Reclaiming Sanity: Meeting with a Designer

Would you believe me if I said that the bold, saturated colors in our living room and the multitude of paint samples on each wall in our home was slowly driving me insane? You should.

After much deliberation with Don and a growing feeling that our home would never get to the place we need it to be, I invited an interior designer to our home after meeting her at this sip-n-see. Here's what I gleaned from our two hour meeting:

1) Painting a multitude of similar colors on the same wall = bad idea. You will start to see the colors only in relation to one another.
2) Paying her hourly consultation rate saved us the expense of another bad paint choice, not to mention the hours and hours of painting. Consulting with her truly did save us money.
3) Use less saturated color, but still use COLOR. I love beige and cream walls in other people's homes, but it's not our style. We chose a paint color that is variegated, just like colors are in nature. A tree isn't one shade of green, it's a dozen shades.
4) Don't get paralyzed when painting. Keep going!
5) Work with what you've got. Spending a lot of money on art or furniture is not on our list of priorities. 

You can see the full crazy effect of our current paint situation in this picture. White baseboards, beige crown molding and trim from the previous owners, and saturated green living room walls that abruptly meet boring beige walls in the dining room.

This little family blog is certainly not a design blog, but I wanted to share all of this today in case you think working with a designer is WHACK. It's not! And there are a few little changes we made that we can chat about later. For now, I'm off to start patching the 150 nail holes in our walls before we repaint this weekend.

Goodbye, avocado walls, goodbye!

One last note: we bought this indoor/outdoor rug on sale from Pottery Barn and we LOVE it. It's made to look like sisal, but it's soft. It's also child-proof, meaning that when it gets dirty, you just wipe it off. When it gets REALLY dirty, you can hose it down outside. This is the same cleaning schedule we use for William and it works just fine.