more castle/chevron discussion, House 11 boys' room curtains

I showed Princess the two options for her room (chevron wall or castle) and she most emphatically picked the castle, but she also most emphatically does not want me to paint over the pink wall that is already done in her room so...hmm. (She could have cared less about the chevron wall.)  Princess, ever the problem solver, suggested I put the castle on a different white wall.  I could put the castle on the wall opposite the bed (the only wall big enough to accommodate the decal), above the dresser, (like the one in the picture from yesterday) but then that leaves me with a pink accent wall over the bed a la 1995.

I could repaint the pink wall back to white, put the castle over the bed, then paint the white wall with the dresser pink to satisfy Princess's desire for a pink wall.  This would work just fine but oy, what a waste of time and paint and money and making me paint more ugh yuck arg.

Cathy commented that I could paint my own castle, thereby using the paint I already have. I LOVE this idea and think it is fabulous. Except I think it is wildly beyond my skill set.

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Look at me all blogging every day this week! Its like I have a house to decorate!

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The boys' room for the past two houses (see here and here) has been navy blue and orange.  Since I am moving the orange accents to the new dining room, this leaves me with navy blue and....I dunno, some other color.  I'm trying to work with what we have for window treatments, but I'm running into problems with this room.

The new boys' room has a window that is 93 inches wide, and it is set up high in the wall, and it is off center.  (Fabulous!) This is also most likely the wall that the boys' twin beds will be going on.

My thought is to run curtains across the entire length of the wall, thus disguising the fact that the window is off center, and thus the beds arrayed under that window will also look off center.  Since most curtains are between 44 and 57 inches wide, I need four panels of whatever curtain I use. Except I do not currently have any set of curtains with four panels in my garage of magic leftover decor that say "ooh, use me in a little boy's room!"  

I do have one pair of these blue Ikea Stockholm Blad curtains.

Actually, I have 8 blue panels, but six panels are going in the living room, so I only have two left over.  I have a green/red pair as well, so you would think I could just go buy a new pair and voila, four panels EXCEPT NO, Ikea has DISCONTINUED THEM!!! The bastards.  I swear, when Ikea is going to discontinue things it should be required to notify me directly. (Also! My plan to use two Erslev rugs in the eat-in kitchen is also dashed by Ikea discontinuing that item too!  *shakes fist at the sky*)

The Last but not least, I have these yellowy-greenish citron stripe curtains that I made out of West Elm duvets in my Why Buy Curtains When I Can Kill All The Duvets phase.

Or I may just leave the boys room in a completely undecorated state until after Christmas when I will have the money to do something I actually like. Yes. That sounds like a plan.  

chevrons or a castle for a princess?

In Princess's room I have already painted the wall behind her bed hot pink.  My big plan is to do something like this, assuming I can do the math (debatable; would one of my sisters fly out for the weekend and help me, please?):

But while looking for a decal for the boys room (sigh, I'm really having trouble with that room), I came across this castle, which is awesome.  It is a castle for a strong Russian tzarina instead of an insipid, treacly Disneyfied castle.

That castle in the picture with the baby is the six-foot size, not the three-foot size, so its kind of enormous.  I think it would look awesome over Princess's bed, but, grr, already painted the wall hot pink (four coats!) and I have four non-returnable quarts of paint for the chevrons sitting in the garage, waiting for me to do the math and paint the chevrons.  (I am kind of not looking forward to doing the math, as it involves leveling lines and making a grid.  Plus a LOT of taping off.) (If you want the cons of putting up a six foot sticker, I have done it before and I will say that its harder than it looks and requires a helping hand.).

What should I do? Giant sticker or chevron wall?















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sputnik and leather chairs

The sputnik-ish light was installed today in the family room area off the kitchen!

That area had a Tuscan-style wrought iron chandeliers, which I took down and walked down the hall to the dining room.  Apparently when the former owners put up the interrogation lights they somehow cut the power to the dining room chandelier box, so....I have an ugly chandelier that doesn't work.  Add it to the list of things to repair.  (Forgive the blurry phone pictures, I killed my phone this week and am using an older one until my new one show up.)

I also made the Mister go at 10 pm to a trailer park and pick up these (slightly filthy) Chairs of Awesomeness:

They will be going in the eat-in area off the kitchen, at the round dining table soon to be installed under the sputnik.  (The tolix chairs will be in the dining room with the non-working chandelier.)  Best of all the Chairs of Awesomeness were only $40 for all six.  Holla, craigslist!

House 11 Dining room moodboard

My new house is going to be decorated largely with what we already have.  The Mold Remediation From Hell has eaten up all of my hardwood floor budget and is now chomping its way through my decorative items budget as well, so we are looking at the old "use what ya got"  and "I hope I can find this on craigslist" method of decorating.

I am going to base the dining room off the orange trellis curtains that were previously in the boys' room, because the new boys' room has a much wider window and those curtains won't fit that window. Those curtains are also discontinued, so I can't buy a second pair to make them work in the boys' room.  Ergo, those curtains are free to make their way into the dining room, where I only need one pair.

The one thing I plan on spending my money on in the dining room is blowing up a photo from our trip to Italy three years ago.  Its a photo of the beach in Santa Maria di Castellabate, where the Mister's family rents a beach house in the summer.  Otherwise, I already have the trellis curtains, a pair of orange lamps, the dining table and chairs, and a console (not the one pictured, but similar in size).

The only problem with this plan is I am totally at a loss with what to do in the boys' room.....but that's tomorrow's post.

ET Phone Home, tawdry paint

My living room and my kitchen are hazmats sites.  ET phone home....  (I am on a roll lately with the early eighties references.)

Actually, we are just remediating some mold.  (Two things to know about getting rid of mold: 1) it will cost wayyy more than you think it should, and 2) the mold remediation business is full of hucksters and con men.)

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I started painting the Princess's room.  I have an idea for a wall in her bedroom, and bought 5 quarts of different colors for it, but then realized that executing the idea would be much easier if I painted the wall a base color of pink, but I didn't have enough paint so I bought another can of paint but not from the same place, and of course they didn't match exactly.

(FYI, the pink on the left is Benjamin Moore color Wild Pink from Ace Hardware (Clark Kensington brand of paint), which is a truly terrible paint, don't ever buy it because the coverage was horrible.  The pink on the right is Benjamin Moore Wild Pink from Home Depot in Behr paint, which was a paint with much better coverage but the color isn't right.)

This annoyed me to no end, because buying two quarts is more expensive than a gallon, and then I had to go buy yet more paint for yet another coat so that the whole thing is the same color.  To make matters worse, I liked the original color from Ace on the left, not the second color from Home Depot on the right.  Since we are hemorrhaging money at the money I debated just finishing it with the darker color on the right, since I have just enough paint left for another coat.  But its not the right color.

The Mister said "the left is so sophisticated and elegant! The right is tawdry and cheap! If you paint it the Home Depot paint you will forever look at that wall and think if only I had just gone and spent another $20 on more paint."

*snort*

I love that man.

So we got a third can of paint and it looks much better.  Very elegant and sophisticated. 

the way back machine: my dining room circa 2002

Princess got into the cardboard box that holds our film pictures from the last twelve years, and as I was cleaning up the mess I came across this picture, which was funny in light of my writing just a few days ago about how I painted our condo every color of the rainbow:

That red! (It took two coats of primer and five coats of paint. Never again will I paint a room red.) The sophisticated gold dupioni-looking polyester curtains with matching beaded valance! (Twenty eight years old and already an old lady with victorian taste.) The federal style china cabinet, actually displaying my china!  All the matching espresso furniture! The Purple Beast of a sofa!

Oy vey.

The other side of the room was even worse but I don't have a picture.

It has been a lot of trial and error to figure out what I actually like.  My taste has changed, but, honestly, not that much.  I still like the Klimt painting and still have it, although its currently hanging out in the "unused art" section in the back of the Mister's closet.  I still like federal style furniture, although today I'd probably pair it with a lacquered parsons table instead of a matchy-matchy dinette set. There is still a part of me that likes beaded, bedazzled things, although I'm no longer in the habit of using beaded valances.  And I still decorate with strong jewel tones like red and purple.  Reading design blogs for four years refined my ideas on what I really like, and how to use it. (I still make mistakes, but I like to pretend I've gotten better at this game.)

How about you?  Has your taste changed since you started reading design blogs, or have you always known what you wanted? 

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

The new house has a lovely living/dining room space that runs the whole left side of the house. Or at least it would, if someone had not built a weird half wall separating the two.

Here is what it looked like last week, when we bought the house.

Notice how the wall does not go all the way to the ceiling?  It appears that the dining room was probably used as an office, because that half wall was built right on top of the existing carpet.  The chandelier electrical box in the ceiling was also capped off and these ....weird...lights were installed.

We referred to the room as the Room of Interrogation. (Also good for performing spur of the moment surgeries.) (No one EXPECTS the Spanish Inquisition!) (Between that line and the title, I have hereby exposed myself as no longer a member of the 18 to 34 demographic, I know.)

Today the wall came down.

Let there be light!

Now we just need some paint.

Since 90% of my inspiration pictures have white walls, I decided to paint most of the rooms white.  Its funny, when we first got married I painted our condo every color of the rainbow, and then I went through the beige phase (not pinky-beige! I never went for pinkish beige, I swear, it was a tasteful grayish-brown beige!), and now I am back full circle to all white walls.

There are a million gazillion shades of white out there.  I bought about ten samples, put them on posterboards, and carried them from room to room in the new house, testing them in different lighting.

You can barely see a difference between any of them, right?  I couldn't.  Once we narrowed it down to two we put those two on the wall.  We eventually decided on Benjamin Moore's Mascarpone (the one on the far left).  Its a bright, creamy but not yellowy white.  I started painting the Princess's room with it today, and it looks pretty nice.