prints and prints

I still have a few blank walls left in my house that are just begging for some art love – mainly my two large walls in my living room. Right now they are both facing each other in equal blankness.

I think what has left these two walls blank for so long is their size – they are at least 4m wide and I just didn’t have anything to fill the space.

I have pondered it a while and I think I may have my solutions. On one of the walls I’d like to purchase two or three of Sharon Montrose’s animal prints – I am thinking this combination:

   

or this:

  

or:

  

The deciding is going to be tricky.

On the other – on which the couch backs onto – I am going to attempt to create a grouped wall of art. Now I say attempt – as I haven’t had much success in the past at grasping the eclectic look of things – but it seems a great, and inexpensive, way to showcase a lot of art, and it can grow and change with you. I am going to be using these as inspiration:

For what will be included in my print gathering – I am currently loving the below prints/artwork:

clockwise from top left; melbourne print by studiokmo, Jamais trop tard by evajuliet, Flaming Lips. Do You Realize. by 2142stuart, Watercolour Blobs by MadeByEmilyGreen, The Cool Tiger in Sunglasses by Lucius Art, Rabbit Watercolor PRINT by WaterInMyPaint, Cat Watercolor PRINT by WaterInMyPaint, Rain by Aneesh Vini, Wander Art Print by Wesley Bird, Ocean Blue by Leah Flores, Mac Cat by Florever, Deluge by Marc Allante.

So some thinking will have to be done – and some saving of money to afford these all.

Also – just apologies for the sporadic posting – I just started a new job and it has hindered my time to focus. Hopefully once I am in the swing it will get back more to normal.

my house tour

So I finally got around to taking photos of my house (well my house was finally tidy enough to take photos!) so I have updated the house page on my blog. Feel free to check it out if you want to see my decorating attempts thus far.

Just one of the pictures featured – my dining room table with my new chairs I bought on ebay:

 

an industrial feel

I love the look of home-wares and furniture that have an industrial feel to them – especially when they are actually had a former life in some sort of industry. That rawness and metal look feels so out of place in an every day home, so much so it almost looks like it belongs. Below are a few finds of mine which epitomises this look for me:

ebay antique hospital cabinet

ebay industrial console table

this one needs a bit of imagination – but with a restoration it would make amazing storage

ebay industrial drawers

vintage index file drawer by industrialrelic on etsy

Replica Xavier Pauchard Tolix Chair by Matt Blatt

Now just to get the massive New York-esque loft to fit all this furniture in, sigh….

 

bedroom revisited

A while back I was talking about doing a mini bedroom cure – I didn’t get too far, mostly because the bedside tables I wanted from Ikea never came into stock. I have finally given up on ever getting the bekvam stools and ended up buying the Rast Bedside tables last night:

image courtesy of ikea.com.au

In some ways I think this one is slightly better. It’s a lower height than the stool, which fits my Malm bed a lot better. And it also provides the space for more storage – I am however against having too much open storage as this can looked cluttered, so I need to have a think on what I do with all that space, cute boxes maybe? I will be painting the tables soon, I think just to be safe white will probably be best, but maybe as the room progresses (and I settle on an exact colour scheme) an accent colour. That’s what I love about this sort of Ikea furniture, at $14.99 each, and solid wood, you can paint it as many times as you want, until you get it right.

So that’s the bedside tables finally sorted. Unfortunately there are a few more niggling things that the bedroom needs. Currently I am in two minds about the floor plan. Since I moved in I have had the floor plan in the below configuration; with my Malm bed and Malm chest of draws. The box in the bottom right of the image is my wardrobe with sliding mirror doors, and the space to the bottom left currently houses my laundry basket.

The Malm chest of drawers was never quite right in that space. I bought it for my room back in Perth so it wasn’t bought for this room. I always thought something lower (it is the four drawer Malm so it’s quite high) and longer would look better. But one night I got restless and changed it to this configuration of the bed (now with my bedside tables):

The dresser still doesn’t work, it’s an awkward shape for the room. I could put the dresser in the nook to the bottom left, but that’s where my laundry hamper sits and is hidden nicely by the open door – if I moved it there, where would the hamper go that’s out of sight? I’d love to get rid of the drawers all together, but I can’t fit everything in my wardrobe, and it’s nice having some where to place your jewellery and jewellery boxes – so I think I need some sort of table, chest of drawers, or sideboard for my room – but how to configure the floor plan? I had a play and came up with the below options:

Option one has my bed slightly to the left with a low chest of drawers/sideboard on the right hand wall, I even squeezed a chair in – but it’s not really necessary. I am not sure if the bed being off centre would make the room look strange.

Option two is leaving my bed where it is at the moment, in the centre of the back wall, and then moving my current chest of drawers to the nook on the bottom left. The cheapest solution, but I would need to figure out what to do with my hamper…

Option three is moving my bed back to where it was, against the right hand wall, and then having a low and long sideboard/chest of drawers directly opposite the bed. The only con with this plan is the bottom bedside table is close the wardrobe doors.

So I need to decide on a general direction soon, and then I can get moving on finding the pieces to complete the bedroom. Let me know if you have a favourite plan, or something completely different – all opinions welcome!

I’ll update you soon with how painting the bedside tables goes!

all floor plan images were made at floorplanner.com

picture posters

So it seems to be that time of year where you receive a million and one emails from online stores with different sales and offers. Most of mine are deleted (the christmas presents are already bought – so no more spending for me!) however a recent snapfish.com.au email took my fancy when they were offering 40% some of their best sellers – which included posters.  You could blow up one of your existing photographs up to 50x75cm (if you’re mega pixels will allow) for $24, and anything smaller was even cheaper. So, despite my self-imposed spending ban, I purchased 5 posters. Below are the photos of the posters I bought – I am not sure quite where they will fit into my house yet, but I’ll be sure to take photos when they have arrived and they are hanging in the house.

the gondolas from my trip to Venice

a view of the trees in the dandenongs

the fushimi inari shrine in Kyoto

a small church in Santorini

one of my favourite photos, the paper cranes from a Japanese temple .

The cranes photo I ordered in 50x75cm, the biggest you could get. All the others were 50x60cm. I am hoping this assortment of bright colours can add some ‘pop’ to my home. Most of these images were adjusted slightly in picnik.com – mostly just adding a boost of colour to all of them to improve the brightness. Hopefully the posters arrive before I head home for Christmas! Or else I will be waiting until I head back to work in the middle of January next year.

ikea, why must you tease me so.

So it seems everything I currently want from Ikea is not in stock – boo! I am not sure quite how accurate their stock counter is, but since it’s at least a 40 minute drive from my house, it’s too risky to chance it. Hopefully in the new year (or at least after Christmas) some of their stock will be replenished and I can buy:

ostlig flower pots - to hang on my fence outside. I have decided with such a small deck I need to lift the plants off the ground – also I need to get all my pots matching, it’s currently a bad mish mash of different pots (I never seem to be able to do the eclectic look well, it always ends up looking untidy)

tarno chair - to match the outdoor table I bought a few weeks back. I have since painted the table red, and would love to include two of these chairs with it – maybe in red, or another bright colour.

Also my bedside tables fall in this category – but you’ve seen enough photos of those! Some things that are in stock that I’d like to get my hands on:

gilbert chair - for my dining room

norrora dishes – would be perfect to hold those loose elastics and bobby pins.

I am going to try to hold out until after Christmas….let’s see if that happens.

mirror mirror on the wall

After a productive Ikea shopping trip my hallway now has mirrors!

finished table!

finally a finished dining room table to eat on!

(excuse the dead looking flowers – they aren’t dead they are some Australian natives and are quite dark in colour)

dining room chairs

so now that I have picked up my ebay table (well phil brought him home last night) I am beginning to think about what chairs will go with the table. I haven’t refinished the table yet but I’d like to have an idea of what chairs will be going with it. I am currently wrestling with the following options:

You might be able to tell that I am either going for a white or clear chair….

the bedroom cure continues…

Some of the next steps on the room cure involved researching your shopping list, identifying whether the room is warm or cool and begin entering all your shopping list prices into a spreadsheet. I have definitely identified that my room will be cool, with greens, greys and whites being the colour scheme, with odd pops of colour in small doses. The rest of the shopping list is coming along too. Unfortunately since I am hoping to some of my materials second-hand from ebay etc I don’t have images of what they will look like yet, but I have confirmed a few buys on my list.

For the bedside tables I am going to go for the Ikea Bekvam stool, and I think I will paint them white, however I am still deciding whether I want to go with something more bold.

With the bedside lamps I am still undecided. The idea of a wall lamp either side of the bed is appealing as it doesn’t take up space on the table – but I am always adverse to drilling any holes in my walls. If i went for a table lamp I’d like some industrious, however I am beginning to realise just how expensive lamps can get, so it may just have to be something simple.

The dresser is most likely going to be two Ikea Rast dressers painted. There are a few on ebay so I may be able to get two for under $100.  However I am keeping an eye on ebay just in case a lowboy dresser turns up.  The same goes for the chair – I am hoping to get a solid wood chair from ebay for the bedroom chair, and giving it a bit of a paint to liven it up.

The feature pillows, pillowcases and pom-poms will be left for last, as finishing touches for the room, so I won’t start looking until I see more of the bigger picture of the room come together. I am still searching for pieces to go above the bed and on the dresser, and finding the perfect piece might take me a while. 

The shopping list currently is sitting above my budget of $500, but until some things like the art and lamps are decided on I can’t hone it any further.