Pops of Color! or One Color to Rule Them All

I've been exploring the idea of not having every surface in my home covered in color. Which is new. Maybe it's also the trend? I don't know. But these mostly neutral rooms with a single splash of color are delightful!

The tricky part? Deciding on the color...

Because I love them all... 

Plywood Walls or White Plys (Vision Dreams of Passion)

I'm still searching for the perfect walls for my bedroom. I like the exposed lath and plaster situation, painted white, of course. But we only want to do that to the interior walls of the bedroom, which leaves the exterior walls. Now these walls are trouble. The house is over 80 years old, and has had its share of leaks. So those walls are kinda...skanky. Due to the expanding and contracting of the wet lath, the plaster is no longer connected to the lath. It kind of floats in front of it. And under the window, where my feet occasionally dangle off the bed and push into the cracked plaster, it has been removed.

So my options are drywall...myself...and spend an eternity mudding the walls and sanding until I get perfection. Or come up with something else.

Anything else.

What about plywood?

When done correctly, it looks nice. I'm not a huge fan of the yellow wood, so maybe I could whitewash it, keeping the grain...?

How does one find no knot plywood?

This is more like what I would end up with:

A little busy, but still natural. And there a cool built in shelf on the left!

Very simple, used as a headboard:

Oooh! Green stained!

I love this look with the mint bench! Industrial and yet vintage at the same time!

Mid century, anyone?

And danish modern:

And here's one of the only whitewashed plywood photos I could find:

I think it's the one, though! Wood grain and white and clean...exactly what I was hoping for in my tiny bedroom.

All images pinned to my Architectural Awesomeness Board on Pinterest.

All My Teals

We randomly ended up at a hardware store today. Not in the plans at all. We drove to Glendora to get a smog check and needed a place to hang out  while we waited. I picked up a bunch of teals. My camera photographs them bluer than they are. At least I think it's my camera. It's overcast today. Another reason to build myself a lightbox. (That paragraph is a perfect example of  how my brain works).

I used the chartreuse sample as "carpeting" because I really, really want chartreuse Fedora Flor tiles in my bedroom. And right now, in the imagination stage, I'm feeling exceptionally brave.

More Paint

Another great tool is a Color Visualizer. Available for free online from several paint retailers. I used the one from Benjamin Moore. You do have to register, which they don't ask for until you're halfway through, but it's pretty cool.

Here's my lovely bedroom pic in Grappa:

And Gondola Ride:

I think Barkley's coat really pops with the teal.

The Secret Bedroom

A lot of you know that I use the secret to get everything. But I thought I'd share a little bit of the how. First there's tut.com. You actually type in your goals and then the universe sends you personalized emails. Here's an example:


I understand, Courtney, that you must wonder, sometimes to the point of bewilderment, at what you're truly capable of doing. Yet, therein lies the "problem," because living the life of your dreams is far more about what I'm capable of doing. Surrender -
    The Universe

Sometimes they're so good they make me cry. Which, not difficult, but still.

Now to use this toward my interior design dreams, that's my favorite part. I've never been one to walk into a Crate and Barrel and buy a $5,000 bedroom on a credit card. I'm too cheap for that. Even if I had the cash, not really my style. If you follow the secret, you probably have a vision board. I don't like them, too clutter-ie. Especially mine. I'm a square-right angle clutterer. So what I do is frame my inspirations and put them around my house. Like so:

This is my bedroom inspiration. It sits on a shelf in my bedroom. It was almost impossible to find anything that was small enough to replicate. No sense in finding some crazy 500 square foot dream bedroom. I love the wall color, it's a rich eggplant, and the textures in the pillows and then duvet and the closet drapery. It's got all that pattern that I love so much.

Here's my bedroom. It's tiny, but it's not like I need a treadmill in here:

We used the IKEA swedish shelving and I added an Indian flavored tapestry. Then I made a fabric panel in some excellent IKEA fabric to cover the end. It faces out to the hall and I don't want to see clutter from outside my bedroom.* (Barkley really wanted to be in the picture).

Underneath is the really bad clutter. That's what the tapestry is for. But I wanted to show you everything, good and bad and biscotti on the corner of my bed.

*I know I have a shoe hanging off the basket. It's an excellent shoe and I like to look at it. A shoe fairy sent it to me with kind words and it reminds me of good things. I also have my Buy More hat in there. I wanted it and my husband got it for me from a producer. So it gets displayed as well.