Straight from the Container

I was cleaning my desk (shocker) and came across a notebook where I’d taped some new house inspiration some months ago when we were getting ready to take ownership of the war box. It’s pretty interesting to me what was grabbing us then so I thought I’d compare and contrast.

This is where we started out with the dining room. I think the gray of this was so different from how we’ve painted anything previously, I couldn’t resist it. We have a seriously teeny-tiny dining room that only fits a table that small plus two chairs (and, okay, right now a way-oversized dog crate, don’t ask) and for some reason I wanted to really play up the smallness of it. We have that table, so it’s kind of there, but our chairs aren’t old fashioned at all. Here’s the actual space:

There’s nothing salonish about how our DR turned out except for the paint color. And lo and behold — I really ended up hating how dark it made the space. Add to that the fact that the Devine paint we choose, sorry to say, is chipping like crazy, and on a wall as dark as these, that’s bad. We’re planning to repaint but not sure on the color yet, and we’re going to finally replace the hideous blinds with something, anything else, too. Okay, another thing about the DR: Before we bought a house we were renting a really great mid-century modern south of town that had high ceilings and enormous picture windows and real wood paneling. Except for location and it wasn’t ours, it was perfect. Anyway, we bought the above table along with four knock-off tulip-base chairs that looked great in that space, but in our new space the chairs just looked beyond shabby, so they’ve been relegated to the basement for now. So we put these Panton chairs in their place, but they just feel like too much to me. I love them and I like them a lot as an accent, but there is just something too cartoonish about them for me to be happy with them longterm as our main DR chairs.

Onward. Here are some initial thoughts we had for our living room.

Okay, this is interesting. We actually settled on this wall color and managed to find a reasonable, though not exact, facsimile. I can’t remember what store but again, pretty sure it was Devine paint. But when we got one full wall painted — correction, when Dave got it painted, poor thing — we stood back and realized the color looked absolutely vile against the gray of the DR; it was just vomitous. So we shelved it and went with the blue tones that you see below.

Despite the bitching I’ve done lately about how gloomy/blue the room feels, I’m not that unhappy with where it is right now. The worst of it is what you can’t see in this photo, a large hutch that has smoked glass and kind of swallows light. You’ll notice we did get the fireplace painted, though it’s not complete yet. This was our inspiration (the previous brick looked kind of like nicotine stains):

We’d actually still like to do something like that, extending the facade up to the ceiling…someday.

I also came across this clipping — what planet am I living on thinking that Dave would ever agree to this color? I don’t know. What do you think of it?