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living & dining rooms, part 6:
redecorating the living room
tales of an illicit love affair
You may recall that one of
the earliest projects we did in our house was to decorate our living and
dining rooms, including painting the
walls and ceiling. Purple, in fact. With a sage green accent wall. And
despite the doubting Thomases who filled our email inbox with messages
questioning our sanity, or at the very least our sense of decency, we like
it very much. Love it, actually.
We didn't have any plans
to change it, were perfectly content to leave it that way for many years
and focus on the ten gazillion other projects that needed our attention.
You could say we were in a committed, monogamous relationship.
But then love struck out
of nowhere and we were helpless in its grip: the chest constriction, the
shortness of breath, the inability to think, the butterflies in the
stomach...it's either love or the flu and either way, you're not walking
away unscathed.
When we moved into our
house, we were struck with this vision of our living room, and that vision
included something like
this:
(Yes, we sometimes have
caviar dreams on a canned tuna budget.)
It's not even that either
of us is really into leather furniture -- neither of us had ever thought
about having a leather couch until then -- but something about this house
and its craftsman details inspired the idea of curling up on careworn
leather cushions with an old book -- the kind of book that has a fabric
cover that you find forgotten somewhere in the corner of the library -- on
a gray, rainy day with the mist hanging over everything like gray silk
drapery. You know the kind of day I'm talking about, and the kind of couch
I'm talking about, and the kind of experience I'm talking about.
Obviously, that couch was
out of our reach. And anyway, we had a perfectly nice couch already. A
good and loyal couch that was with us during the harder times, and made
the move with us twice without a complaint, and supported us through
school and jobs and put aside its own dreams for the future so we could be
comfortable and happy. Still, we kept an eye peeled when we walked past
furniture stores and...okay, yes, we admit we did the occasional browsing
on craigslist and even dog-eared the latest Restoration Hardware catalogs.
But it's not cheating if you only look, right?
But wandering eyes opened
the door to temptation. Actually, they opened the door to a furniture
store is what ithey did. We told ourselves we were just looking that sunny
December Saturday when we stepped into the furniture show room, and we
weren't lying, but within minutes, we'd laid eyes on The One, and it fit
our vision and our budget and it was all downhill from there.
We left the furniture
store and realized if we were going to make such a big change, we were
going to have to do it right, transition the old to the new. Now, we
weren't about to get rid of our beloved (and painstakingly painted) purple
walls. But a change in color was called for, so we settled on changing the
green accent wall to a gold color to better accentuate the dark leather
color. We chose a color that matched the
roman shades in our dining room and then we realized that we had
already been trending away from the purple sage green combination in our
accessories, that we already had touches of gold and orange and dark brown
throughout the room to pick up.
We had five weeks until
the couch was to be delivered, which meant we needed to get the wall
painted, rearrange the furniture, move the old couch downstairs (it was a
good and faithful friend, we weren't getting rid of it...we felt guilty
enough already), rearrange the room, get a new rug and lamps, and build a
small sofa table for those lamps.
But first, the painting:
The color we used is
called Bakelite Gold. It's a little bit of mustard mixed with paprika and
turmeric and saffron, rich and warm and a great complement to the purple.
We're very pleased with how well it turned out and how nicely it
accentuates the woodwork. It was sad to see the green wall go, but the
change was worth it.
Instead of doing a paint
treatment to that wall, I had an idea to do a stenciled phrase under the
window. I have a thing for words, in case it wasn't obvious, and I love
using them to decorate or personalize. I already had a pretty good idea of
the font I wanted -- an Arts & Crafts style font that is one of my
favorites of that era -- but I wasn't too keen on making a stencil. It
would need to be about five feet long and the thought of cutting out all
those letters made me not want to even do the stencil idea at all.
Well, usually when there's
something you don't want to do, you can count on the internet to deliver
you someone who can do it for you.
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