One Room Challenge, Week 5: Rug and Pelmets

For week 5 of the One Room Challenge, I bought a new rug.  I already had a gray geometric 8x10 rug that fit the space nicely, but as much as I liked the light airiness that the gray and white gave the room, this rug did not stand up to dirt.  The parlor is to the right of the front door, and the kitchen is off the parlor, so the line from the front door to the kitchen was a nice line of dirt across this lovely light-colored carpet.

I found a 7x10 persian rug on ebay.  I was deliberately looking for a cheap, busily-patterned dark blue and red rug that would hide dirt, and I did not want to pay very much for it, because my guess it will need replacing in a few years. 

I also made some pelmets for the windows.  For months I went around and around on what kind of window treatments to do.  Curtains weren't ideal, seeing as the room is only 10x11 and all the furniture needs to be pushed up against the walls, thus trapping the curtains behind the sofa and chair. 

I would love to do roman shades, but yeesh, they are expensive.  These windows are 35 and 3/8s, not a standard size, and I could not find a plain white inexpensive shade that I could gussy up myself with trim.  Custom shades--even plain white ones!--are $350+ per window.  I did splurge on roman shades for our back living room, since it has four abutted corner windows that won't allow a pelmet treatment and six windows are at different heights, making curtains look crazy from a symmetry perspective, but I just couldn't justify the cost in the front of the house.

I ended up using white pull down cellular shades from Home Depot, for about $40 per window.  I could have made a foam core board pelmet, like I have in other rooms, but since these windows are in the front of the house, visible from the front door, and I have another set of windows on the other side of the door I wanted to match, I ordered a more substantial pelmet kit from Amazon.  I have about fifteen plain white Ikea curtains from our last house, so I used those for the fabric, and hot ironed some greek key trim on them.  I'm happy with how they turned out.  They give some fanciness and look finished without overwhelming the rest of the room or making a giant statement.

Next week is the big reveal, ack.  I need to finish painting the closet and find some art.  I can't wait to see all the other rooms.  

One Room Challenge, Week 3 and 4: a new sofa

For week three of the One Room Challenge my kids were on spring break and I thought I'd be able to link up to the ORC a few days late, but alas, apparently not.  For week four I have some sofa updates.

I have wanted a blue velvet sofa for a long time.  I looked around for various ready-made blue velvet sofas, which there are legion, but I had some specific requirements.  It is a small room, so the sofa could not be more than 80 inches long in order to fit between the two end tables.  I wanted a three cushion sofa, which is difficult to find in a smaller apartment size sofa.  I also did not want a lumpy, bad quality sofa.  I am old and need soft cushy sofas for taking naps.

None of the sofas from big box stores fit my requirements.  I could have gone up to 82 inches, but all of the blue velvet sofas I found either did not have three cushions, or were like sitting on cement. 

Instead I decided to recover our Room and Board sofa, which fit all our requirements...but was looking a wee bit worse for wear.

Then one Saturday afternoon I was strolling downtown past a design firm when I happened upon this amazing blue velvet sofa being unloaded into the store.  It was beautiful! It was amazing! It fit all of my requirements! It was $4400!

Sad!

I kept on strolling down the street to my favorite consignment store.  They did not have any blue velvet sofas.  They did, however, have a service where you can order custom sofas, and one of them was a 78 inch english roll arm sofa, and as long as I got a navy blue cotton instead of a blue velvet, it was substantially cheaper than $4400.

That sofa allowed me to pick out fabric for coordinating throw pillows, so I played around with that for quite a while. I ended up picking a navy blue cotton with a greek key design for the sofa, and emerald green throw pillows with welting that matched the sofa.

In the above picture I brought two of my pillows from home...the chiang mai dragon in alabaster (left), and the chiang mai dragon in aquamarine (right).  Although I originally planned the room around the alabaster, I am actually thinking that perhaps the aquamarine might be the direction I'd like to go.  I should probably decide soon considering its Week 4 already.

One Room Challenge, week 2: Painting

For week two of the One Room Challenge I have some painting progress for you. 

Since this is no longer a dining room, as it was when the house was originally built, we ripped down the chair molding and painted the room white.  For months we had a bracket in the wall that we couldn't remove (see it above the window in the upper left?), but luckily the painter was able to get it out and patch the hole it left behind.

When we moved in last summer, the entire house was painted Navajo White with miles upon miles of pine trim and honey oak cabinets and badly stained mahogany closet doors, and every room in the house had a country plaid or country floral or country something.   Some people like that look.  I....don't.  

For new readers, last summer we moved from California to New Jersey two weeks after I had a spine fusion surgery.  I was not/am still not allowed to paint anything.  I can't get my arms over my head much, so I don't know how I would paint anything anyhow.  This has been incredibly frustrating, because Old Uninjured Me would have had this entire house painted from top to bottom in a few weeks.  New Weak Me has been spent a lot of time on the sofa.  

Thus, we decided to hire out having the house painted.  Since paying someone else to do stuff you can do yourself for free costs $$$$$$, we decided to start with only painting the first floor walls, baseboards, and door casings.  To save money, we decided not to have the windows or doors painted yet.  

I wanted to paint the whole interior of the house the same color, and I wanted to have very very very light gray walls with bright white trim.  

Did you know that Benjamin Moore and Sherwin Williams paint samples costs $8?  My plan was to go to Home Depot, have them color match the BM and SW paint samples in their $4 samples, then narrow it down to the ones I really liked and get those in the actual BM and SW paint samples to be sure it was the right color, so that I wasn't spending gazillions of dollars on paint samples. 

I went through 52 gray paint samples.  Every single one of them was WRONG WRONG WRONG.  

Apparently I don't like gray.  

I gave up on gray and went with a very light creamy white for the walls (Sherwin Williams Westhighland White) and Benjamin Moore Chantilly Lace for the trim.  

But you already had a yellowy white in the original paint, you are thinking.  

NO THIS ONE IS BETTER.  See?

Or as my children said "....it looks exactly the same."  

The Mister noted that the new bright white looked SO FABULOUS on the door casings, that clearly, we should go ahead and paint the windows.

 Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I booked that immediately.  Luckily no one from Apartment Therapy will be reading about this wood desecration. 

I feel perhaps my pictures would be more majestic had I actually taken some with the intent to publish them on the blog....except I took zero before pictures, the ORC wasn't even on my radar last month when all this painting was going on, and all the before/during pictures I have were progress pictures that I took on my phone to text to my husband.  Hence the boxes of girl scout cookies front and center.  I suppose I could move all the new furniture out and take some posed progress pictures, but that requires a level of commitment I do not currently possess.  Let me know if you want to buy some girl scout cookies.  

One Room Challenge: Front parlor

I originally published this post in January, with a plan for redoing our front parlor, but since I made very little progress on it, I'm finally getting started, and I want to participate in the One Room Challenge--I'm republishing it, slightly edited.  As with every other ORC I have participated in, I'm skating into this one slightly late and somewhat disheveled.

We've been in our new house a few months now, and as expected, how we use our house is slightly different than our original set up when we moved in.

Our house has an addition that was put on in 1994.  The original house was about 1800 sq feet, and the addition added about 600 sq ft with a new living room and master bedroom. The front door opens onto the stairwell, with what would have been the original dining room on the right (the current parlor), the original living room on the left (now the dining room), and kitchen in the back, as per this very-very-not-to-scale floor plan (take the wall lines with a grain of salt):

Since there is now a living room in the back of the house, we have our 10 seat dining table in the original living room.  The parlor became a "what do we do with  this space right off the front door?"  When we first moved in, we plopped a round dining table and a dresser in the space and called it the homework room.  It was really more of a "here's a flat surface where everyone drops their junk when they walk in the door" space. Sadly, I have no pictures of the original set up, but it looked like this the day we moved in:

During the day, when I am at home by myself, I spend time in the dining room and front parlor.  At first, I brought a club chair in to the homework room.  After a few weeks I decided that the homework room would be better served as a sitting room or parlor.

For a long time, the room looked like this:

I pulled together a mood board of how I'd like to decorate it.

The chiang mai dragon fabric in alabaster is the jumping off point for the design, although I'm not sure if I will simply get pillows in that fabric, or try and finagle a window treatment out of it.  There will be lots of white paint and I'll be removing the chair railing and light fixture.

 I've wanted a blue velvet sofa forever. The one in the mood board is a Crate and Barrel Lounge II Petite sofa, but that sofa is a bit large for the space, and the "velvet" option at Crate and Barrel really looks more like a microfiber.  I planned to reupholster our Room and Board Murray sofa, as it has held up great even after a child poured a can of anchovy oil all over it, but that plan may change. 

rug / sofa / lamp / coffee table / basket / end table

Red chair we already own, it is the discontinued Odeon chair from Crate and Barrel.  Peacock mirror from Pier 1, discontinued.

T's bedroom

Many moons ago I put together a mood board for T's bedroom, which looked like this:

The finished room looks absolutely nothing like that.  The only thing from that moodboard we used were the pink lamps we already owned.

T and I looked through what remains of my fabric collection, which is pretty limited since the moving purge.  T picked out this Pottery Barn Paradise fabric.

 Back story: I once saw this fabric as a Pottery Barn duvet on an Apartment Therapy article, and in the picture it was a bright yellow.  I stalked ebay and craigslist looking for this duvet and finally tracked it down.  When it showed up, the color was very mustardy, not bright yellow.  I ripped the duvet apart and used it as curtains, then decided it was just not what I was hoping it to be, and put it away for years.  I'm happy T liked it, as I think it works really well in her room.

I recovered her headboard.

Since her windows already have pull up shades and window/furniture placement makes long curtains inadvisable, I made two pelmet boxes a la Jenny Komenda out of foam core board. 

I added a purple quilt, shopped the basement for art, shuffled some Malm dressers out of other rooms, bought a neutral shag rug and a panda head, and voila, new room.

great white balancing on these photos! Nothing but the best for my blog. 

pretend the art doesn't look crooked

different white balancing ftw

Someday, if my arms ever work again, I will repaint her bedroom (and the rest of the house) with a fresher white, and paint the trim.  

Live with it: the basement laundry

As you may have seen, the Fall 2017 One Room Challenge kicked off two weeks ago!  I looooove watching other people make over their houses, and some of my favorite bloggers are returning this round.

I would love to participate in the ORC, as I just bought a house and have 13 rooms to makeover....but zero budget.  Womp womp, sad trombone.  Also I can't use my arms, which makes DIY projects difficult.  However, this is a blessing in disguise, because it will force me to live with this house for a while before making any really big decisions.  Many times I have thought "I must have This" and then I get This and it turns out that spot would really function better with That instead.

I have already changed my mind on a number of design decisions.  I assigned all the children bedrooms based on what already-owned rug fit in which room, and then it turned out that the furniture each child owned did not fit in the rooms, even if the rug did, so that meant some reshuffling, and some new rugs.

One "live with it" sort-of-failure/success is the 30-inch nook by the front door.  My first inclination was to buy a small dresser with drawers, because the Mister likes to drop keys and wallet in a drawer as soon as he walks in the door.  Since he lived here for a  month before we got here, his keys and wallet drawer was the kitchen drawer with the spatulas, which wasn't working for either of us.  I searched high and low for a less-than-30-inch dresser, which was impossible to find.  Then I found a dinged up lingerie dresser at a yard sale, which I thought was perfect, as soon as I could paint it a pretty color.  I attempted to paint it, using my arms, as one does, and as I've mentioned, using my arms is currently a no-go, and I had to take to my bed for days after putting primer on it.  Two more attempts at painting it were unsuccessful, and it is still sitting in our garage, unpainted.

This past weekend I thought to myself, ugh, the front door is always a mess, there are always 400 shoes here, why doesn't anyone put their shoes away in the shoe cubby that is in the far back of the house?? Brilliant idea: I should put a shoe cubby here in the front, not drawers.  I pulled the shoe cubbies out of the back closet, and hunted down the cover my mom made three houses ago, put out a basket for mail....and voila, shoes are put away.

You are all now desperately wondering where the wallet and keys go.  They ended up in the Drexel console that now resides in the dining room (not yet ready for pictures), which is where the Mister previously dropped wallet and keys in the last house.  Things will work out if you ignore them long enough. 

************

There are a few problem items I will have to live with for a while.  One of them is the washer and dryer.  Our current washer and dryer are wee bitty, teeny tiny petite appliances, located in our basement.  Our w/d in California were enormous, but since it costs many thousands of dollars to move across the country and the Mister said "hey, this w/d here is brand new", I sold the ones in CA.  When we got here I discovered that my new washer is half the size of the old one, and comfortably fits a pair of shorts and some socks and a handkerchief but not much more, thus necessitating what I consider an excessive amount of small load laundry doing.  (Irony: I bought this house without the Mister ever seeing it. I noticed there was a petite washer, but figured no big deal, I already have a w/d to bring with me. Then I broke my neck and things went to hell and well, this w/d debacle is really my own fault for not paying more attention, but I was otherwise occupied.)

The laundry is also located in the basement here.  In California our laundry was located by the door to the garage on the first floor, and thus I passed by the laundry multiple times a day, so I also did laundry multiple times a day.  I would love to relocate the laundry to the first floor  here.  Unfortunately there is not an obvious relocation destination on the first floor.  I spent a week thinking how I could move walls and repurpose closets to get the w/d upstairs, then realized that if I am going to spend many thousands of dollars on improving this house there are more important projects to tackle first.

I gave up on that and decided that it would be simplest to just buy a new larger w/d and put them in the basement, even though I prefer the first floor.  Easy, right? I spent some time researching what w/d to buy...and realized that the reason we have these wee, tiny w/d is because the two doorways into the laundry room are 24 inches wide and 26 inches wide, with no possibility of widening either. 

One is banded by the stairwell and an HVAC duct, and the other door is banded by a plumbing pipe and loadbearing wall.  So...the previous owners bought tiny appliances.

So we will live with it for a while.  Perhaps that time living with the doll size w/d will give us some clarity on how we'd like to move things around.  Maybe I will learn to like washing 12 miniature loads of laundry per day. Perhaps I will just tear a washer size hole in the wall over the stairwell and just pass the washer through with the aid of a few burly men.  (Thinking outside the box here.) 

Next up: living with it, the refrigerator edition. 

Painting oak kitchen cabinets

I have plans for our kitchen.  Lots of plans. One of my big plans is to paint the honey oak cabinets.

Years ago, I saw this picture in Better Homes and Gardens.  (I cannot find this picture on the BHG website to link to, but I'm positive that's where it is from.)

I love two things in this picture.  First, the day I saw this picture I went to Ikea and bought a floating shelf and installed it in my kitchen under the cabinet, as you can see in this heinously not-white-balanced picture of my kitchen four houses ago. (This was the house with the rats. The horror.)

Second, I love the greige on the cabinets.  That's right.  I, Lisa, Hater of Neutrals, Proponent Of Color, Lover of All Things Bright And Colorful, have been dreaming for years of painting my kitchen cabinets a neutral color that leans towards beige.  (Not swine beige, never that. A pretty, soft, grayish beige.)  

Lest that shock you too much, I also have contemplated painting the cabinets olive green.

via Little Green Notebook

Or emerald green.

via Apartment Therapy

Or a cornflower blue.  

via Emily Henderson

Or cobalt blue:

via Wiley Designs LLC

Sadly, every space has its limitations.  My kitchen has brand new gray/swine beige/black/cranberry granite counters installed by the previous owners.

Its in great shape and it makes zero sense to replace it right now, even if its not the bright white or quartz I would choose.  So....it is unlikely I will paint the cabinets a bright, happy color.

I feel that this kitchen would look nice in either greige, or a two tone white and charcoal gray or black, like so:

via Design Manifest

There's a bunch of rearranging of cabinets that needs to happen before I can start painting anything, so I have some time to contemplate.