My Home

I realize that I talk about decorating and defining your style and other decorating stuff, but I've never shown you my house in any detail, so here is the living room. Like all of our homes, its a work in progress. (Wow, it's a little scary putting your room out there for others to see and critique. I'd never before realized, and give all who do on a regular basis credit).

My style is Mid Century Modern (clean lines with subtle curves, simplicity, organic and geometric forms, texture, wood - in my case vintage teak, and a more minimal style) moving toward a color scheme that is only turquoise, aqua, olive green, brown, and cream with black accents and an occasional pop or orange; a focus on folk or hand made art and accessories; live plants and comfortable functionality. All my furniture (except the Ikea couch grrrr) is from the 1950s or 60s, including the lamps (and my dishes - but the dining room is for another day). Now I have to warn you that minimal styling means just that. I don't have many do-dads and vignettes around - on purpose.

My style has a big twist in that I have bold color on my walls (deep turquoise, sour apple green, fudge brown) and some very bright colored accents instead of neutrals and occasional pops of color more typical of  mid century design. I've trying to move away from the bright accent colors, to a more streamlined and sophisticated color palette and trying to inject some more modern into the mid century.  My first step was to change out the lamps. But you get to see pictures of that another day. I've also thrown in some paintings from my talented son and you can see some of my crafts featured on my blog scattered around. I like the hand made / folk art look and will be incorporating more of that into my space as I slowly finish projects. They key is to remain minimal while doing so - I'm not sure it will work.

Yes, that's a dog create next to the couch. Sebastian is part of the family and enjoys hanging out with us. You might notice I made the decision to center the art on the wall instead of on my off center couch. Two schools of thought on that idea. I have rolling ottomans under the coffee table.

The dresser is now aqua. I had a small table in it's place, so the clock needs to be  raised up and something done with the rest of the wall (picture ledges, or frames hung up - can't decide)

Bright colored accents, while I think they are super cute, are slowly going away to be replaced with hand painted stretched muslin squares and something unique (don't know what) on the small solid colored canvases (maybe toliet paper roll art). This is a stop gap measure until a large wall hanging/quilt is done and in their place (haven't even started the quilt yet - but its all planned out). The chair is to be reupholstered in a turquoise, blue and green flower explosion of 1950's original never used fabric. It will be very gorgeous.

I'd love to show you a completed room, a show piece, that accurately represents my style as of today, doesn't have any filler furniture or accessories (filler while waiting to purchase the piece you really want) and all the projects are done. But I don't think most people live that way and honestly my rooms will never be done, as I always think of new projects and ways to switch things up. I can never focus on just one room until it's done. My brain just doesn't function that way (and I'm a bit jealous of people who post beautiful, perfectly finished rooms on blogs). I'm scattered and work on projects as they interest me. This is done enough for now as I focus on a quilt for my son's high school graduation, blog posts and projects and daily life. Plus I have a bee in my bonnet to make a religious wall hanging and it's 1/2 done on my dining room table. I always have more projects going on than time and the energy to complete them. Such is my life.

This post started out about my new lamps and completely morphed into something else. So a lamp post and a painting the aqua dresser are in your future!

I hope you enjoyed a tour of my living room.