Living Room Magic Carpet

Biscuit test-driving new magic carpet

Last week, David and I purchased this sample rug for our living room and have decided that we love it. It wasn't available in our required size, so we've ordered a larger one from a different store (Kensington Carpet One), which should arrive within 10 days. I'm a little nervous since our design consultant, Danah, advised us that different dye lots may have slightly different colours. I love the muted colours of the sample rug and hope the new one isn't too much darker (newer).

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If you can't tell, the rug is a creamy sage colour in the middle, with an ivory border. The main accent colour is a darker sage green and there are slate blue highlights, and pink highlights.

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This rug has answered all my prayers! And it's finally given me direction for the living-dining room. The rooms are open-plan and have a lot of different colours already and I wanted to re-use as many of the existing features as possible.

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For example, I have a sage green sofa and chair in the living room, so the rug really needed to work with them! We also have custom floral draperies in both rooms (panels and valance) left by the previous owner. These are green chintz, with large white, blue, and pink flowers, and gold trim! I really hope to re-use these for a while to save money (although they are not to my taste, they are traditional and suit the room just fine). We also have dark antique furniture.

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The main problem, though, was the dining room rug (below). It's a dark rose with ivory and taupe, and has small blue and green accents. Although the sofa creates a divider between the two rooms, I still wanted to rugs to be similar (e.g. both traditional, similar palate).

So, I really had a lot of things to coordinate with this magical rug!

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And did I mention our chartreuse (yellow-green) walls? They are very pretty and look gorgeous in the evening light. The chartreuse (painted by the previous owner) has grown on me, but I decided there was simply too much colour and I would sacrifice these walls if the new rug palate demanded it.

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And to top it off, I really wanted as much blue accent as possible in both rooms since my tableware is mostly white and blue! What a conundrum. I almost called a decorator about 40 times in the past few months.

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But the new rug makes everything obvious. It coordinates beautifully with the sofa and chair (sage) and works reasonably well with the rose rug in the dining room (much better than the various contemporary rugs I brought home to try). The new rug even looks good with the draperies. But the chartreuse walls don't work and need to be neutralized!

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I'm happy to change the wall colour, but it does open a whole can of worms. You see, the living-dining room walls extend into the front hall, which entend into two stairwells, which extend into upstairs and downstairs hallways! For coherence, I'd like to carry a single colour throughout (currently there are 3 different greens!).

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The downstairs has a lot of browns, with a brown brick fireplace in the family room (still undecorated except for an inexpensive cream rug and old oatmeal-coloured furniture) and brown flooring in the hall.

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So I've decided to paint the whole thing in a warm off-white or very pale brown. I haven't decided on my colour yet, but I like Benjamin Moore's Creamy White (light beige) and White Down (ivory). I'm sure this decision will take weeks, and another few months to get all the painting done!

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I will post pictures when it all starts coming together!

Biscuit *adoring* new Pottery Barn rug

I was so ferociously annoyed with Pottery Barn for selling me a damaged rug (see previous post) that I let Biscuit, my eccentric orange tabby, test-drive it a little while on Friday night.

I don't know why, but he seemed to *adore* the Arts & Craft stylings and vegetable soup colours of the new Adeline rug. Hmmm - do you think he recognizes the camouflage potential - allowing him to conceal his identity for optimal human stalking...? I really hope he adapts to the new mocha rug (on which he will be unable to hide).

Some photos of the damage:

De-feathering the Nest

So...we had intended the nest-feathering (i.e. home decorating) to commence in earnest with acquisition of aforementioned Pottery Barn "Adeline" rug. Regrettably, it did not.

We eagerly arrived at Pottery Barn on Friday night (as eager as possible after a hard week's work) and brought home our brand new rug, bound in seriously heavy duty plastic wrap (which looked rather bedraggled - but I figured, hey! it's a long trip from god knows where to here).

However, as we merrily unpackaged and began to un-roll our amazing new rug, we discovered, to our horror - two large rips in the rug!! The outer packaging had been pierced and the rug scored deeply.

Bloody hell! We were not impressed (particularly not David, who had done all the carrying of said 8ftx10ft rug). Damn.

The phone calls began. I notified PB immediately about the damaged rug (now it's 10 to 9 on Friday night), and they suggested I bring it back (on my nickle and time) and exchange it for a really new (this time) rug. I decided that wouldn't work for me, so I asked them to DELIVER me a brand new rug, like I was supposed to get the first time. This seemed clever as it would save David and I another long drive to the mall and a race to steal one of 6 PB special "pick-up only" parking stalls. Plus, for $1000, I ain't impressed sister, and someone better do something nice for me.

I was informed that at Pottery Barn Canada, we "do not have a special delivery service" (apparently all rich yuppies have a truck on hand for carting home poorly-crafted, over-priced furniture from Pottery Barn) and it would take 10 days for them to get their special hired deliverers to deliver for us. Then they recommended that I photograph the rug, send them the pics, and they would give me a "deep discount" ("like $100 for the rug", I asked," instead of $1000?"). Sounded like a great idea for about a second until I realized I couldn't email pictures until Monday (home computer won't connect to the internet) and I don't want a crappy old busted rug. So I told them to hold me a new rug, I would schlep this one back, and they could give me a discount for my troubles. They agreed to 10% off, or about $100.

Ugh. I left the rug un-rolled in the room on Friday night and discovered another serendipitous fact by Saturday afternoon - we hate the Adeline rug! Okay, it is positively gorgeous, just not the soft and comforting look I wanted for the room.

When we had the 3x5 size, it looked so much more lush and bright - on the small size, the border (dark green) took up a lot of space, while the interior colour (light green) took up very little space. However, on the large 8x10 rug, the interior space was suddenly really large (light green) with this narrow dark green border. The light green was just too washed out - almost like a faded sage green. The rug looked old, a faded version of the original. I was sorely disappointed but we were happy to discover our design flaw, and the fact that we get to do a "no questions asked" return AND get a discount because the rug we didn't even like was damaged!

So on Saturday I called PB again (another explanation to another manager) and we decided to return the rug in exchange for a different one, called "Graham".

But, to our dismay, darling Graham is out of stock for 3-6 weeks. So we are on back-order. We are waiting.

We can't really do much with the bedroom until it arrives. We took down the curtain rods to paint and aren't re-installing rods, etc. until we investigate window coverings (blinds or curtains) which won't be decided until the rug is on the floor and we see what will work best.

Meanwhile, we're sleeping in a spare room, which is small and cozy, while our real bedroom waits, bereft, with no rug, no window coverings, and a lot of things piled in it, including a damaged reject Adeline rug.

At least I'm looking forward to the new colour scheme - which reverts to my original plan- ivory/cream and BLUE! How soothing....eventually.

Feathering the Nest (Part I)

S ince buying the house, we've managed to get sorta-kinda unpacked (all the important stuff is "out" and in its place). There are still plenty of boxes in the basement containing God knows what things we clearly don't need. We haven't done much proper decorating yet - we did hang one painting (and David's antlers - a story for another day) and I organized my bookshelves. Mostly we've just arranged furniture and seem to spend lots of time moving things from one cupboard to another in the kitchen. We've silently decreed that everything needs to be in THE RIGHT SPOT in the kitchen.

Last weekend David's mum came to town and helped us paint our master bedroom and bath. The room was originally hot pink (imagine if you dare - a Victorian boudoir!) and the bathroom featured several feet of flowery pink wallpaper border (which took several gut-wrenching hours to meticulously scrape off).

Since the bedroom faces north and has a giant spruce tree to the northwest, it gets no direct light and seems a little dreary. The floors don't help - they're a medium-dark hardwood - gorgeous but dark! So we decided to paint the room a soft ivory to lighten it up. We chose Benjamin Moore's White Down, which is a slight off-white colour. Now that it's on the walls I love it - so light and creamy - but I now wish I'd gone a little darker. You live and learn. All I knew is I didn't want light beige, which I've lived with too many times.

Now that the walls are painted, we're moving on to the next steps - rugs, curtains, new bedding. I love the planning/pondering process and have been poring over decorating magazines for months trying both to learn "the rules" (if there is such a thing) and to get ideas. I've always had a good eye for style and used to be a fashion victim in my 20's (now recovering), so I am pretty tuned in to what I like and don't like. I know who I am, I know my tastes, and I want to convey that. Luckily David and I have similar tastes. We like eclectic homemade things and refined lovely things - antiques, old clocks and lamps, historical things, Arts & Crafts and Art Deco era things - all quietly refined things that take a lifetime to acquire!

So it will be a slow process. For now, I have the ideas for the bedroom all figured out. The walls are ivory and the bedding will be creams and ivories - all this will lighten the dark floors and low light. Next we decided to choose a rug. Originally I'd planned to do blues and sage greens as accent colours with the ivories and creams, but that idea fell through when I visited Pottery Barn.

I came home from Pottery Barn with five 3x5 rugs on consignment (a brilliant system) so we could lay the rugs down and see them in the room and choose what works best. Four of the five rugs met my colour criteria and had creamy brown-green-blue colour schemes. I sneaked in another rug (my favorite at the store) which didn't exactly meet my colour scheme - sage green, yes, but with yellow and bright ochre/red flowers!

After considerable head scratching, shuffling of rugs, debating, lying on the bed looking at the rugs in different light, turning on different lamps, etc. to see the colours, and considering ease of "decorating around" we finally decided on a rug!

We ended up choosing the brightly-coloured Arts & Crafts-inspired one that's from the same era as my Mission furniture. I didn't plan to have reds and yellows in the room! This rug is energetic and spirited, the exact opposite of the soft, calm mood I wanted to create.

The rug is called Adeline

I can't wait to pick up the 8x10 size later this week and see it, in all its cheerful glory, in the room!

Then we have to start thinking about window coverings. And bedding! And another piece of furniture? And then decorate a complementary master bath? I can see where this is leading. Now I understand how people never stop decorating and re-decorating their houses. A labour of love I am discovering...as we begin to feather the nest.