Our own Sherry and Terry

It's twins!!  Before you get too excited, I mean our slipper chairs, which arrived today!  After some minor assembly with a little assist from Allen Wrench

they were all ready to go!  I definitely need to dress them up with some brown pillows to tie in the couch, and maybe track down this fabric to make some pillows for the couch.  I am so glad that they turned out this well, and I must resist the urge to grab a fun stool to put between them, we still need to save money!

Banishing beige

We all know it, that pale, sickly shade of yellow-y beige that many have lovingly dubbed "builder's beige."  All of the transitional spaces in our home are were this color, perhaps since there is so much space that repainting it would be a big undertaking.  As part of our plan to have all painting projects completed by Thanksgiving we decided to tackle the beige in the downstairs a few weeks ago.  I wanted yet another shade of gray but couldn't decide exactly one and was nervous about just choosing one since so much space would be committed to this color (our hallways are like one big Mobius strip).  Enter the swatches:

To see how it would look next to the greenish kitchen walls

Checking to coordination with the darker gray already in the hallway

Under the silver and white frames in the gallery

In the mudroom with the darker wood console table

Fairly quickly both hubs and I chose the lighter shade for the hallways and the darker one for the mudroom.  This was a little surprising as I was planning on just choosing one color, but it has definitely worked out having two shades.  The wonderful thing about Martha Stewart's paint collection is that she has handy little symbols to make sure that the colors coordinate, so our home still feels cohesive.  Observe!

Underneath the fun mirror I painted with chalkboard paint

Looking snazzy with the trellis rug

Going moody in the mudroom

Looks alright with the kitchen green too!

So goodbye, downstairs builder's beige, catch you on the second floor!

Crossing my fingers on this one

We had our housewarming party on the 8th, and much to our surprise most of the people that we invited actually came!  We had lofty plans of entertaining all of these people outside on our lovely paved patio with the grill going and a Bocce ball tournament.  Sadly, Mother Nature had a different idea and all 20+ of our guests were confined to the living room and kitchen.  This alerted us to the shortage of seats in the living room (the sectional seats five, which is a lot with the two of us but not so much when you have 18 extra people).  Our favorite seating arrangement ever was when we had this sectional plus another large sofa that we used before we upgraded, we were able to seat 12 with that arrangement!  We don't quite have the room for another sofa since our room is more long than wide, and a loveseat would be too bulky.  A lot of the rooms that I have seen on design blogs and Pinterest have a matched pair of slipper chairs, so I decided to start preliminary searches for those.  I also decided to try to find an interesting pattern to bring some life into the living room (forgive me) since we have a large solid sofa, solid walls, and natural tables.  Enter this chair,

The Avington slipper chair in Cloud Floral from Target, so cute!  It was also marked down to $125, which was nice enough, but when I noticed that it was a buy one/get one 50% off, it pushed me over the edge.  I figured out how to frame it with the hubs since we decided to stop buying furniture and start saving for a car (that hasn't worked the last ten times we have said it), and I really wanted these.  What gets me, every single time I have decided to spend money, is the deal.  I mean, c'mon, two slipper chairs for $225 after tax and delivery?!  Crazy good, right?  The pattern is also a perfect blend of the blues and grays without being too overpowering. 

Ugh, I hope so.  Because I really have to stop spending soon.  Like now.

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.