Hey guys! Hope your weekend was great. Bret and Lou spent Saturday at the Natural History museum, leaving me several glorious hours to catch up on the phone with friends, wrap up the end of Serial, and play at decorating. I got a lot done! Some bedroom progress, some entry progress, and some family room progress. These photos are all quick and dirty - no styling, no tripod, no nothing - and really for context about where we are now. Let me dump them here so we can talk about next steps, mkay?
Hokay. I mentioned last week that we had made a big rug switcheroo in here, and that I was not at all sure how the black and gray rug would go with my brown furniture. Well, I love it. Also love, unexpectedly, the lack of coffee table. We'd been moving things around so much - the white Kallax that we bought to serve as coffee table is now in Lou's room, and the bench you see in these rug shots is in the family room - so we don't have anything at the moment. Which is lucky, because turns out, we really like it. Not having a table here makes this pretty small space usable for lounging on the floor and playing chess and spreading out. I think it also helps the rug feel like the right size, even though I'd normally prefer to go a tad bigger with it. Even at this very beginning moment, I love it. Bret and Lou do too - and you know how Lou feels about black and white. (I can't believe no one's called me out for decorating my daughter's room in her two least favorite colors. No one except Bret, and Lou herself, I mean).
But anyway, can you guess what's on the to do list for in here? Yep.
1. Style those bookshelves. Though I really think a lot of bookshelf "styling" has completely jumped the shark, and there's nothing wrong with just, you know, books, these are heap of a mess. The games, the scale of stuff: meh. I want it to be tidier, if not Pin-able.
2. Fix the curtains. I only have one set of these gray Ikea curtains, which I found at Goodwill last summer. I'll add sheers for light and privacy, possibly beef up the rods, straighten the rods, and then consider if I need a new set of gray to balance things out. In general, I say yes: I need two curtains per window for things to feel complete. But in our last apartment, we only had one panel per window in a couple rooms, and the earth didn't implode or anything. And getting to Ikea is such a pain in the patooty that I might learn to love one panel. I hope patooty means bum and not something else.
3. Art, art, art. Different room, same story: so much art to hang up.
4. Paint it. So, I've mentioned painting a chalkboard wall at least a half dozen times, and it finally hit me: I want more than a tiny side wall. More than just a weak-kneed sliver on some ancillary support beam. I don't know why I was feeling so constrained. I've been obsessed with dark and especially black walls, but I figured they belonged to those other people - who also have 3,000 square foot lofts with sunshine streaming in 24 hours a day, or something. I don't know. But after discussing our love of black walls with a friend last week, I was looking at the living room and realized I wanted to frame the whole thing out in black. So you see those two side walls and tiny sliver of ceiling, er soffet?, between them in the third picture, above? Yeah, they're gonna be a nice matte, chalkboard-y black. I cannot wait.
5. Plants. My one surviving plant from the Greenery Massacre of '14 is valiantly trying to produce oxygen for our entire apartment, and to serve as the single non-human living thing in here (the fish also died). I'm a big fan of non-human living things in our home, and I just am craving plants. And redemption. I think it may be tough to find them this time of year - I really don't know - but I'm on a mission.
6. Other stuff. I want to switch out a couple pillow covers and restuff our pouf; I have a plan to store throws (of which I have like five - I even require a blanket to watch TV in the summer) other than that, I'm pretty happy with the level of tchotchke decor in here.
7. Mesh with kitchen. Somehow, my kitchen stuff, including the dishtowel-curtain and art, aren't playing well this new color scheme. Darn. I'll have to do/make/find new curtains and art! So sad.
Soooooo, that's the fam room so far. So excited to start painting and hanging and generally making things even more awesome in here. I'm already so happy with just how the space is working - the floor space, the accessibility of all of our games, and bringing in the extra chair from our room - so now it's all just really fun gravy. And when it's all said and done, I'll do sources and a price breakdown, never you fear.
And you may have noticed that I'm returning to the blog categories of yore - Decor Monday, What's for Dinner, Do Stuff Better, Make Stuff Better, Friday Love{s} (which never really left). They may not always perfectly align with a given day of the week, but I do like the scheme as an organizing principle, so let's try again. Thanks as always for reading, and I'll see you tomorrow!