Fabric decision time!

or, Indy-cision Time.

Now that I have floors, I need to do a few things. After a semi-epic home improvement store trip, I decided that choosing such a thing as a just-inside-the-front-door rug is beyond me and I'm going to do Jess's floor mat thing. I need a kitchen one too, but since I still haven't committed to redoing the kitchen, I may or may not need to make a decision. Actually I probably do because that floor is teh ugh.

Source: eastcoastcreativeblog.com via Katherine on Pinterest,
Honestly I never get tired of this picture.

But to do that I need fabric.

Enter Spoonflower, where you can make your own fabric. Or order fabric that someone else designed. (Yes, they have TARDIS fabric. Lots and lots of TARDIS fabric. Also gothy spooky fabric.) That second one would be better for me because no need tomake my own, but also worse because Must Look At All the Fabrics. Okay, not all, but all the damasks. Or all the purples. Or all the turquoises. Or all those. And some owls. Steampunk wot wot?

Let's just start with the entryway.

Walls are light blue.

I changed the entryway collage from the original one it took me a month to do, to one with purples and blues, you know, like the rest of the downstairs. I don't know whatever possessed me to buy red picture frames. Those are getting painted.

Here are the entryway contenders.

1 - Simple, fits my colors, and bright. A little light for something I'm going to step on.	2 - Doesn't fit my colors at all, but I'm a sucker for mixing patterns and words that look like they're from old books. And some of the designers say they will do custom stuff, which I take to mean "slap new colors on the design they already made."	3 - Bold, reminds me of Jess's print above, but otherwise probably not fitting in that great with the look I've got going, whatever that is.
4 - Fits colors perfectly. Bonus: not a lot of white, so it won't show the dirt. But both colors are about the same intensity/saturation. There's a bit of a dullness to it.	5 - Clear and simple. It is going on the floor, after all.	6 - Alluring, interesting, and that pop of red. But it does have brown. Brown is like "we didn't know what color to make your rug, so we made it brown."
	7 - Great pop of color, though still with the brown.

Antici...

In just about two weeks, I am getting my floors done. I am so stinking excited. And, so stinking not-ready. As with all things, there is never enough time. I've been scrounging boxes out of the back room at work (no one ever recycles anything, apparently, but at least they don't throw things away?) and lugging them home (they're quite big and it's been quite hot) and packing up clothes, books, and dishes.

I never really finished unpacking from moving in, so you can imagine how this totally feels like going backwards.

And yet it is going to change everything about my home.

No more fur-encrusted carpets.

No more coffee and cat stains.

No more ugly light green.

So easy to clean. So elegant. So much more me.

It also means I've got some crafting to do.

The problem with hardwood floors, of course, is that they are hard wood and easily dinged. And not very warm, but I will worry about that later. Still, I do want some floor prettiness to break up the brown.

Jess over at East Coast Creative made these great floor cloths.

I love the totally geeky silly pictures these fine ladies take of their, um, creative process.

Source: eastcoastcreativeblog.com via Katherine on Pinterest

Of course I need fabric. Jess found hers at Joann, but Joann is a huge time-suck for me; I find myself spending 2 hours there and not buying a single thing. Fortunately I can sort their fabric online by color. UNfortunately I'm not seeing a whole lot of patterns I like, so that means MOAR WEBBYSITES.

Oh wait, someone, probably Jess and Monica, told me about this:

Source: spoonflower.com via Katherine on Pinterest

And hey, tablecloths! Oddly, finished fabric is often less expensive than raw fabric. And then it can just be repurposed.

Source: hayestone.blogspot.com via Katherine on Pinterest

The T-shirt surgeon in me likes this, even though it's not at all classy.

Source: etsy.com via Katherine on Pinterest

Painting rugs seems to be all the rage on Pinterest. (Once again it's Mon & Jess who made me aware of this trend...see, something did come out of working at The School That Shall Not Be Named!)

Source: mysimplehomelife.blogspot.com via Katherine on Pinterest

I'm not totally sure how non-DIY that will look, but I'm expecting that simpler is better. The Pinterest world seems to say that sisal absorbs paint really well; I think I'll try it for the porch rug first.

Hmmm ... time to contemplate, experiment, and see what happens. 

Paint

Today we are going to ignore pretty much everything, and talk about my deep and abiding love for paint.

When I moved into my NYC apartment, one of the things that captivated me (besides the absence of roommates hiding the garlic press and soaking every flat surface of the bathroom) was the fact that the previous tenant had painted the foyer. True, it was a gross green color that reminds me of my current and deteriorating carpet, but it was not white and the landlord had left it that way. I later repainted it a dark purple, and I'm really shocked that I got my deposit back. That had to have been a nightmare to paint over.

By contrast, the previous occupant of this house was clearly afraid of paint. Nearly every wall, ceiling, and bit of trim is the same semi-gloss off-white. If you don't know much about paint, let me explain that semi-gloss is for bathrooms. It shows flaws (and these walls have many) and is easy to clean, but painting lore says that not everything is supposed to be the same color or the same gloss.

Oh, sure, there was some wallpaper around, but I quickly took care of that.

Too bad you can't feel the fine flocked texture of that wallpaper!

There was some work to be done in the bathroom as well.

Mighty fine! I will say this...when she decorated, she made sure everything matched. And she really paid attention to the details.

But it had to go. If I had disposable income and another place to live while it happened, that tile would have been erradicated. But I don't, and I only have the one bathroom, so I had to find a color that I liked that didn't look too horrible with what I will be kind and call army green.

Step one: remove wallpaper.

Nasty! That's some old school wallpaper paste. I used a product called "Piranha" and a scraper thing to remove it. Think of the nastiest, most viscous dragon snot you can imagine. Then mix it with peanut butter. It took a 3-day weekend, but the wallpaper was gone and the dragon snot was dissolved and disposed of.

I called a contractor to fix a hole in the bedroom wall (just under the torn-off wallpaper) and figured, well, if I'm going to paint, I may as well tear out the industrial metal medicine cabinet and replace it. There was no way I was going to find one the same shape and there was no way I was going to lift and install it myself. A good DIYer knows her limits.

I went for a slightly steampunk look. And you have to have a light fixture, right? You can't just not have light and electricity in the bathroom

Finally, finally, it was time to paint. A friend of mine said, "I bet the inside of your house looks like a kaleidoscope" and...well, I'd already done this, so it was more like he was clairvoyant than prophetic.

I will admit that there are probably too many cats in this bathroom, but otherwise, it turned out pretty close to what I envisioned in my original mock-up. One of these days I am going to order some of the fabulous pressed-tin or mock-pressed-tin ceiling tiles and slap them over the ceiling, but there's my steampunkish bathroom...complete with steampunkish collages I made over on Polyvore and a totally awesome print from Alternate Histories.

Don't wait

One of the hardest things about this sudden unemployment is the waiting. I have to wait to hear back from jobs (or not hear back), of course, but I also feel like I have to wait to get on with my life. I bought the house just under the deadline for the Homebuyer Tax Credit, so I have the money all ready to redo the kitchen. But I feel like I can't redo the kitchen, because I don't have a job and it seems foolish to spend so much money when I don't have money coming in.

This, by the way, is the kitchen of which I am speaking. It doesn't quite look like this at the moment, since I removed the foof and replaced the stove with one that actually works. But it is still quite yellow and quite wrecked. There is virtually no prep surface. However, kitchens cost money and this one will have to wait. It doesn't stop me from dreaming, though.

I admit that I've been pretty random about choosing colors and just picked whatever I wanted for the first couple rooms. The more I look at places that are actually decorated, though, I see a common theme throughout. Not that people use the same colors throughout, but they do use colors that go together and complement one another. I've been sticking with cool colors...I have purple, blue, and teal, but complementary colors are nice too. I think most of the rest of the house is going to be in the blue-to-light-turquoise vein.

So I do my dreaming over at House of Turquoise...here's my latest kitchen fantasy.

Source: houseofturquoise.com via Katherine on Pinterest

Source: houseofturquoise.com via Katherine on Pinterest

I love the color - very similar to the color I used for my hallway, which is somehow both peaceful and bright. The white is crisp and clean. I love open storage, though I'm not sure I would ever be able to keep things tidy enough; I have such a small space that it's hard not to cram everything in, anywhich way. I actually would love to knock out the wall, or part of the wall between my kitchen and dining room, though that's not a part of this design.

Oh, yes...my point...if I had done this already, it would be done. I might be kicking myself for spending the money; I might even wish I had the money back. But it would be done, and I wouldn't have to agonize, or wonder when I could do it.

Instead I'm going to look at my dining room and wonder if it wouldn't look so much better with wooden blinds instead of curtains, and perhaps I will spring for a can of paint.