Let’s face it no one ever really expects to have a plumbing emergency, but they can happen to anyone, at any time. Things such as a burst pipe, a blocked sink or toilet and a flooded basement are all plumbing emergencies that can cause serious water damage if not addressed quickly. Now obviously in some cases, these may only be minor problems that you can deal with yourself especially if you have some DIY skills. However, in our experience, the fix is usually temporary and doesn’t completely resolve the problem. So, we thought we would have a look at some of the situations where it would be better to use the services of an emergency plumber. 

When Your Toilet is Overflowing 

If your toilet begins to overflow it is not only inconvenient but could also put the health of anyone living in or visiting your home at risk. While it

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It’s time once again to throw open every cabinet, drawer, and door to show you how we organized our kitchen, which we slowly renovated over the last two years (more on that slow but steady reno here). This post should be an especially fun one because you’ll see just how much we’ve improved upon the original organization of this kitchen, which we shared in this post almost two years ago. And, as usual, we made a video walk-through of the whole thing too, which also explains a few future plans involving two outdoor cabinets that we plan to add to the nearby kitchen porch. So yeah… lots to cover.

We’ll start with the video, because it’s truly the most comprehensive way to understand exactly what goes where in our new kitchen. Sherry also snuck some Penny footage in there for you, because she knows what you really

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Ever since Margot profiled the Edinburgh apartment of Nina and Craig Plummer—the designers and shopkeepers behind Ellei Home, then called Ingredients LDN—we’ve returned to its quiet, refined simplicity. In addition to their fairly new studio space, in a 19th-century Renaissance-style building formerly used as a church hall, the duo photographs all of their offerings in situ in their flat, and every detail is designed with this in mind: lime-washed walls for a neutral, evocative backdrop, a kitchen island on casters for easy maneuvering.

Recently, on returning again to the post, we noticed something else about the space: a definite Shaker inflection in the kitchen. Fitting, since Nina told Margot at the time: “We like to think that if we use our values to shape our homes, our homes will, in turn, shape the life that unfolds within them.”

Join us for a look.

Photography by Nina Plummer.

elegant twin doors lead into the cook space. though they look original, they we 9
Above:
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For the first time in our lives, after four decades of living on this planet, we’ve upgraded to a king sized bed! We’ll get more into whys and hows in an upcoming post (it’s both bigger and significantly lower) and we see the obvious irony of owning a bigger bed in our smaller house – but let’s just summarize it as: “the things we do for our dog.”

You’ve also probably heard this before, but sometimes the way to feel like you’re living large in a smaller space is with fewer larger furniture pieces (as opposed to a bunch of small dollhouse-scaled furnishings). There’s such a luxury to having a nice long 90″ sofa upstairs, a big 72″ table that seats up to 8 people in the kitchen, and truly, it has been glorious to have such a giant bed. Like, two people who never cared about a king

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When designing my Amagansett home for the second time to coincide with the release of my design book, Live Beautiful, I chose to incorporate neutral and tactile furnishing, one being a new armchair for the living room. Perfectly petite, its 1950s Scandinavian proportions bathed in shearling make it super cuddly with just the right amount of tufting. The chair instantly became the most beloved chair for our family and went viral on Instagram with hundreds of re-grams and inquiries of its origins. Furthermore, once we adopted our rescue puppy, Tuco it became his favorite chair to snuggle upon. Each morning, my husband, Victor would sip his morning coffee on this chair only to have Tuco come over, nudge him with his nose, and subsequently prompt him to get up out of “T’s chair.” Before Victor fully relinquished the chair, Tuco was hopping right up onto it. It was the sweetest

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