Tag Archives: big brown

Bar Ideas

Friends! We here at Big Brown, aka just Ray and I, are on the hunt for a dry bar/bar cart situation. Actually, we’ve been on this hunt for a while. Currently our bar items live in our kitchen on our old table along with a juicer (also no permanent home) and old magnets. We need something better!
A few years ago while yard sale-ing, we found a rusty, grimy, cart that we took apart, sanded. painted, sealed, and put back together. It now sits in our dinning room and we use it as our coffee cart. It’s perfect in it’s size, simplicity, and function.
As much as I love our coffee cart, I want to go with something different if we go with a cart-style for our bar. Maybe something with wood like this:

Mid Century Bar Cart from West Elm
I love the mix of brass and wood and the clean simple lines.
I also love the idea of going with a consul or credenza and repurposing it into a bar:
Modern Media Consul from West Elm. A Little price-y, but it has a beautiful design.

Similar to the Modern Media Consul, is this “Ikea Hack” bar cart DIY from Brittany Makes blog. It’s a similar style and I love the price point!
What’s your favorite of the one I posted? Have you seen any great bar situations around? Send them my way!

A look at our sunroom

Around Big Brown

Big Brown Record Redo

Leave a reply

Big Brown is forever a work in progress. We moved in with only hand-me-down and thrifted furniture. Don’t get me wrong, we love thrifting and most of our furniture has served us well, but we’re slowly transitioning our house to feel even more like us. And maybe more adult. And maybe less falling apart.
One thing we’ve been wanting to change for a while has been our record player and record shelving situation (see our ridiculous collection here). Since we moved into Big Brown, most of our records have been living in our sunroom on crappy shelves from Ray’s apartment days. We wanted to move our records into the living room to create more space in the sunroom and to motivate us to listen to more of our music library. Ray and I both spent a lot of time researching shelf options. We didn’t want to spend too much, but we wanted a shelf that would look nice and hold the weight of our vinyl. Everyone everywhere recommended the Ikea expedit/kallax units. With that in mind, we went with some of our friends down to Orlando to visit Ikea last weekend. With gift cards in hand, we were prepared to buy 2 2×4 kallax shelving units. We came home with said shelving, a small cart for our bathroom, wall shelves for our sun room, a few light fixtures, and a couple of kitchen odds and ends. Our friends bought a dining room table and chair set, a side table, 2 arm chairs, a foot stool, and a kitchen island. Needless to say, the four of us + all our of stuff barely fit. Tetris to the max.We’re really enjoying our new record situation. The kallax shelves are perfect for our collection and add extra surface space for our record player, playstation, and speaker setup. We definitely recommend them! So, what do you guys think?

4 years at Big Brown

4 Replies

Guys, it’s been exactly 4 years since we bought Big Brown. 4 YEARS! Being a home owner, especially to a 100ish year old house, is a weird thing. We love it. And sometimes we hate it. But mostly we love it.
I’ve told the story of our first visit to Big Brown a million times and at least twice on this blog, but I’m going to tell it again. It was September of 2010. Ray and I were not married, engaged, or even dating. We were “just friends” who sent hundreds of texts messages to each other during the work day and spent every single afternoon and evening together eating dinner, watching movies, and hanging out. Ray’s apartment had reached the max level of disgusting and it was time for him to find a new place. One afternoon Ray asked me to go with him to look at a house. Here’s where it gets weird – Moments before I get to his apartment a drunk driver (going extremely slow) hits our church van which was parked behind Ray’s apartment and an adjacent fence and then pulls over into some bushes. We chat with the police, the driver continues to yell “that’s drunk” over and over, and in about 20 minutes everything is back to normal. Strange, right? After the commotion we headed to Big Brown. It looked like a ginger bread house and we instantly fell in love (with the house). A few months later we also realized we were in love with each other.
Here are some blurry iphone pics taken during that initial meeting with the realator: Big Brown is forever a work in progress. Over the last 4 years we’ve painted, repainted, scraped wallpaper, cried over leaky roofs, added furniture, taken away furniture, added cats, taken away cats, and the list goes on. We have soooo many ideas and dreams for Big Brown and we can’t wait to see them come to fruition.