Lightening the mood

Chocolate brown is only good on walls in small doses.  No one told this to the previous owners, who decided it was good for a dining room.  It was definitely very dramatic, especially with the big light fixture, but it didn't strike the mood that I wanted for our space.  I picked out the color combination I wanted a while ago, but due to its relative disuse it didn't make the cut when it came to pre-move in projects.  A good friend of mine offered to help us to paint a room as a housewarming gift (awesome idea!!), and we chose this one.  I appreciate her perfectionism, because this room has a lot of trim.  When you look closely, you notice lots of red and brown on the sashes, sills, and chair rail.  This is very frustrating, since it meant that not only were the previous owners sloppy, but the ones before them as well.  I think this room also has wallpaper under the layers of paint, which means that a full overhaul may be in the cards someday.  But for now, it looks smashing!

Mustache power!

I have been loving the recent trend of using handlebar mustaches in decor items.  When we realized we needed a little something of interest in the mudroom, as well as needing a key holder, it seemed like the perfect combination to get a handlebar mustache key holder.  And where, pray tell, can one find such an odd item?  Etsy of course!  We definitely scored with this moderately priced item, which looks pretty snazzy in the small space, if I do say so myself!

The funniest moment is when Jeremy looked at it, appreciated it, but said that he imagined it bigger.  Naturally my first thought was Homer Simpson ordering a beer in Australia (50 seconds into the clip below). 

Love it.

Eggplant no more

The half-bath on the first floor was purple when we moved in.  Now I am no stranger to purple walls, my first apartment bedroom's walls were purple, but it definitely clashed with the other colors that we chose for the house.  It wasn't too offensive so we waited a while, but the other day I suddenly couldn't stand it anymore and took it on.  Unfortunately the space was too small for two, so I embarked on this journey solo.  

Something interesting happened when I went to remove the lightswitch covers.  Keeping with the theme of the previous owners seeming to cut corners, I found out that they not only put the lightswitch cover back on while the paint was still wet, I found out that they painted over wallpaper when a huge chunk of it peeled up with the cover.  Ugh.  I glued it back down and prayed that the paint would keep it down until such time that we could pull it all up and do a proper job.  Unfazed, I pressed on, and after about six hours in a small space , just me and a paint can, the room looked great!  I love this Plumage color so much and am so excited to have it on all four walls of a room.

This time I did not fail at my attempt

We bought a patio set on July 4th so that we could actually sit at a table with my parents for the holiday (the moving van didn't show until the 6th), but it was missing an umbrella.  And I mean it when I say "missing it" because we definitely dealt with glare and a little sunburn.  So when I was in World Market today and saw rectangular umbrellas marked down from $169 to $42, I was all over them.  Took a bit of a gamble with mixing patterns, but I think they can play nicely, if only because you don't really see them together (since the umbrella is so tall).

When I got it home J was still at work, and me being impatient, I struggled to set it up myself.  Believe me when I say that this clip was the one that kept running through my head as I wrenched and twisted and shoved the thing into the base, threading the needle through the table.  The fact that I got one with blue stripes is a total coincidence, by the way.