards of glass, construction scraps, and even astroturf became building materials in Kahn’s somewhat capable hands.

Was there a floor plan? Did they discuss the number of bedrooms, the layout of the kitchen?

“We didn’t think in those terms,” says Ms. Livant, who is 82. “We thought shelter from the elements and a beautiful place to live in: stained glass and pottery and wood, sleeping loft and a fireplace. Michael had no definite plan except to work and see what the natural shape would be. If you stay with a preconceived notion of what you want, it could be too restrictive.”

There are, of course, more photos under the cut!

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As of this morning, there was a rather…unusual couch for sale up on San Francisco’s Craiglist. A certain Willow created a decidedly NSFW couch…not safe for work if your employer is really uptight, that is. Unfortunately, some uptight Craigslist users decided to flag the classified page before I could find out how much it cost, but a friend of mine just happened to grab the pics so I could show them to you.

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Pets come with accessories… there’s just no getting around it. Me and The Beard? We keep cats, and thus we know that the ugliness of the litter box is legendary. A few enterprising furniture makers have endeavored to help people for whom aesthetics are of utmost importance hide the realities of their cats’ daily lives.

Below you’ll find just a few examples of the many attractive litter box hideaways out there. Perhaps kitty is craving a little privacy this holiday season?