let’s talk about color and pillows for days (ORC week 5)
It’s week five of the One Room Challenge, and that means it is time for the details. The room is painted, the floor and windows are covered, the furniture is all in place, and it is time to work on the finishing touches. The fun stuff: pillows and art and additional lighting.
Wait. That must be someone else’s space because mine still looks like this:
Surgical white. Sterile. Or think of it as a blank canvas. It’s all in how you look at it.
The room is painted. The floors are primed, but not painted. Baseboard molding is still missing from one quarter of the room. The blinds are here, but not hung. The furniture is most definitely not in place. Some of it is not even selected. So what in the world did I do all week?
1. We picked a color palette for the house. Elsie of A Beautiful Mess recently wrote a couple of great posts about picking a colors for your whole home. This is particularly useful if you love color but do not want your home to look like a crayon box or the inside of a skittle factory. It turns out, I didn’t really need to go through the exercise since I loved all of the colors that she picked for her home, but go through the exercise I did. I even dragged my husband to the paint store to pick out colors that felt right to him. Not only did we double up on three colors, I selected one of his colors to paint the floors in the family room. (By the way, I have no intention of painting the walls any of these colors. These are the colors that I'll be decorating the house with. I am in love with the white walls.)
2. I looked for furniture. Everywhere. What I really want is a dresser that will fit in the closet nook. Something with character that will provide storage for the kids toys, extra blankets, etc, and create a home for the TV. Something like this or like this. What I found, even with paint, isn’t quite there.
On the other hand, I did find this bed for $120 at a thrift store (it has a foot board also).
T wants to paint it green. I also found this bed, which had a home with the circus in another life, and this bed, which is so beautiful and is WAY over my thrift store budget ($425? At a thrift store?).
Oh, and I found a couple of accent tables to (possibly) use for coffee tables. I’m still waiting to see how they look when everything is done, but for now, these were kind of fun, offer space for storage, and there are two of them so no fighting over table space when we are building Legos. I gave up on the concept of a play table or desk. Too much going on in too little space.
3. I bought white fabric roman shades for the room’s four windows. Possibly too much white, but they actually look pretty darn good in the room. While I was at IKEA, I bought a rattan chair in the As-Is section for $30. It's small scale is perfect for additional seating and the rattan gives some texture to the room.
Just for the record, my mom and I stood in IKEA looking at blinds for what seemed like forever trying to figure out how they worked. No cords. No fasteners. How the heck do they stay up? Magnets, it turns out. And if you have ever met my kids, you know that G, in particular, is obsessed with magnets. (PS Christmas is coming and this is the best toy I've ever purchased. Spendy but worth every penny.)
Hmmm. For half the price of the next best alternative (yes, I did buy two different natural woven blinds from Lowe’s, and yes, I did return them both), I’m willing to give magnets a shot. Now I just need some cool hooks on which to hang my magnetic shades. I really like these French hooks, but I need eight and this is not in my budget (they run about $11 a piece, so, you know, $88 for hooks is not really an option). Anyone have a suggestion for a hanging alternative?
4. I searched for pillows. This could be a post unto itself, but there are about a million blog posts written about where to find the best pillows on a budget and this is not going to be one of them. I tend to go back to the same places for pillows every single time – West Elm, Home Goods, CB2, Anthropologie (can we talk about this throw?), and Society 6. I find Urban Outfitters actually has some fun pillows, but the prices have gone up considerably in the last few years. I know Etsy is the place to go for pillows, but I just don’t have the patience to wade through the junk. When I have more time, I’ll hunt down some specific makers, but for now, I’m skipping Etsy.
As you can see, I’m having trouble sticking to my palette. I’m really feeling the pink and green in this room. Thoughts? Suggestions? I’m open.
I did buy a couple of white pillow covers while at IKEA for the whopping price of $5 and $7 each because several of the pillows I liked seemed very DIY-able. That's a verb. Check out these cool tutorials here and here. I also thought this tutorial and this tutorial could be adapted to pillows.
So that's where we are. The first coat of the floor color is going on the floor tonight. I'm totally nervous. One week left and a lot to do. Better get hoppin'. But first, be sure to check out what everyone else has been working on. There are some mighty fine projects going on (I love this dresser by the way - can't wait to see the whole room).