my inspiration...

for the accent wall i'm forced to paint. before i talk about the accent wall, check out my inspiration. it's a satellite image of the gulf coast. i used to live there. near apalachicola and st george island. the chamber of commerce gave these posters out free when i lived there. i love the colors.
i framed it. it hangs in a guest bedroom. a green guest bedroom. the same bedroom where hubby and i removed some shelving on an opposite wall last week and spackled the holes so that it looks like this.
it was after we did this that i ran to the garage for the leftover green paint. and searched. and searched. and found out there was no leftover green paint. and found that i didn't remember the name of the paint color. or the brand. very unlike me. i can tell you every other paint color in this house and our previous house. well, and probably the house before that. this room, nope. not a clue.

hence, i'm forced to paint an accent wall. tempe star from sherwin williams. it's a dark blue with a hint of green and grey. i think it'll bring out the blues in the poster nicely.
oh, and did i mention.... in 72 hours company arrives.

foyer redo

this is the before. a little boring, huh. or rather a lot boring. it's ok, you can agree with me. actually i did have a few more items on display (like stuff with some height so the picture doesn't look like it's hanging in mid-air like now) but removed them in haste, stored them and then realized i hadn't taken a photo. i was too lazy to put them back. in the foyer, one level lower than the rest of the house, there's only one wall to style. to my right is the front door. to my left is the door to the garage.

i'd outgrown the red. and it wasn't representative of our decor any more. i have no other red in my house. therefore, time for this puppy to get a new coat of paint.

here she is. sporting rainstorm by sherwin williams. in high gloss enamel. and some dazzling jewelry from anthropologie.


atop sits my matchbook collection. i love these. i pick one up whenever i see them.

and the full gallery wall, using my train photos.
please ignore the glare. it's very hard to get a photo without one since there's a window directly behind me here. i think it's definitely an improvement from the before and more representative of the style and colors of the rest of the house.

lesson learned.... next gallery wall i do will be random. photos at random widths and heights. this was tough. 4 hours of my life i'll never get back.

keeping the sanity

i put in the request yesterday. please touch only the handles. this was after i had spent some time cleaning all the stainless in the kitchen. i saw this this morning.

BEFORE

thank goodness for this, that i picked up at bed, bath & beyond the other day. looks like amazon sells it too.

AFTER

it really does work. and amazingly. i used it on our stove hood which had a buildup of months of cooking grease underneath. worked like a charm (after some soaking time for the stubborn stains). doesn't streak either.

and in other news, here's cali posing in our awkward family room niche underneath the even more awkward "you're-supposed-to-put-your-tv-here" niche. she's posing with the new paint color, slate from restoration hardware. love it.

new use

in a mad dash this afternoon to get a sample of this (because, yes, after the kitchen backsplash went in yesterday, we decided to change paint colors slightly),


i found this in pottery barn.

from here

ok, so i wasn't dashing that much that i couldn't stop and browse for 30 minutes in pb. but it's hard for me to pass one up. but i did pass up jcrew and anthropologie. so give me a little credit for that.

this is going in the kitchen. nope, not with jewelry. but something else. i'll show ya when i've got it rigged. any guesses?