What color, what color, what color?

Bonjour Beige, Eggshell

 

Well Spring is here, which sends me into a cleaning and project frenzy, so I am looking around at all the things I want to ‘spruce up” a bit in my house.  You know those parts of your house that you were/are not happy with.  For me, that’s a long list! Ha!  But, when we moved into the house almost three years ago, there were a couple rooms that were painted hideous colors that I just could not live with.  I picked a very boring, nondescript color, and rolled it on the walls.  I was hoping that either it would match whatever I planned for the other rooms, or that I could live with it until I could pull the room together.  So, this year, I want to change the dining room.  This is it currently.  and here is the window.  First of all, I HATE the rug.  It is there because we want to protect the floor and it is the only one we have.  I took down all of the vases on the picture rail and just left the dishes.  I am thinking about taking down the dishes and putting up ironstone, or all cream and white dishes.  I want to paint the walls a dark granite, gray, navy, or green blue color.  I think the dishes would contrast nicely.  Kinda like this:

white dishes on gray

white on dark background

Here are pictures of the curtains.  They a red and slate damask with a slate hem.

For more pictures of the bay window and curtains, click here.

So, imagine my walls painted a dark color, white dishes on the plate rail (I have many, many, many of those!), the wainscoting repaired and newly painted, a nice new almost room size rug like this:

I also need some dining chairs.  Currently I am using a modge podge of chairs I inherited, along with 5-6 metal folding chairs.  Real classy, huh?  I was thinking about something like this for a dining chair:

This would contrast with the ivory wainscoting.  Or, if I wanted the chairs to blend in and not stand out, I could get ivory chairs like this:

My table is very similar to the one pictured above.  I have some vases from Ikea I purchased two weeks ago.  I will post a pic of them here, but be warned that we were having a birthday party with the plastic table cloth and whole nine yards, so look past “Bolt” and view the vases.

So….with all of the above changes in mind, what color should I paint?  I want it to be dramatic and sophisticated at the same time.  I like the streamline of modern elements, but I like the warmth of earthy elements too.  Here are a few color chips that caught my eye:

Whatever color I choose, it has to go with the living room which is connected to it.  Here is a pic of the living room:

You can see the dining room on the left.  This picture is OLD…lol. I have since streamlined my decorations on the fireplace.

So, what are your thoughts?  Leave me a comment and give me all of your decorator advice.  

Andrea

***Update:

I had some paint in the shed that was close to the color I wanted, but when I painted it on a board and propped it up on my plate rail, I found it to be too blue and too light.  I think I am going to go with the color chip that is all the way on the left.  It is Behr Hidden Path 720F-5.  I also like the one all the way to the right it is Valspar’s Signature Graphite. The middle one is Martha Stewart (Lowes) River Rock. Thoughts?

Curtains in the Master Bedroom…check!

Ready to be put up

YAY!!!!  After three years, I FINALLY have curtains in my bedroom!  Woo hoo!!!!!!  I am so excited!  I bought some premade curtains from Target.  They are the Rocky River faux silk, 95″ curtains.  Since the curtains need to measure 120″, I had to buy some material to make a panel for the top.  I bought a beautiful, but simple, damask fabric from Hancock Fabrics when they had a half off sale on their designer line.  I also bought a fifty yard bolt of 1 and a 1/2 inch double sided satin ribbon online to use instead of traditional curtain hooks.   Curtain rods and hooks are expensive, so I reused the existing curtain rods, but painted them Rustoleum’s Metallic gold.  It is a mustardy color with a little bit of a shine.  It is not ugly spray paint gold.  I think it turned out lovely!  Maybe one day I will upgrade to some larger, more ornate curtains rods, but for the time being, I think it looks fine.  The main reason, as I have said before, that it took so long to put curtains up is the expense and also because you cannot find ready made curtains that are 120″!  Buying designer material is also expensive…you might as well plunk down $300 a panel at Pottery Barn.  Since I needed 8 panels, I did not see myself spending $2,400 on curtains.  I bought 8 panels at Target for $27.99 each, bought the panel material at Hancock’s for $60.00 and paid $8.00 for the fifty yard bolt of satin and $15.00 for the curtain rod paint. After a lot of sewing and piecing it all together, I spent a grand total of $307.00.  I think the real reason it took me three years to get something on the windows is that I am too cheap…hahah….and it took me three years of plotting to find something that I could make into curtains that would look great, but not break the bank! 

The big reveal………..drum roll please………….

Before....

 

After

Before...

After

After

After

Note: Some of these pictures were taken last night and some were taken this morning.  Thus, the difference in lighting.

"sooo exhausted" after putting up all of the curtains 🙂

Andrea

Living Room Curtains

Well guys, after living here for 2 1/2 years, I have finally put some curtains up in the Living Room.  Yay for me!  I brought some fabric home from my missions trip to Manila, Philippines last year and finally got around to turning it into curtain panels.  It was quite humorous trying to convince the sales people that I really wanted 35-40 yards of fabric.  When I told the lady who was going to take me shopping what I wanted, she showed me scarves.  I told her that I wanted to make curtains out of the fabric so then she brought me to the mall and showed me ready made curtains.  The ready made curtains were very small.  It was hard to explain to her and for her to understand that I had 13 foot ceilings and needed a LOT of fabric.  So, I ended up calling off the shopping trip and my husband and I found out that in the basement of the mega mall, they have several fabric stores.  So, off we go and here is the result:

I hope you all have a great evening!

Andrea

Dining Room Curtains Are Up!!!

YAY!  I could almost do cartwheels!  Lord knows I have enough space in the hall!  Steven put up the dining room bay window hardware and I just finished putting up the last curtain panel!  I snatched up some red damask silk curtains on clearance at Tuesday Morning almost two years ago .  The only problem was, they were only 108 inches long and I needed them to be 119 inches, so I recently added a charcoal colored panel to the bottom.  The curtains have been sitting on the table, waiting patiently for the day they would get pressed into service.  Today was the day!  Here is the BEFORE picture of the bay window.

To start, I had a hard time finding a bay window curtain rod that I liked.  There are only a handful of manufacturers who make bay window hardware.  Most of them are made to work on a track system.  Almost all of the bay window curtain rods that I could find were made so that the panels go on the rod and then you cover the mechanics with a valance.   I HATE valances and I wanted to use clip rings.  I also wanted the flexibility of opening and closing the curtains at will, as well as letting the sun filter in without all the elaborate curtain trappings.  The windows in the bay are beautiful and I did not want to suffocate them with material.  Last year, I ordered some other corner connectors through the mail, but when they arrived, they were very small. You could only use them with a half inch up to a one inch metal rod and the rod had to be hollow so you could insert the corner connector.  I needed a  large rod to hold up all of the curtains and I wanted it to be aesthetically pleasing.  I think it would look ridiculous to put a little skinny rod up on such a large window.    So, with a little creativity, I took this:

and made this:

The lucky find was the corner connectors by roth+allen I found at Lowes yesterday.  I was at Lowes for a different reason and was glad I puttered down the window hardware aisle.    Anyway… Here is the final product!  Now we only have the living room bay window hardware to hang up.

The only thing left for the dining room is: 1) Refinishing the floor; 2) Our dining room table  Our table is being made by a local craftsman out of 180 year old boards salvaged from an old building here in Central Louisiana.  I AM SOOO EXCITED ABOUT THAT!

Dilemma of the Day

I decided to sit down and finish sewing the last curtain panel for my dining room.  I have been trying to get it done for about six months now.  I don’t know why I stopped with only one to go.  I must have been really tired!  I put the finishing touches on the very last one and then pulled out the hardware that I am going to make into a bay window curtain rod.  I have searched high and low for a bay window curtain rod to my liking.  There are only few choices out there for bay windows and the few available on the internet and at JCPenney either cost way too much or was not suitable for my needs.  I did not want a double curtain rod and I wanted to be able to open and close the curtains, so the rod had to be nice to look at with the drapes tied back or pulled close.  So…I took a trip to Lowes and bought several pieces and parts and made my own bay window rod.  Right now it looks like this:

Overlook the rug.  It is temporary until I get new dining furniture.  Right now it is serving its purpose by protecting the wood floors.  Anyway… I am two curtain brackets short and need to run to Lowes to see if I can find two more.  Hopefully I can talk Steven in to cutting the rods down to size so I can paint them, assemble it all and get it put up on the windows before next week.  We have been in our house two years without any curtains….sigh….

Here are the dining room curtains that will be going up (hopefully) sometime this week.

Off to finish the curtain rods……

TOMORROW IS CHRISTMAS!

Andrea