A little green home rehab

Although I primarily talk about travel here, I have also to a lesser extent been talking about the "green" lifestyle and integrating organic/green living into both everyday life and traveling.

I am a big fan of "Freshaire" brand paints, which are VOC-free. The paint hardly smells at all when you're painting (in fact to me, it smells a little bit like pumpkin), and it dries really quickly - my experience has been within half an hour, which means you can paint and put the furniture back in place almost as soon as you're done.

Room by room, I have been working my way through my condo, turning a personality-free off-white living space into a colorful home. The bedroom is two shades of blue ("Beckoning sea" and "Winding river"); the living room is now a pale terracotta ("Ginger root"), as is the bathroom; the kitchen is a cheerful combination of white enamel and yellow ("Delightful daffodil"). My latest project has been the combination living room/dining room.

I already have an existing look to one side of the room. (The giant wall map is a National Geographic product. People always ask.)

The map, the colors - I really loved the look I created on that side of the room, but the long wall that joins the living room and dining room has been boring - blah - with a bunch of birch-colored furniture and an off-white color. (It doesn't help that the carpet is also a dark cream color. Not my choice - it was newly installed by the seller when I bought the place. But since it's new, I'm not in a hurry to rip it out, either.)

I needed a color that would draw together my existing elements in the big room - the dark green of the couch; the multiple hues of green in a large wall painting done by a friend; the soft sage of an area rug under the dining room table. A pale sage (or as Freshaire calls it, "Arbor vine") was the perfect choice. It also compliments the birch-colored furniture nicely and really makes the room pop.

One of my more unusual storage needs - and I have lots of storage needs, thanks to near-non-existent closet space - was that I needed someplace to stick about two cases' worth of wine until I can get around to purchasing a wine fridge. (You know, one of those 35-50 bottle wine fridges.) As it was, I had three Ikea "Billy" bookcases that I was moving from the long wall to the short wall in the dining room. The bookcases didn't quite fill the wall, but the narrow "Benno" CD/DVD tower was perfect to fill the gap.

And, as it turns out, the Benno is working decently as a makeshift wine rack, although I wish Ikea had a variant that was twice as deep, so the bottles didn't stick out the front, and had less risk of falling out. The shelves are adjustable - I left a large gap at the bottom to fit a couple of oversized books - and you can easily fit two regular-sized bottles or three half-sized bottles per shelf at this configuration.

I cut some small pieces of padded shelf liner for each shelf, to ensure the bottles would not roll out of their nooks. Although it is not likely to be a permanent solution - I would still like a wine fridge so that I could actually keep and age some reds - it was a handy fix.