The Reveal Part 6: The Living Room

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Erin

The living room is still, very much, a work in progress. We haven’t unpacked the books on the shelves…or picked out a coffee table…or added a rug. I really want to love everything in this room, so I’m just taking my time. Waiting for the right things to appear. But, of course, I painted it (Leaf 07). And added a couple of sconces. It still needs more lighting, but I always forget because it is so bright during the day. And, also, I want to find the right lamps, which takes time.

When I finished painting this room, I immediately thought it was too bright. My mom still doesn’t like the color up on the walls in this room, but it grew on me very quickly. This room is not sophisticated, it is not subtle or grown up. It is vibrant and young. It reflects the life in our house and the life that grows green leaves right outside the windows.

I love the look of pewter/tin/tarnished silver against the acid green. These necklaces, my mom picked up in Thaliand in the ’80′s and I woke up thinking about them as we were moving and called her up and asked her for them. I now understand they were meant to go here.

And, of course, this is what our couch usually looks like. Which is why I had to get a slipcovered sofa. I would have preferred something more tailored, a little cleaner, a little sexier… but this is our life. Cat hair and all-and it doesn’t make any sense to design for a reality that doesn’t really exist.

Via Design*Sponge

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Erin

Many thanks to Kate Pruitt, a fellow Oaklander and design editor at Design*Sponge, for featuring our bathroom today. If you are coming here for more info, here are the posts on our bathroom:

The Reveal Part 1: The Bathroom

Designing a Bathroom

Yolo Colorhouse

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Erin

I’ve mentioned Yolo a lot on my posts discussing our recent house renovations. I’ve been a big fan of the small Portland, Oregon-based company for a while and after painting our new house myself with their product, I’m an even bigger fan.

A week or so ago, I contacted them with some of the pictures I’ve been posting on this blog and they paid me the huge compliment of putting my bio and a couple of pictures up on their company website as a “featured color collaborator.” Our house will also be featured on their Facebook page next week, which should be easy enough to find by searching and/or friending “Yolo Colorhouse” on Facebook.

I went to school for five years to become an interior designer and I’ve worked for other designers and architecture firms. This is the first time I’ve been my own client and it feels so good to be getting such great feedback for a project that is really me. Its always scary to put personal projects out into the world, but it so rewarding when the response is so positive.

The Reveal Part 5: Our Bedroom

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Erin

Our bedroom took its cues from the green and grey bathroom next door and the plants that glow green in the sun outside our southern facing windows. None of our bedding is new-it just all made sense in our new room. In fact, nothing is new in this room except the paint and the schoolhouse pendant (Schoolhouse Electric).

The buffet in front of the windows is a dining buffet we bought from West Elm to use as a changing table more than four years ago. And now it has life in our bedroom as a place for my jewelry, etc. I basically use it as a vanity I don’t sit at. I’m pretty anti-changing table since you really only need one for a couple years whereas if you use a dresser or other similar piece of furniture (a buffet, perhaps?) then you get much more use out of it.

My poor crooked lamp that reminds me not to get too attached to my things while living with kids…

When we took out the closet to give more space to the bathroom, we were left with the beautiful door moulding that extends around the bedroom door as well. I couldn’t get rid of it, so we mounted a mirror in the old door’s place. It worked out pretty well, I think.

The Reveal Part 4: The Kids’ Room

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Erin

The kids shared an itty-bitty room in our last place. Our current house is three bedrooms, but after a family talk before moving in, we decided that the kids would still share a room and the third bedroom, which is connected through a door to the second bedroom, would be the playroom. When we were all looking at colors, I asked my son, Caleb, what color he wanted his room (Zoe, our daughter, is still too young to really care)… “Purple.” I waited a couple more days and asked him again, hoping he would have changed his mind since purple isn’t generally a gender neutral color… “Purple.” And then I continued asking him over the next couple weeks, hoping Hoping! he would change his mind. Then, I resigned myself to picking out purples. The one we settled on still wasn’t exactly what he wanted- he envisioned an eggplant -but it sufficed. Leave it up to Yolo Colorhouse to make a purple that could almost be described as “gender neutral.”

The size and light of this room make it so nice to be in.

Here’s Zoe’s crib. I made the curtains for their room. I was at the fabric store about a month after we moved in and saw this fabric. It stopped me dead in my tracks: purple, but not girlie. Not a flower in sight! And! It incorporated the orange that is accented throughout our house. It was made for their room. The prints above the crib are a series of Heather Ross sleeping woodland animals: a fox, a raccoon, a deer… And I bought them before I had ever laid eyes on the fox curtain fabric. I am just hoping foxes don’t become as ubiquitous as owls. I am so. over. owls.

I try to make as much for the kids as I can. I have special memories of the things that were made for me and I want to pass on that feeling to my kids of being surrounded by reminders that they are loved. I knit one stuffed animal for each of my kids: this bunny was Zoe’s. The doll crib’s bedding I made out of scraps from when I made her crib sheet.

I painted a portrait of our cat above my son’s bed as a surprise before we moved in. He used to sleep with her every night while he went through a phase where he was having nightmares. Later, she became too demanding and started waking him up asking to be pet, so we had to revise the sleeping situation, but here she is…

And here’s their playroom. Where the chalkboard paint it, used to be the door to one of the closets we took out. The playroom is the last room that I haven’t painted.

This is the view from our bedroom door, facing the kids’. Our bathroom is on the left and the entry is on the right. Again, you can see how important it is that all of the rooms’ colors work well together. That is my son’s bunk bed that we painted with chalkboard paint when we got it a couple years ago and on the floor is Charlie, who was made for Caleb by a close friend.

The Reveal Part 3: The dining room

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Erin

The dining room is probably my favorite room in our house. The fireplace is small, but it works! The built-in is still intact, there’re plate rails and wainscoting and bay windows. I don’t love the light fixture, but until there’s the money to get what I actually want, it stays. The table, chairs and buffet were all my grandma’s. (The same set were also in an episode of Mad Men-They were in his friend’s house in California. Not our set, but the same design.)

My favorites things are rotated on the mantle- My Heath pitcher filled with clippings from our plum tree, a Japanese sugar mold, a clay chameleon my mom got for me in Africa and his hippo friend…

The gray is so warm and inviting. This room was a late-’90′s-Pottery-Barn-red and is now the neutral that ties in our color palette. Its the same color that is in both bathrooms. The dining room still feels plenty bright because of the windows and all the white trim.

Here’s the dining room from the living room.

And here it is from the kitchen. You can see how important it is to have a unified color palette since each room is open to the next and half the house is visible at once.