AKA Bye Bye Purple
When we first started at looking at homes in this area I had hoped to buy one already furnished. We don't have any plans of selling our home up north so this meant we wouldn't be bringing much with us to this house. We would literally be starting over with almost nothing. It is like being twenty something again but with a fifty something body and budget. :D
The design side of me was excited by this opportunity but I also knew that it would be an expensive undertaking. My husband kept reminding me as we were looking at houses that the whole furnishing process would be " A marathon, not a sprint". Patience has never been a virtue for me so this would be a challenge.
This is a photo, via Zillow, of how the dining room looked the first time we toured the house.
We didn't get very much in the way of furniture with our home purchase but this dining room set and the rug did stay. The buffet is a built in so I could at least consider this space basically furnished...for now.
It seemed like an eternity between having our offer accepted and the actual closing. In the meantime I was house obsessed and one night while I was on the internet I found this older image of our dining room.
Holy Purple!
I would guess that in the interest of making the home more appealing to a greater audience the seller's realtor suggested a more neutral color.
The seller might have agreed to paint the walls but held out on the ceilings.
What you couldn't see from the first images is that the ceilings were also a lighter shade of purple. So although the walls were toned down to a neutral flax seed color, they left the ceilings painted a two tone orchid and eggplant.
It wasn't so horrible but it didn't fit my vision for the home so one of the first items on our to-do list was to hire a painter and begin repainting the main living areas.
It was difficult to know what color to paint the walls when we had only been in the house for a couple of days. I knew I wanted to stay neutral and have the artwork take center stage but what about those tray ceilings? Should I accent them, and if so, with what colors?
I had to move quickly. The painter had some time right before Christmas and it would be so much easier to paint these rooms before there was any more furniture. Most of the new construction we toured was finished in neutral shades of gray but our house has a taupe/cream tile in the main living areas so I needed a neutral color that leaned a bit warmer. These images seem to appear more green but in reality they suggest a hint of brown.
My choices:
I love bold color so something so tame is unusual for me but I think these will be great colors to create my canvas. I want a colorful coastal meets a refined island look. The Balboa Mist is the wall color and the Cumulus Cloud is on the horizontal part of the tray ceiling and the Dash of Pepper is the accent color.
When we looked at new construction I fell in love with the modern industrial vibe lighting but the house we bought is fourteen years old with more traditional fixtures.
I needed something to sit on more than I needed a new chandelier, so I opted to keep them, at least for now, and contrast them with more modern touches like the black and white abstract paintings we purchased at a local gallery.
This artist incorporates sand into each of her pieces. The perfect touch for a coastal home.
Eventually I hope to bring in some color on the dining chairs and maybe some fabric panels on either side of the arched window, but for now I added this oversized bowl in cobalt blue.
The basics are covered in this space. Now to bring in some pizazz. Marathon be damned.
:D
xoxo,
p
