Archive for February, 2009
Katie & Deb’s Australian Design Dilemma
When Katie & Deb from down under contacted us for decorating help we couldn’t help but be excited. While most of our clients live here in the US (along with the occasion Canadian consult) we actually offer to help anyone across the globe, as long as they can provide some links from their area that we can “shop” to make their mood board. There’s not much of a difference between 70 miles and 7000 when you’re dishing out virtual decorating advice, right? Here’s their letter:
We’re so excited to be getting your advice!! Deb and I moved into a brand new townhouse but it lacks personality & warmth. We’re struggling to arrange the furniture in the living area and make best use of the space while infusing it with some style. We like clean & modern but relaxed– nothing too slick/fancy. When it comes to accent colours our favourites are blue & green- along with natural tones like brown, white, straw. Pottery Barn is our favourite store but we don’t have it in Australia so we like Freedom, Oz Design Furniture and IKEA. We’d like a new sofa/chairs that are more informal and can seat more people. The piano stays along with the TV stand and the white walls. We’d like new lamps, curtains (those blinds have to go!), and a rug. The bookshelves are going upstairs so please ignore these. Really looking forward to your advice!! -Katie and Deb
This bright open space is primed for a transformation. Here’s the mood board we whipped up for a casual, warm, and relaxing space where Katie and Deb can feel right at home:
And now for the mood board breakdown.
Read the rest of this entry »
Reader Redesign: The Lovely Loo
Get a load of Kelly’s budget bathroom makeover. Here’s her letter:
We’ve been working really hard on the house and it seems that the most “done” room is of course the smallest – one of the bathrooms! Here’s what the bathroom looked like when we moved in:
And this is what the bathroom looks like today after we replaced the old cracked toilet, painted the walls, replaced the light fixture, spruced up the existing counter and bought a slew of accessories:
This bathroom was redone for a total of… (DRUMROLL PLEASE!)… approximately $399!!! By shopping thrift stores and looking for good prices at big box stores it’s possible to really change a room’s look without making it look matchy matchy! – Kelly
Needless to say we love Kelly’s frugal yet fabulous makeover (click here for more details on her blog). From the new light fixture to the punchy paint, it really looks like a whole new room. And we especially love those bows on the shower curtain rings. Adorable!
Pillow Talk
Who has two thumbs and scored a fun new crisscross pillow for $2.63? This girl.
A recent trip to Bed Bath & Beyond ended in one of my best scores to date. Digging through the discount pillow bin yielded this beauty that was marked down by 50% and then marked down again, this time by 75% off the sale price. Yup, for just $2.50 plus thirteen cents of tax, this crazy beautiful lattice pillow came home with me. Look how happy it is on the bed with its other pillow friends:
A lot of people ask us how to mix patterns and prints, and this new pillow conveniently demonstrates a few of our favorite pattern mixing tips. First of all, you want one of the prints or patterns to be a larger scale, more bold pattern (the pillow) while the other pattern is smaller in scale and a bit more subtle (the duvet cover). It’s usually a good idea for the smaller sized item to be the more bold piece (ex: a subtle small-scale patterned armchair paired with a graphic large-scale patterned pillow). Although we’ve seen some majorly dramatic rooms with large geometric or floral patterns in the curtains or even on the walls that knock our socks off, so it can go either way.
The other thing to keep in mind when you’re mixing and matching would be to try to keep the patterns or prints in the same color family. Thanks to the similar tone found in both the duvet cover and the pillow they don’t seem to be fighting each other and can peacefully coexist in our peaceful master bedroom. Here’s the close up. Isn’t she a beaut?
And here’s my receipt. Gotta love a cheap thrill every now and then.
Especially one that makes the cashier do a double take. She couldn’t believe the price. And I couldn’t believe my luck. Here’s to major markdowns and digging through those clearance bins! Happy hunting…
A Few New Views
Say that three times fast.
We added some new after pictures from a few different angles to our house tour page… along with some never before seen befores! We often get email requests to see the other side of our living room and our den, so we waited for a sunny day and snapped some pics from unseen angles. And since we love a good before and after, of course we’ll show you what each room looked like before.
Take our living room for instance. Here it is on the night that we moved in:
And here it is from almost the same angle now (I took that hideous divider out myself while John was at work and tore back the weird linoleum square to reveal hardwood floors beneath!):
And we musn’t forget our dark and dated den. Here it is from another angle during our first walk-through (that’s our cute realtor in the doorway):
And here it is now (after widening the doorway to the sunroom and the kitchen, replacing the faux-parquet linoleum with hardwood floors, removing that crazy archaic wall sconce, and adding about six gallons of paint):
So feel free to check out our updated and expanded house tour whenever the mood strikes. Of course we also updated our room by room source list (so if you have any where’d-you-get-that questions, we hopefully have an answer for you there). Come on in and make yourself at home!
Bedroom Botanical
Thanks to the fact that our master bedroom has a huge floor length mirror (a surprise wedding gift from John so I could see myself before walking out the back door to get hitched)…
… the second mirror to the right of the bedroom door seemed a bit superfluous.
So we seized the opportunity to replace it with one of our homemade botanical prints in an inexpensive Ikea frame. I like it so much that I want another frame to hang right under it with a different botanical on display. But I’ll have to wait for our next Ikea trip…
We intentionally sized our homemade botanicals to fit into these great square Ikea frames for a luxe look on the cheap. There’s nothing like a leaf on the wall to remind you to leaf all your worries behind. Ok, so that’s a stretch, but it really is super serene. A bit of nature does a bedroom good, and it’s especially convenient when you don’t even have to water it.
Maybe it’s the bulbs poking through our flowerbeds or the forsythia starting their annual show, but I also decided to swap out the art over my desk for something a little less glacial. We took the existing photo on our Alaskan honeymoon (snapped from the window of a tiny sea plane as we flew over a glacier covered in volcanic ash). Needless to say it’s one of our favorite images from the trip, but spring fever has me chasing something a bit more tropical…
So I pulled a two minute art swap using another botanical we made. And I’m loving the lighter leafy vibe…
What about you guys? Does spring fever have you switching out accessories or art in your home? What sort of seasonal things do you do to usher in the warmer weather? Dish the spring-is-on-the-way dirt.
We added our den’s corner office area to the room-by-room source guide (found in a link on the top of our House Tour page) so you can now see where we snagged everything from those boxes and tins to our desk and our lamp.
