A little change, please...

I always thought I should have pursued interior design as a vocation.  I've dabbled with staging homes for sale, hung wall paper for friends, and given decorating ideas to those who asked.  I will say my hat's off to the real designers out there - putting yourself between an opinionated husband who thinks he's a contemporary modernist and a whiny wife who just wants "shabby-chic" is nothing short of heroic.

When I was younger (do all old bloggers say that?) I hoisted my own furniture around regularly, re-upholstered chairs, and repainted walls at the drop of a hat. I loved changing my environment along with the seasons or my mood. We've been in the hacienda for 12 years and I hadn't done much of anything to the decor, short of changing a few pillows, rugs and artwork. I have some "Big" decorating challenges which make it a tad difficult to just switch things up...

Like this...

And this...

And my personal favorite decorating nightmare...the "You can never move this, Laurel!" statement piece...

You just can't move these pieces around much in a 2,400 sq foot home...so you move everything around them, you re-cover the sofa pillows, rotate the art, repaint the walls.

After twelve years, suffice it to say that the paint on the walls in the hacienda are looking a little shop-worn. Not that my color palette is dated (aubergine never goes out of style!) but like many of us who are creative, we just get tired of seeing the same thing. Unfortunately, I'm not a fan of painting.  It's not the actual exercise of throwing it up on the walls like an HDTV star...it's more about the bending down, ladder climbing, paint in your hair, manicure demolition and horrid clean-up that I hate.

But over the years Behr paint and I have become tolerant of each other, and it was time. And since the notion of redoing the whole house is daunting for this old blogger, I thought I'd start with the dining room, one of the smallest. And while we're at it, why not do something with that 30-something Macy's dining room table?

While some of you might be cringing now, I should mention that none of my children care anything about "inheriting" this Asian-style table.  Maybe after my make-over, they'll be fighting over it? Who knows. Oh...can you make a Chinese table look Southwest??

 

My daughter and her kids were all to eager to help me paint and redecorate. I stuck the kids outside to tackle the two arm chairs in the heat. (The pool was just a step away, so I'm not the mean Grandma you might think) I only wanted to change the two arm chairs, leaving the side chairs in their original wood. Too much  turquoise can be a "crafty" thing...too matchy-matchy for me.

Meanwhile, Amy and I made our way around the table, adding a Mexican tile motif to the corners. I was not very familiar with chalk paint, but Amy had the recipe to make our own.

We covered the purple walls with Behr's Premium Plus Ultra in "Dolphin Fin" gray and painted the opposite wall in "Suntan Glow", the same terra cotta peachy color that I've used on the fireplace...very Southwest". Michael and Kaitlyn were just dying to paint walls. (I promise that Amy and I were there painting too...just no pictures of two sweaty ladies...you can thank me later)

 

Gray is a very hard color to decorate around...just the subtlest hint of blue or yellow changes the whole room, as does the ambient light.  So my walls turned out a little bluer than I wanted, but the addition of the peach, coral and yellow accents warmed it up a little.

I touched up the shades on the chandelier over the table with some paint.

By the end of the two day job, my back was killing me and I was exhausted...so I drove all over town the next day looking for drapes to replace the green silk swag that had hung over the giant picture windows for 12 years.  I thought about making them but our two local fabric chain stores didn't have *!@#%#% and my Stonemountain was too far away for this tired chick. So I bought the drapes instead of sewing them. Not a fan of Bed Bath and Beyond, but they came through for me this time. They made the room pop.

 

 

 

I need to find some fabric to cover the other chairs, but for now, I'm done with this room. On to the next...maybe I'll wait a few weeks to recover.

Laurel. Pooped.