So Yvonne Eijkenduijn is probably one of the most influential DIY interior designers on the internet.

She purveys the popular northern Euro all-white aesthetic — well exemplified by Suki in Helsinki or  Benita Larsson who also DIY it —  of what is, I think, an essentially Gustavian Swedish style to offset long grey winters, where evening falls at 3 p.m., with glowing white or pastel interiors.

Eijkenduijn and her husband are meticulous renovaters and crafters; she adds minimal pops of floral color and hand-crafted or peeling vintage things to her white rooms, which makes them seem less twee than beautifully ordered and sculpted. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t like Eijkenduijn’s style. Essentially Eijkenduijn and Gustav solve the problem of how to make uncluttered modern interiors femme. It is the moral question of the 20th century: where is a girl supposed to sit, and concatenate the moral community home represents, in a Bauhaus living room?

Eijkenduijn’s kitchen. http://www.yvestown.com/archive/2012/05/kitchen-update.html

Eijkenduijn has been blogging for seven years and has made a design career from the success of her blog. It carries no ads, which seems to be a point of pride — and an Old School WELL-era  internet campaign — among the professional DIY home design visionaries like Anna Dorfman, for example. Others, equally inspiring and creative, seek sponsors, like Morgan Sattersfield,  for example,  with her hard-core thrifted mid-century-modern Palm Springs Cali aesthetic,  or suburban DIY nesters who have monetized their blogs and, in the case of John and Sherry Petersik, for example, do a terrific professional job.

Eijkenduijn has always seen the blog as a cottage industry marketplace to sell books or yarn, other peoples’ creations and, less often, things she has made. She solicits sponsors and swag in a way the Petersiks, who live off the income generated by their sponsors, do not. The Petersiks, for example, both of whom have creative backgrounds in advertising,  clearly state they don’t accept products for review, and recommend only things they actually use. It is the foundation of their trustability and, I believe, their huge traffic.

But Eijkenduijn recently asked her readers to pay her back for all the time she’s put into the blog by contributing money to build her a new roof. Lots of readers are pissed off. I am slightly put off too, as if I had been lulled into thinking she’d invited me to dinner and then presented me with a check.

What do you think? Should we chip in for Yvonne’s roof? Has she made a faux pas? Is it a cultural thing that her American readers are pissed off and the Europeans aren’t? Are Americans, who generally believe that journalism is about hustling your music video, naive? What’s happening?

Update 5/22/12: Eijkenduijn has taken down her roof fund posts with  strange rancor.