My Favorite Color

Well, in case you haven't noticed, I'm pretty fond of the color red. It has such a bright, snappy color punch that really livens up an otherwise ordinary color scheme.

Since we move around a lot, whatever colors we choose for the walls/flooring/drapes have to be kept pretty neutral because we have to turn around and rent/sell the place within a few years of moving in. So, that means that the accessories in our house have to do the shining.

Enter the color red, center stage. I probably got a little carried away with red in our current house, but I really wanted a cohesive color scheme to be carried throughout the downstairs living area.

The following photos are pictures of some of the things I have painted or made to liven things up in our house. I chose to do a lot of word paintings because with three young kids underfoot I need a lot of reminders!

I heart polka dots, especially on plates and things. That red cutie at right is from Pottery Barn.

The mirrors were purchased at IKEA and painted with Hawaiian leaf images. The bundle of reeds they are hanging from is left over from a bamboo blind that I took apart to customize.

No house in Hawaii is complete without an Aloha sign, so I painted this one with a green lei surrounding it. That picture frame was damaged in our move, so I patched and painted it in the same style that I did the mirrors above. I love looking at all the sweet baby pics of my kids in this frame. I need to make a new one (or update this one) to include baby Hazel.

Remember this infamous sofa? (see Bag Bonanza written in May) Yup. It's red too.

...and here we have more red. The dining set is a gorgeous vintage solid mohagany table that I bought at a moving sale. The sad thing is that I'm so afraid to ruin the table that we have never, not once, eaten at that table. Pretty silly, eh?

I haven't taken the time to find/make a decent tablecloth or runners to use while eating (the cloth on there now is actually a round quilt from Williams Sonoma, and I'm not letting the kids loose in there with that on the table!) The chairs were hideously ugly with the original white vinyl (now a very dirty, dingy hue) so I made slipcovers for them. I still haven't gotten around to hemming the bottom of them. Can't make up my mind whether to actually hem them or tack them in place with upholstery tacks.

I've noticed that I have a terrible habit of getting things to about the 90% completion stage, then moving on to something else exciting. This is the case with so many things in our house. The curtains are not hemmed, just pinned up, the touch-up work on the walls is yet to be done in many places, the dining room slipcovers, the brick border that I painstakingly installed all around our yard but had to stop in one corner for some maintenance work to be done. The work is done, the last 4 bricks are yet to be mortared in place. That was about a year and a half ago. It drives my poor husband crazy, but I never even THINK of those things during the day when I could actually do something about them. Is anyone else like this or am I just kooky? :-)