Monday, February 28, 2011

new motto: simplify, simplify, simplify

I've been feeling a bit tired of our Shabby Chic hydrangea bedding so last week I picked up a crisp white duvet set with red stitching since I seem to be a fan of red accents in our very turquoise bedroom. This also made sense since we have two red quilts that we use in the winter. While I love the way the bed looks, I'm feeling a bit like there's too much going on in the bedroom, pattern wise. In fact, it's a feeling I have about both our bedroom and our living room, and something that I feel I must remedy posthaste.
I'm thinking I need to find a solid curtain to go behind the bed and replace the black & white ones until the summer when we only have plain white bedding to contend with.  Right now my eyeballs hurt with all the pattern. Normally I'm not a fan of plain white curtains, but I'm rather enjoying them in the office so I'm wondering if that's not a solution at this point? I believe I have two pair here somewhere.

While I was cleaning and photographing rooms, I thought I'd take some updated pictures of the living room as well since I changed out Alan's bedside table, moving the serving tray to the living room next to the sofa. This gives us (well, me) much more room to keep a book next to the sofa when I'm done reading. It also helps lighten up the dark corner. I've since moved the round side table to the dining room next to the leather club chair that's there (sorry, no pictures of that vignette). One thing I noticed when going back through the living room photos is that here too there is way too much going on. Wood, brick, white, brown, yellow, green, more broan, tan, flowers, different flowers. Again, my eyes hurt. I definitely need to do something in here to ground the room or unify the look. This is where I think the rug is going to come into play. We'll move the brown rug into the dining room with the pale blue walls and green curtains (who knows how that will look?!) and bring in a solid rug to help. That's at least a starting point to tame the chaos that's currently going on in here.

And clearly that burgundy striped cushion has to find a new home (or a new cover) and the striped paper in the photos needs to be replaced with either a solid matte or maybe a black & white photo (or maybe sepia)? Something ... not so busy. And maybe I should just clear off the fireplace mantle entirely, keeping only the ceramic antelope we picked up at an antique store in Santa Rosa.

Egads! It's simply out of control in here.

I think my motto for further decorating is going to be simplify, simplify, simplify because right now everything is feeling very out of control, all over the place, and not at all relaxing.

What have you done in your decorating to simplify your look, to create a calm, serene haven at the end of the day?

2 comments:

  1. I spent January 1 of this year doing exactly that: SIMPLIFY! Of course, I have kid clutter to deal with, but I think I'm on the right track. Also, I am employing the philosophy of "Only have what you love," which is helping me make editing decisions. Here is the result of my living room clean up: http://kristamamaswan.blogspot.com/2011/01/finding-my-heaven-in-2011.html

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  2. I definitely like the idea of only keeping what we love. I feel like so much of what we have in the house is because it was on sale, or was a good deal, or because it was good enough (at one time, and maybe not even for the room it is currently in).

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