Steve needs a Tenant, I need a webdesigner, who’s in?

My friend Steve is thinking about renting out the other half of his town-home.

It is around Grand and Lexington in St. Paul.
2 Bedrooms and a big sun room. Hardwood floors, built-in shelves and china cabinet. Laundry shared with the other town home (normal, not a coin-op type). Lots of storage space. $800 / month, a little negotiable.
No garage space, street parking only (you would have to ask him if there is any alley or otherwise off-street parking, cuz he just walked out of my office and I can’t recall if there is or not)
He, his wife, and their twins will live in the downstairs unit, so it is an owner-occupied type of thing (which I’ve always found to be nice)

If you know anyone that is reliable and looking for a place around there let me know and I’ll get you in contact with Steve. (Alternatively he is also my friend on facebook, so you can contact him yourself by posting a comment on this when it arrives on facebook)

As a completely separate item, I’m actually trying to do a decent website for my wife’s career as a writer, and I need some help.

So I started playing around with Drupal and loved it. Best CMS I’ve ever tried out / tested (probably due to a pretty helpful community / podcast at Geeks & God.) Anyway, I was able to get a basic development site up with a blog, events with times and locations and all that, forums, a basic book-list (for when she publishes books), and a bio section that automatically imported her Twitter on the sidebar. And I did that all in a matter of a few hours.

But, now I need to make it look pretty. And, after many failed experiments in the past at not sucking at this, I have decided it is just better to ask for help from people who are good at it.

If anyone is good at working within content management systems and getting them themed well and would like to do any work at all helping me not suck it would totally awesome. I’m not married to drupal, but I am set on using an open-source content management system. I would prefer either PHP-based or Ruby-on-Rails based.

The general motto Lauren has for her writing is “Light reflected off of dark waters” which is sorta the motivation for any design work we tackle on this. I have a few ideas on some logo’s but I’m much more interested in what our artistically talented friends might come up with. (because, as I’ve established already, generally suck at that as well as web layout – a photoshop master, I am not)

So if any artists out there want to take a stab a logo, a favorite icon, a mock-up/wireframe, a basic color pallet , or anything just for kicks we would love you forever, and we would have fun playing with the ideas for all that.

We originally talked about waiting and paying someone professional after a publisher picked up one of her books, but we thought if she makes it to the next round of the amazon breakout novelist competition it would be better to have something up sooner. And maybe even that wasn’t ugly or a stock theme (or easily downloaded theme). Also, I always think it is more fun to let your friends, the people who really know you, to take a stab at artistic endeavors like this IMO.

So, who wants to help?