Thursday, August 18, 2011

But My Life is Just Too Random!

In the midst of all the packing and planning we've been doing for the big move to our first house this weekend, there was a period of a couple of days when we thought we'd paint before we hauled all our crap over. The realtor had told us that we may be able to move up the closing date. Given that we already had a truck and a group of our friends reserved for the weekend after the original closing, we decided it would be the perfect opportunity to clean the place up and paint.

Ahh, painting. Growing up, my parent's house was all white. Every wall was like a blank canvas to better display my artist mother's work. And it's not that it wasn't nice, it was always bright and airy, but sometimes some paint can really bring a room together or define one room from another.

During these couple of days when we thought we would be able to paint, I amassed a quite large collection of paint samples. The colors I was looking for could best be described as "muted jewel tones", like sage and salmon. I plotted out which colors would be best in each room: a salmon/sunset color in the bedroom, sage in the great room, icy lilac in the dining room, stickynote yellow in the guest room, and a pale sky for the living room.

Well, as you can probably already tell from the language I've been using, we didn't manage to get into the house early. There was a typo in the paperwork that needed to be corrected which set us back to our original time line.

And it's a good thing it did because I have reneged on just about every paint choice I had made (except sage in the great room because that's going to be gorgeous). Dan saw the problem before I did but I brushed it off: even though the paint colors would be lovely in their respective rooms, there wouldn't be any cohesion throughout the house. The tones I picked just didn't go together well.

At first, I refused to admit it, but he is right (See honey? I put it out on the internet that you're right). Each room would have been stand alone, which may have been ok if they were all well divided, but when you've got an open archway between two rooms, they kind of have to go together.

After some trolling through Apartment Therapy, I stumbled upon a comment that broke it down into terms I could understand: pick an object (or two) that you love and define your colors for your ENTIRE house based on those colors. Pick two major colors and two minor colors and try to keep the rest in neutrals.
The two objects I chose for this exercise were my awesome comforter (birds!) and my vintage-inspired lounge.

With these two items, I think these will be my colors (and yes, I used Paint. Paint is awesome!):


I'm still not sold on the forest green as a minor color, but I've got some time to mull it over.

Great. I have colors to base things off of. I can design a house. Well, crap. What about everything I love that doesn't fit in with these colors?

Like my butterfly kite? And my framed Chinese paper opera mask cutouts? And my Andy Warhol "Marilyn Monroe" puzzle poster? And my Zack Morris poster (not my actual poster, but the closest I can find. I'll post a picture of mine once it's hung up)?



How the hell do you incorporate those into a design? Do I just need a room where I put all this stuff and segregate it from the rest of the house? Am I just thinking too "big picture" at this point since I'm basing the feel of the entire house on a comforter that gives shoved off the bed for five months out of the year because it's just too damn hot?

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