I want to say a big thank you to the Apartment Therapy community! They helped us out with some clarity for our living room light situation. Despite having a very low quality photo, I sent our question over and got plenty of feedback in return. A lot of people felt that the Le Klint 172 would work well while most people thought that we shouldn’t have any pendant lighting at all!! A few people agreed with us about the PH 5 pendant being a good mixture of our table lamps and our dining room pendant.. (I still love it and wish I could use it somewhere.) You can read their comments here, if you want.

My interest in home design and decor has been developing at a rapid pace for almost three years now. It wasn’t until I got engaged in the summer of 2006 and realized that I would soon be making a home for myself and my new husband that I began exploring the world of interior design. Boy have I learned a lot since then! As I said in an earlier post, most of what I’ve learned is from trial and error and a whole lot of studying! I study everything! I study my surroundings and the interiors of all the places I frequent regularly, I study books, magazines, catalogs, design shows and decor blogs, and I study my friends and families’ homes. I take absolutely everything in. I promise you, go anywhere with me and wherever I am, I will be noting every last detail. To a fault. Because of this, I feel like I will never stop learning because I can’t help but absorb all I see. Fortunately, since I am pursuing interior decorating as a career, I will have an outlet to pour all of this learning into. Eventually.

I recently picked up a book called Apartment Therapy: Real Homes, Real People, Hundreds of Real Design Solutions. It’s by Maxwell-Gillingham Ryan, founder of the popular shelter blog ApartmentTherapy.com. In the introduction of this book, the author has a couple of solid things to say about the home. Listen to this….

I used to think of home was the place where we cook, eat, and sleep. I now understand it as a force that shapes our daily lives. More than just a physical shelter, the home is both a second skin that protects us from the world outside, and an emotional center that nourishes us and supports our inner-most dreams.

Whether you live in a rental apartment in New York City or own a house in Seattle, your home is the one space on earth that you can call your own. You owe it to yourself to make it as beautiful, organized, and healthy as you can.

By taking care of our home, you are taking care of yourself. A healthy home will nurture and support you.

Now, I would caution myself to remember and consider that my TRUE home is not on this earth but with Jesus in eternity. No dwelling place on earth can compare to the beauty that is my future home in Glory, much as it’s hard for me to even comprehend this. But I can appreciate this quote because I think it resonates with my reasons for why I do what I do, for my home that is. Our home is a shelter, a nourishing center, a protection, and a second skin and I absolutely believe that it should be all these things. I believe this because I believe that I personally am called to live my life in and from home. Right now, I have the great privilege of being able to work from home which is something I do not take for granted. We also plan to raise a family together so being a mom will be a couple of decades worth of work that will take place primarily at home. It’s also a great possibility that my children will be educated at home. (But more on that later, much later.) I love to have people in to our home, and I want to be more hospitable to do so more often. I also, and you could say first and foremost, want my home (our home) to be a place of refuge for my dear husband. I want him to come home to a place of rest and be blessed for his hard work outside of the home.  I know that my husband could be blessed by our home even if we lived out of a cardboard box because it ultimately has to do with the homemaker’s heart and desire to serve (or her lack). But since I have been blessed with more than a cardboard box, for right now at least, I’ve been endeavoring to be the best steward I can be. 

Say the words ceiling fan and I cringe. They’re big, they’re bulky, and they’re usually hideous. *shudder* Plus, the light they cast is glaring, unflattering and pretty much bunk, especially if it’s the only source of light in a room. Ew. So when I moved into my husband’s house, switching out the ceiling fans was one of the first things we did. We went to Home Depot and picked out an attractive fan that we thought would match our new home’s decor. Then we bought three of them and put them up in our living room, office, and bedroom. That was two years ago and, well, things have changed. For one thing, our style has shifted towards a definitively more modern aesthetic. Not that we weren’t going for modern before, we just didn’t know exactly what “modern” was or, for that matter, what our style was. We’ve made many a change in our home over the past two years, as opportunity and budget would allow. We’ve also made many a mistake because of not fully understanding our own tastes. You’d think it would be common sense NOT to try and decorate your house when you don’t know what you like, but alas, we learned by doing. (I don’t necessarily recommend this, however.) Slowly but surely we are making fewer and fewer mistakes while making more assertive design decisions that are relevant and consistent with our sense of style. One such mistake, which we could only see in hindsight, was the purchase of the aforementioned ceiling fans. Don’t get me wrong, the fans would be great in the right context. In fact, they will probably stay in the bedroom and office where they’re…..getting by. But now that the living room opens up into the dining room and kitchen, the lighting/ceiling fixtures from all three “rooms” must work together and that ceiling fan definitely doesn’t work. It’s not even centered! Lame-o. We ripped that thing down months ago and we’ve been living with a few little pokey wires that are hanging down 6″ from the ceiling. Now I just have to decide if I want a ceiling fan w/a light, just a fan, or no fan and a light fixture instead.

Here are a few fans that we like:

And here are some light fixtures that we like:

Here’s a sampling of some of the current lighting in our home and our possible choices for the living room:

Notice that the mention of the practicality of a fan in Florida didn’t come up. Yeah, it would be very practical to have a ceiling fan. Some would say it’s a necessity, and believe me, this past summer we could have really used the extra help in keeping our home cool. Yikes…. But some of those lighting choices above are just too amazing to pass up. I don’t know, I think it could be worth it to endure the larger electric bill in the summer if I could have one of those lights in my LR. Let’s face it, I tend to ere on the side of form over function.

My favorite shelter magazine, Domino, is shutting down. Their last issue goes out in March. What a bummer. I had just sent my check for another 1 or 2 year subscription. (can’t remember which) They will probably be sending me a sub. to another magazine but I have no idea which one. I used Christmas gift money to buy subs. to Metropolitan Home, House Beautiful, and Elle Decor but they aren’t as good as Domino in my opinion. Oh well. I thought about getting a Dwell subscription too, but since I picked up over 2 years worth of back issues for $5 at a garage sale, I figure I had better go through and exhaust those before I get any new issues. I also receive (as gifts) subscriptions to Cooking Light, Bon Appetit, and Southern living.

I have been working on my home office since I moved into this house. It has gone through a number of transformations to include several different wall colors, several different window coverings, several different desks and a multitude of other furniture pieces constantly in rotation. The flooring has gone from carpet to hardwood, to 3 area rugs to no area rugs and back again. Lighting has been varied to include random thrift store lamps I purchased on an impulse and, one of my better purchases, a pair of matching lucite lamps that I’m still using today. Artwork has been, in a word, “sad” however, I am proud of the brief stint my 2008 Stendig calendar spent gracing the walls. ( If I only now had space for a 4 foot by 3 foot calendar. I miss that thing. ) For the most part, try as I might, my office has generally been very haphazard and I have to say, tragically dull. 

Now it’s time to focus on the fun stuff so here’s a breakdown and a preliminary mood board.

Window coverings: Also white. Big, voluminous, cotton white, puddling to the floor, set off by classic black hardware. 

Desk: Oh dear. I will spare the long story and cut to the chase by saying that I finally decided to take the old vanity from my adolescent bedroom and re-paint it….white. Yup. More white. Can’t get enough of it.

Overall color scheme: White, Black, Cream and other Soft Neutrals, Brazillian Cherry wood floors, Chrome metal accents. I haven’t decided on a true “color” yet for accenting but I expect that my artwork will dictate this eventually.

Artwork: And speaking of….I’m planning on highlighting one corner of the office with floor-to-ceiling art hung in a salon-style grouping. I’m intending the artwork to consist of a lot of bright, primary colors with white mattes and light colored or white frames. There will probably be a sprinkling of b/w photography in there. 

Floor coverings: I am using two rugs. One small, 3 x 5 black and white zebra print rug(not tacky, I swear!) to delineate the seating/reading area and a larger 5 x 8 cream shag rug to delineate the desk and piano area. Currently this “shag” rug is a simple bound carpet remnant but I will be replacing it with the real deal in the near/distant/unknown future. Even though the room is small, there is still plenty of cherry wood floor peeking through.

Here are a few inspiration photos:

I can’t believe it’s been nearly a year since I first set out to pursue interior decorating as a business. Now, 10 months later, I have a few new ideas up my sleeve. What I tried to do last year didn’t really work out how I thought. I wanted to develop a portfolio of my work before I started charging for my services so I decided to offer my services free of charge to a handful of “clients.” While I was able to help a few people, I never ended up getting anything for my personal portfolio. As much as I enjoyed the work and was happy to help people, I found that I couldn’t afford all the time I was putting in without getting anything in return. I did gain a lot of experience however and for that I am glad. 

One of the problems I ran into was that my clients weren’t always as willing to make changes as they thought they’d be. I would present ideas and suggestions to them that they just couldn’t visualize and were therefore reluctant to try them. This is understandable because I did not present them with a compilation of all my ideas in one place. Rather, we would work on one piece at a time, getting hung up on wondering how the piece would fit with everything else. Bad idea, I know. It doesn’t make sense for me to expect people to see my brilliantly fabulous ideas if they’re all stuck in my head.

This year, my approach will be different in that I will be providing my clients with the ability to purchase a personalized design plan with detailed instructions they can implement on their own. The design plan will include:

Paint Colors
Flooring
Furniture
Window Coverings
Rugs
Lighting
Textiles
Accessories
and more….

Stay tuned as I get a few things ready to post over the next couple of weeks. Until then….

College dorm room syndrome

• Lots of mismatched frames such as:
• Frames with words like “friends” or “forever”.
• Different colored frames.
• Beaded frames.
• Frames with seashells or sports memorabilia. 
• Lots of small frames. (5 x 7 or smaller)
• Cheesy, goofy, ham-it-up type photos.
• Blurry “spring break” type vacation photos.
• You get the idea.

Now imagine all of those elements up on one wall at the same time. Where is the harmony and cohesion in that? Let’s face it: There’s nothing harmonious about it. It just doesn’t wok or coincide with a well designed space.

Grandma’s house syndrome

• Again, lots of mismatched frames that are often very dated
• Lots of posed family photos 
• Annual school pictures
• Traditional graduation pictures
• Clutter, clutter, clutter

Think about it. What’s particularly inspiring about these kinds of photos if everybody has them? Nothing! And how does that contribute in the process of making your space personal? It does the opposite! Eliminate all the clutter by keeping the multitudes of these standard, posed photos (that everyone has!) in albums. There’s nothing wrong with annual school pictures but they don’t really have a place in the décor of your home.

So here’s how to remedy both of these problems:

• Give the “Friends Forever” type frames to your teenage neighbor. They simply aren’t appropriate for anyplace BUT the dorm room or teenage bedroom because frankly, they’re juvenile. Neither is there a place for “theme” frames with palm trees or curly cues or rhinestones/beads. Give these a rest.
• Get rid of all the small frames and replace them with bigger frames that include matte space. 
• Repurpose any good sized colored frames by painting them one unifying, neutral color such as black, brown or white and if space allows, add a matte.
• Stay away from mixing different styles of frames such as a modern, country cabin, and ornate traditional. There IS a way to accomplish the eclectic look, but this is not for the faint of heart. 
• If you must have them out, keep the birthday parties, glamour shots, cheesy faces-smooshed-together-to-get-into-the-frame pictures and the like in bonus rooms like bathrooms or hallways and always have some element of your picture frames relate to one another. 
• Maybe all the photos are black and white or maybe the frames are all black or have bright white mattes or are all the same size. This way, even if you have completely random photos, they will still feel cohesive because they will all have a common denominator: the frame/matte/size/layout.
• You can include a few well-chosen personal photographs for your main living space but avoid overly “pose-y” shots and instead stick with more artsy or photojournalistic candids that are either similarly shot or have similar colors. 
• Display the photos in such a way that the attention is drawn equally to both the subject of the photo and the actual frame itself. This way the overall effect is seen as “art”, not an opportunity to show off your 07′ Halloween costume or Super Bowl game face. Again, keep these kinds of shots tastefully displayed in the bonus areas of your home like hallways and bathrooms. 
• One way to make a personal photo become a work of art is to blow the photo up, colorize it or play with the white balance to create a graphic “overexposed” effect. Just converting your photos to black and white makes a big difference.
• If at all possible, go for frames that will allow space for a generous matte. For example, one small 4 x 6 photo placed in an 11 x 14 frame with a matte is better than putting that same photo in a 4 x 6 frame. Why? Because the frame and matte enable your eye to focus on and appreciate the photo itself instead having your eye get lost because there is no point of focus.
• Remember, most people take more pictures than they could possibly display at any one time. Take care to ruthlessly edit the handful of photos that you want to include in your décor and put the rest in an album or an online picture sharing website.