What do you think? Opinions please!

Coastal Living

I'm officially obsessed with coral.

I just painted my office this color and now I'm thinking doing my front door it too.  (I have a gallon of coral left that I can use to test it out.)

I have had my head/ heart stuck on doing it turquoise for quite some time... 

 But I think Pantone's forecast of it has me over saturated sadly. No offense my aqua friend, I still love ya,  but maybe its time for me to move on to another area of the color wheel.

Here is the house and front door. Its kind of tucked away and dark, so what ever color goes up needs to have pop. (It actually needs a new light too.)

I'm open to suggestions, just not yellow.  I LOVE yellow doors, but this house was dark brown with bright yellow when we bought it a year ago. See...

do you kind of understand?  Maybe in time I will be open to the idea, just not now.

So what should I do? Coral, a blue/green or maybe a deep chartreuse? Help! Does anyone have a great kickass color? I'd love your suggestions! I want to paint this weekend.
P.S. Eventually we are changing the windows out to true divided lights to make it feel more coastal ranch than 60's ranch.

What I look at while I blog...

I have been re-doing my office the past couple weeks.  It, like my family room, was a dark wood paneled hole and was super depressing to hang out in.  While working on it I realized (well actually just confirmed) a few things about myself in the process.  My office is MY space and I found that the objects I placed in there were much more personal than those I'd place in my living room.  The space is a bit brighter and "crazy" than the rest of the house, but it  is a reflection of me and what I find inspiring.
Here are some things I realized...

 No matter how badly I want an all white space I am a color obsessed person and need to be surrounded by it.  I will change my paint color with my mood or season.  It makes me happy.  Wildly patterned objects do too. I painted my office coral.  I love it, and I'm OK with the fact that it will be a different color by this time next year. 

(My yellow pineapple lamp w/ some added "flair", and some other things that make me happy)

 I am a retro girl at heart and I need something vintage around me.  I'm quirky and I like quirky things. 
I also love sentimental things that remind me of my childhood or loved ones.

(My Grandfather's sign from his business and my Grandma's color wheel/ chart remind me that hard work and creativity is key.  They were a big part of my life and I also have a few of my Grandma's painting hanging too.)

 I love shiny, sparkly objects... hence the name of my blog.  I must have been a crow in a past life.  I am always picking up vintage baubles in my travels and I
keep a plate of them out for inspiration on my work table. 

 I have issues.  Who doesn't?  Mine is that I REALLY want to be one of the organized people, but my A.D.D. brain will not allow it.  I do my best work when I have 5 projects to complete by tomorrow. I love when my office is neat and clean, but I thrive in chaos even though it drives me nuts.   My office is already a mess and that is why I'm only offering snippets at the moment.  Regardless it still looks better than it's before shot...

So, what do you like to surround yourself with to feel creative?

P.S. Don't forget to enter my chevron pillow giveaway here.

"Holy Albino Peacock On Steroids!"

Or maybe just a ginormous dandelion. After obsessing over the PS Maskros for like ever I finally caved and did it. My niece just returned from an internship with IKEA in Sweden and convinced me. (She also brought me some great shelter mags too, and when I get minute to read them I will post.)
Yes it is HUGE, and yes I'm not even sure it looks right in the space but I'm kind of in blind awe right now. All I know is it really is the most fabulous thing you can buy for under a hundred bucks. AND I hung it and wired it myself and I'm still alive to do a happy dance.

I made sure to wear my ugliest dress for you guys. Seriously, it was HOT yesterday... especially up by the ceiling.

Highly recommend one!
Oh, I think my blog is fixed... I think.

My latest find

I'm back. I know things happen in threes, and when my sewing machine and camera broke I knew there was another glitch around the corner. That would be my Internet.  All is right in the land of Verizon again, sewing machine is fixed and I got a great new camera for Mother's Day... so its back to business. 

OK, so my living room is coming along with the help of my latest find... this credenza.   I painted it aquarium green. It looked like this a few hours ago...

Paint really changes EVERYTHING! I can't believe how much more alive the space feels.

My inspiration for the color came from here...

I have been struggling with tying in my red entrance and wanted to add pink. I found that small drawer piece at a thrift shop and spray painted it. I really liked the combo with the green from the Domino bible and the green in my Mom's needlepoint so I mixed a bunch of old paint and got my color.

The whole space is open so its been a struggle. I  am still trying out different fabrics for pillows and need to do a lot of editing and painting of other furniture pieces, but it is slowly getting there.

Remember the space looked like this when we moved in...

I have a bunch more before and afters I have been working on to share with you later this week!

Taking my craziness outside.

I want this...

and this...

Yup, lots of this...

You get the idea.

But I currently have this ...

A naked barren yard.  We ripped out all the landscaping when we bought it this fall.

Its  an improvement from the big chocolate brownie it used to be...

Kind of killed my love of brown and yellow for a while.

But we bought it because this is at the end of the street...

So now my dilema begins. A clean slate is VERY overwhelming.  We are ripping out the rest of the fence this weekend. (More nakedness)  Now I need a plan. 

I gravitate toward structured English gardens because quite frankly my head is a whirlwind mess all the time.  I have too many projects and ideas spinning so I think I need the structure.  I like balance, things in pairs. (I can't just buy one lamp, has to be a pair... just in case I want to use them on nightstands.) 

I also love coastal cottage gardens too.   This is our fourth house in 5 years.  We have a house disease that has slowly been cured by having children.  Our energy has diminshed,  and we are not moving again until they are out of high school.  While doing this post I went through pictures of all our old houses for landscaping ideas...

We started here pre-kids on the Salem Common.  This is where I met my husband.  We could walk anywhere, anytime. It was fun. But it had no yard.  The Common was basically it.

From there we got pregnant and renovated this carraige house.  It had the Ropes Gardens next door. This was the view from the bedroom...

They were beautiful structured English gardens.  They were inspiring and intimidating.  Got lots of good ideas, but my energy was low with a new baby. Instead I just enjoyed the ones next door. (P.S. If you ever do visit Salem, MA be sure to check them out. Open to the public & a great place to read a book.)

Our last house is right up the street from where we are now. It was cute and cottagey.  Tons of peonies and hydrangea.  It had alot of good landscaping bones already in place.  We added fencing and a pergola, just started to get into the back yard when the current house came along. 

So now I am going to try to merge structured and coastal into a 60's ranch.  I really don't know if it can be done.  I'm afraid I'll have a bastardized ranch on my hands when I'm done.  I'm thinking lots of pea stone, boxwoods, hydrangea.  Maybe a fence.  It might look like this with some funky sculptures thrown in, I'm not quite sure...

I just know my head already hurts.

The Chant is Up!

Two lamps or one? Can't decide.

I finally wallpapered my entrance last week.  I was originally going use the Lulu DK Chant in my mudroom, but there were way too many doors and windows.  All the math and the fact that I was doing it myself made me chicken out.  I have much bigger plans with paint for the mudroom now, so stay tuned.  (It just may be my most ambitious and crazy project ever). Anyhow, this was a straight wall, with a little patch over the front door. 5 strips and relatively easy.  Here is the before...

By the way, this funky lantern came with the house and makes me happy!

Pennies from Heaven!

Hi Everyone! Yawn! I've just come out of blog hibernation... seriously I could have at the length I've been absent from here. Its been a busy and LONG winter! I had been hoping to have a lot of projects around the house completed by now, but even those got shoved on the back burner.

Well, I am refocusing myself. That little burst of spring weather this past weekend got me energized & my wheels are spinning. I have been writing my To Do List and is it ever long and ambitious. I actually wallpapered my entrance foyer this afternoon with two kids playing Matchboxes around my feet, and plan on painting my bathroom at some point this week during their nap time. My Mojo is back!!!

Speaking of the bathroom here is the latest accidental update to the 60's ranch. We weren't planning on redoing anything for a year or two, just replacing the shower floor tiles for now. (They were scary.) Well as usual, that opened a can of worms and led to the discovery of black mold in the walls and also there was nothing holding the tiles to the walls since the wire mesh used had long since disintegrated.

I found these penny tiles on Overstock.com (a great deal @ $67 a case with $2.95 shipping for the whole order) and originally ordered enough just to do the floor. When the walls came down I had to quickly come up with a configuration for the walls, and since I love me a good horizontal stripe I decided to just take them all the way to the ceiling.

They actually match the old tile (which is still in the rest of the bath), so it goes for now and eventually the rest will get a face lift too. Now to paint the walls, because right before this mess I had painted them a navy and white chevron... and with the new striped shower and the chevron walls I'm nauseous.

The BEFORE...Lovely old shower, sorry for the crappy pic. Its the only one I have.

I will be back soon with prettier, and much more inspiring stuff than a moldy shower!

I promise.

Mid- House Crisis

OK, October was a wash for blogging. Since moving I haven't been able to get into any sort of a groove. I've just been putting all my energy into projects I've been working on. I just seems so much easier to decorate someone else's space than my own.

The new house has me stuck. I thought it would be so fun to live in the Brady's house, but I'm finding my love of retro fading fast. I hate my stuff. I want to sell it all and start over, I know that isn't realistic or practical. It just doesn't work in this space. The space is seeming less funky and more dated. Its quirks that I loved at first are starting to annoy me.

I also feel a style metamorphosis happening too. You know that feeling when you just don't even know what you like anymore? I'm there. I've just endured nearly two weeks of being housebound with my two sick kids. During that time I've had plenty of time to move around furniture and dream up color schemes in my head. Sadly, I'm in no better shape than I was a month ago, just more irritated . I've been flipping through magazines trying to figure out what it is that I like these days. I stumbled upon this image and started to realize I need warmth. I still love me a great pattern and a sputnik, but the idea of modern rustic is very appealing... cozy, worn and livable. Enough said, here are some images I'm loving today...

Funny, this actually reminds me of my mom's style. Guess I'm craving homey and familiar.

To be continued...

Canadian House & Home
Elle Decor