ORC Countdown: Day 5.2

Gathering courage.

I still have a rather large canvas to paint.
Remember this? This is where the whole One Room Challenge for this room started!

I went searching for inspiration.

I like the shapes and the brushstrokes in this one: Highway Wildflowers by kelli hall for Minted.

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I loved this by the artist, Alison, at minted. It's called Indian Summer.

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This, too, is called Indian Summer.

 Helen Frankenthaler: source

I love how the colours are stacked--inverted--like our expectations. 

I really love the one below, though.

 Helen Frankenthaler: source

I feel like it could inspire me to write a boatload of fantasy fiction, Darkoverish-Zimmerman-Bradley style.

And then, there is Rothko.

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Of course.

ORC Countdown: Day 5.1

No promises I will do this every day, but I did last time and it was fun to capture the chaos and energy of the final week.

Today, I bit the bullet and cut the wall hanging.

Then, I shopped and shopped and settled on some fabric to cover the office chair (the tartan draped on the chair) and the chair cushion for the wicker chair.

I liked it a lot, actually. The colours worked well together and the tartan felt "libraryish."

But then, my husband agreed to hang one of our brick panels, "to see how it goes."

Rocked. my. world.

changed. everything.

Um. No. Not anymore.

This?

or something like this?

Now I wish I'd brought the drapes all the way to the end of that wall. That patch is distracting.

I bought some more yarn.

and a rug

and I am so freakin' excited again I can't stand it.

ORC Week 5: Nuthin'

I had four days off between last week's post and today. Four days.

I didn't do anything related to my room until late yesterday.

10pm saw my husband and I picking up brick panels at Home Depot.

They're still in the garage.

I also went to an upscale lumber yard to find dimensional lumber for my table top. After doing math for about an hour (and making my head hurt) I found out they didn't have enough! And it is going to be much pricier than I'd ever thought.

I purchased the pipes and constructed the base some time ago. I still need to spray paint them.

It's all coming down to the wire, now.

I want to build my pipe table, put up a brick wall, cover my office chair and find a rug.

Oh, and paint a large canvas.

In less than seven days.

Please check out the rest of the panicked linking participants, here.


If you'd like to catch up on my progress, here are the weekly posts:

Week 1: Befores and a Vision
Week 2: The Painted Room
Week 3: The Agony of Decisions
Week 4: Texture and Art

ORC Week 4: Texture and Art

A successful room is a room with a lot of texture. Nester, in her inimitable way calls a room with too many slick textures a diarrhea room. Most of our rooms, she says, are this way. What we need is more roughage.

Abigail Ahern, takes the idea further. Every room, she says, needs at least six textures.

Six!

She advises two from each category: smooth, rough and soft.

Smooth textures are things like glass, marble, smooth tile, plastic, fabrics like silk and satin, certain pieces of pottery and ceramics.

Rough textures include wicker, reclaimed wood, brick, stone, and luckily for me, book spines.

I got everything back on the Expedit during the Organize-a-thon last weekend.

Soft textures include most fabrics and feathers.

Her emphasis is on opposition, on contrast and juxtaposition. Smooth with rough, (a smooth ceramic lamp on a stump) soft with smooth, (velvet curtains over a glass window), rough with soft (a woolly blanket in a basket.)

So, I analysed my room and what I had.

Rough? Wicker chair, wicker baskets, book spines.

Smooth? Glass, ceramics, polished wood, plastic (the Expedit and the table are melamine, definitely plastic.)

I updated the china cabinet by taking out the mullions and lining the back with (photocopies of) pages from a Children's dictionary during the Organize-a-thon.

Soft? Velvet curtains.

A cushion on the wicker chair would help--as would a rug. But the cushion wouldn't add a significant amount and my husband doesn't think a rug is a practical idea in this room--and he may be right. 

So, it occured tome that some sort of textile art would be just the ticket. I had planned to put my large 3x4 foot canvas on this wall to help balance things out, 

but scraped that idea when I saw this:

So, I made an attempt at textile art.

The bottom is bothering me--I'm not sure how to finish it off. The width, too. Should it be wider? It may be too 1/2 and 1/2 dark and light. And is the branch too "rustic" for this room?


Your thoughts are welcome.


As usual, please check out the others, both the invited, who posted on Wednesday (and what an inspiration they are) and the party crashers, like me.

If you'd like to catch up on my progress, here are the weekly posts:

Week 1: Befores and a Vision
Week 2: The Painted Room
Week 3: The Agony of Decisions

The Organiz-a-thon is Done!

Such a great project.

Presented as a class with an emphasis on action, Simplify 101 offered me a chance to get some organizing done in my study which I am overhauling as part of the One Room Challenge. Participating in the forum with its built in accountability and encouragement from classmates was absolutely wonderful.

Here are the Befores.

I decluttered, again, as I went. (I'd decluttered as I had packed everything up, too.)

I got most of everything out of the living room and into the Expedit on Friday night.

Those boxes on the side are destined for the basement. Yes, it needs to be organized down there!

Saturday, after work, I worked on the China cabinet.

I lined the back with photocopies of pages from a children's dictionary. So sweet.

That's just white paper on the shelves.

Ever since I painted the door black, something about this view has bothered me.

Yes, they are both dark. Yes, the heights are wonky. But wait--the muntins--perhaps they're not getting along with each other?

So, since they were easily removed, I removed them.

Then, very carefully, I loaded it back up.

Sunday, I had a meeting over at my Mom's with a fellow bidding on some work in the morning and I had to work in the afternoon, so I set myself an easy task: pack up and distribute the stuff not staying in the room.

Some of it went back to the basement to be stored, some of it was wrapped and boxed up for sale, and some of it went straight into the donation station. I'm happy to say I got it all done! This is that last 10% of a project I find so difficult to do.

Then, I rewarded myself with some styling of the Expedit.

It was a great weekend!

The Organize-a-thon

Woot!

Aby is hosting a weekend organiz-a-thon at Simplify 101.

My task is not difficult: but it is daunting. I intend to get most of  this:

Back into this:

and this:

Just trying out an idea.

Since I am working Saturday and a half day on Sunday, we'll see how far I get by Monday.

Wish me luck!

ORC Week 3: The Agony of Decisions

This week I bought a chair, hung my curtains, and looked at light fixtures.

Along with more than 100 other linking participants, I am scrambling madly to completely make over one room in my house in five short weeks. (Six posts, but five weeks if you start on the day of your first post. Fortunately, I started a bit before that--but not by much!)

I am doing over my dining room/study.

The plans for this room are here in week one: The Befores and a Vision
The adventure that is week two is here: The Painted Room

The chair was easy. I knew I wanted something comfy for reading in this room from the start. In fact, that's one of the reasons I took on this madness.

I decided on the Ikea Byholma.

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With the Byholma flipped over upside down in my cart and on my way to the cash registers, I came across this little beauty.

Obviously, she came home with me. It's called Lacko, but I cannot find it on their site, strangely enough.

The curtains were a bit more complicated.

Also from Ikea, I bought a set at the same time I bought the chair. The next day, I realised I had bought the longer, more expensive curtains. So, I returned them. (I would have kept them, but I already had two panels of the shorter length.)

I washed both pairs and then set about to hang my curtain rods higher.

Did I measure the curtains?

No. (You can see where this is going. Why didn't I?)

I wanted to hang them high, so high I had to enlist my husband's help. While he was watching a movie.

That did not go over well.

Then, I realised we had hung them too high.

I wailed. So, no pictures. Taking pity on me, hubs drilled a couple more holes just below the first ones. Not low enough. Tempers frayed, we had a minor argument about the wisdom of doing projects late at night. And went to bed with lots of holes in our walls.

We tried again a couple of days later.

sorry, the cabinet is still dark. It just might stay that way. I haven't decided, yet.

Meanwhile, I searched the internet and brick and mortar stores for an overhead light fixture. I looked at thousands of lights and visited five stores.

I got a lovely lesson in design from a wonderful saleswoman on size and scale.

From my internet reading, I'd figured out that my light fixture needed to be the diameter of my room length and width (in feet) added together and expressed in inches. So, for example, my room is 10.5 feet by 11 feet. Thus, my light fixture should be at least 21.5 inches in diameter.

But then she asked me "What colour is your table?"

Here's why:

Traditional Dining Room by Gibsonia Interior Designers & Decorators Susan Muschweck Interior Design, LLC

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The size looks OK: but doesn't it look odd? There's no balance at all.


Here is a dark table and a dark chandy:

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So delicious.

When I told her my table top was white, she said I should be looking at silver fixtures. (brushed nickel, chrome, etc.) I recoiled.

No.

But we did agree it should be lighter in visual mass. Airier.

Something like this, I would imagine:

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However, I am not so sure my table top is staying white. I'm giving serious thought to building something like the above (galvanized pipe painted grey or off-black and a "natural wood" top).

or this:

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Dark metal legs and a lighter "driftwood" coloured top.

Decisions, decisions.

But I won't be doing any of it late at night. 

Catch up with the inspiring projects from the professionals here and the wannabees, like me, here.