2 Dramatic Blue Gray Dining Nooks with Orange Accents & LPs!

Blue & orange. If you know a thing or two about the color wheel then you know the BAM! that this complementary color scheme has to offer. Blue and orange are definitely a color trend now in film, video, media. Think CSI Miami! Anyways, here are 2 young but not juvenile dining spaces with deep navy walls the perfect accents of orange. This rooms also have something else in common: records! Being a vinyl hoarder, I love to see records used in design.

Celerie Kemble dining nook

The first room is from designer Celerie Kemble’s portfolio. This is a cool space. It’s a little more modern than what I do, but it has vintage. OK, so the room isn’t “navy” but it is a bit of squid ink paint shade, so there is some blue in that gray. This gray appears more “blue” with the touches of orange. I love dark gray walls. It is a bit of a “modern” shade and it can come across as very masculine, but it packs drama. You want to transform a room in a weekend, paint it this color. Everything you own will look completely different. Whites will pop and blacks will shine. Anyways, I love the record storage in this nook! It is so clever to have it under the seating in a small space. I got to tell David. He need to build us one of these.  Anyways, this is a cozy space, very hip. I want to listen to records and lounge around drinking beer and eating guacamole and chips in this nook. *Oh, I love the textiles in here because it keeps this color combo and space from being too masculine. It’s a nice balance.

The other dining room or nook is from Rejuvenation’s website. It is a really cool space as well and totally reminds me of the early 1910-1940’s Craftsman homes in the Seattle area being fixed up by young adults like ourselves. (Rejuvenation is based in the PNW). This dining room is the kind of dining room you’d see in our neighborhood while your taking the dog out for an evening stroll. It’s classic but it has a special type of vintage lust seen in the under 40 crowd. I guess what I’m saying is that I love the look of vintage mid-modern pieces shoved into a Craftsman. The cool thing about this space is that you remove the furniture and the accessories and you have a classic Craftsman home that appeals to everyone. You didn’t do anything to ruin the vibe or the bones of the house. You worked with the house and added your tastes without destroying the authenticity of the home. I’m all about that.

Rejuvenation dining room

Anyways, I love this room. Once again, it is a “squid ink” shade that looks awesome against that white mill work. The orange accents are brilliant in this room. The lighting isn’t very typical of old homes but it has a nice vibe, a young vibe. I love the records on the ledge (recognize a few from our own collection). And one can never go wrong with a Saarinen table.

I guess we are going to try to finish the upstairs bathroom this weekend. I have to admit that I’d rather do something else, you know, like something fun. Oh, well. This house isn’t going to renovate itself. Bummer.

-Victoria

Read Full Post »

Our 2 “Green Tea” Thrift Chairs

Some of our weekend thrift haul

As if we don’t have a million other projects to wrap up, my chair fetish caused me drag in three more chairs this past weekend. I couldn’t pass them up. I love chairs. I love to “fix” them up. Here’s 2 chairs that we bought for under $3 each. I call these the “green tea” chairs because their color reminds me of brewed green tea. I think this shade only happens to old green things covered in tarry cigarette smoke. It’s one of my favorite colors. I really do like the damage that cigarette smoke does to furniture and paintings, haha. It’s like tea staining everything. So, yeah, these chairs are pretty darn grotty.

Does anyone know how to clean old vinyl furniture? These chairs are filthy. In the pic above, I have washed these chairs with Murphy Oil Soap twice. You would not believe how dirty the water has been both times. The pic is doing the chairs some favors. They are much dirtier in real life. Pen ink marks are on the mid-century modern chair. And the chairs are just so dirty. Any suggestions on what to use to clean these? I keep reading that people clean up these mid-century modern vinyl chairs with soap and water. That’s not really cutting it. I need your ancient vinyl cleaning secrets 🙂

I’ll scrub them again today with Murphy Oil Soap solution again and lots of elbow grease. I’m not really fretting because I like these chairs and I don’t go for perfection, I do like some imperfections.  And the price of these chairs were cheaper than 1 large green tea latte. I’m not losing much. I still need to clean up the wood, maybe coat the wood with Howard Wax to disguise visible scratches and add a nice sheen.

-Victoria

Read Full Post »

2 Sunny Yellow Living Rooms

Country Living yellow living room

I’m not a fan of the yellow living room but I can really appreciate these two that I have recently found. The first one is from Country Living magazine. I can appreciate this one because it sort of creepy. It’s bold and bright but somehow strangely dark and morbid. Perhaps it is the portrait over the mantel doing all of that work. It doesn’t help that that eery pic is surrounded by dead and bare branches in little urns. That being said, that is one of the reasons that I love this room. A few other shots are available on the magazine’s website. You can see that the table is Moroccan in design and that there is a zebra rug, my weakness. This room has a quilt draped over a couch and I still am not running away screaming. Somehow that quilt makes the room a little bit morbid. So thumbs up to this room for making yellow a little bit of a gothic shade.

The other room designed by Jamie Drake is much less morbid and much more playful, sunny, and just mood elevating. The colors are bright. I love teal used anywhere and the teal and yellow really work well together.

Jamie Drake living room

It’s a mid-century modern look and that is usually a winner. It all works so well with the chocolate brown furniture and flooring.

P.S. We are moving into our mess this weekend! The top floor is almost finished and I’ll be sure to post pics as soon as the home gets internet ready. Have a great weekend and relax for us!

-Victoria

Read Full Post »

Vintage Inspired Teal Kitchens

Country Living kitchen

I plan on painting our kitchen a mint. It’s going to be kitschy and retro. This is today’s project: paint the kitchen. The groovy wallpaper has been removed, the faux fur has been pulled off the cabinets, everything has been scrubbed. We are ready to start painting.

While poking around online (when I had the time to do that) I found this kitschy turquoise/teal kitchen in Country Living magazine. It’s a bit prop-ish for a kitchen but it is adorable. I love the pairing of teal and red. It’s a sunny and a happy hausfrau kitchen. It means business with a touch of love. It’s a nice eat-in kitchen. I love the repro appliances. Those are drool worthy. And the repro linens used as curtains is cute. I think I saw these exact same ones at Anthropologie one time. I am always looking for a function for vintage linens. Anyways, this is a cute kitchen and pretty versatile really. It is made 50’s by the use of accessories. Take those out and you’ll have a very different looking kitchen.

This other kitchen is a real kitchen from www.trickmybrick.blogspot.com. This is an awesome blog about  the renovation of an otherwise plain mid-century home. (David and I always thought we would be fixing up a ranch home, but we’re in the Pacific Northwest now and there are many more bungalows.) Anyways, I adore this blog. I love their clean, modern style. Oh, and I am a sucker for “before and after” shots. (Heck, I was a makeup artist). This is the “after” of their kitchen. It is such a pretty shade of teal. I have always said it and this just proves it, a sputnik chandelier will always make a room look like a million bucks. This kitchen is the perfect example. It totally jazzes up the place. (Like I needed another reason to lust for one). Also, I love the cabinet hardware. It’s simple and fitting. This is what we are looking for. Visit their blog for many more pics. You’ll love it.

Trick My Brick kitchen, after.

These are two very cute “retro” kitchens. Teal is a great color because it is vintage but very clean, airy, welcoming. It’s the perfect color for a “working” home. Plus, it looks amazing with white. I see a teal room and just think “happy family”. So, I hope I like the results of the hardwork that we will be doing today.

-Victoria

Read Full Post »

I Should Be Emptying The Rental House In 100 Degree Heat…

But, I’m just worn out and need a break. Even if a break means sticking to the computer chair while the vintage fan blows scorching hot air from outside into my face. Our inside thermometer reads 95. It’s misery and I get to load, pack, carry furniture and David’s Talentmaker  into a beat up U-Haul. Oh, and I get to singe my nose hairs with the vapors of bleach in hopes of getting a security deposit back. What a great day!

A perfect living room

Anyways, enough of my whining over a miserable heatwave here in the Pacific Northwest. I’m from the Southeast. I’ve seen these temps before but never without the modern marvel of a/c. So, while I sweat out pounds and pounds of liquid, I would like to share a room that makes me happy. I love this vintage modern living room. When I think of all of the hard work that I am doing now and all of the misery of the renovation ahead of me, I think about how it will all be worth it in the end. (Geez, I hope so. Talk to me in 6 months and still see if I say this stuff.) I like this simple room. I love the architectural details, the robin’s egg blue walls, the not so frou-frou chandelier, the wide planked wood floors. This room would be lovely in the nude, but it really looks great with help of the mid-century modern furniture. The lines are simple, the colors muted. And it looks like what we already have in our possession. It’s a nice way to make our 40’s-60’s furniture work with our mid-30’s house. I really can’t wait until we get to transform the place. Rumor has it we close tomorrow, but we’ve heard this before so it is hard for me to trust anyone. Until then I’ll be working hard, working on developing the ugliest heat rash ever, and working on keeping it all together. We still don’t know officially where we will be living. That being said. If you don’t hear from us in a while we are either homeless sleeping on the park benches by the ferry terminal, hiding in a remote cabin around Mt. Baker, or in our new house working hard and waiting for it to be internet ready.

-Victoria

Read Full Post »