Summer Living......Room etc.

I am really excited for this week! It has been a long time coming, and I will be moving everything over to a warehouse. I will still be doing my painting here just for the sake of how much easier it is to work around Wren's schedule, but all my furniture will be stored, sorted and kept paint-dust free. Maybe once she is in school or a little older I will switch over to the warehouse full-time. This will give me twice the work room and will hopefully allow me to take on more clients per week. But what I am looking forward to most is setting up a more organized studio area for my supplies!

The surprising effect this move has had is that I am finally starting to minimize the disorder that the constant shuffle of furniture around here causes. I am a capricorn and at the end of the day I like to know that some things are constant and settled. So I have started "letting" myself keep certain things that I might have otherwise let go in the natural cycle of buying and selling stuff from home.

Be warned that I have probably gone overboard on pictures for this post... so please bear with me LOL.

Today Wren and I wanted to have a little fun while Sean was at work so we hit a HUGE park downtown and when I looked up this is what I saw. That's not a trick of the camera, and I thought it was quite amazing!

Wren isn't a capricorn, by just a day, but she is like her momma and sticks with what works. She figured out how to do slides on her own this month and we pretty much stuck to this one all afternoon.

She definitely had a blast... and while she was doing more of this back at home I got to have my own version of fun: playing with accessories and finishing our living room!

My drive to finally pull it all together started with this table. I was unsure about it at the time because of it's chunky style, but it was exactly what the room needed. It isn't often I come across a longgggg console table like this. In fact, it is over 6 feet long, and I am fairly certain it is a home made project by someone because there are no markings or stickers as far as where or when it was manufactured.

Since it was unusual I took the plunge!

I knew it would span the wall with my drift wood and so I wanted to give it an aged grey finish to compliment the drift wood.

I only exposed the original pine is a few small areas and primarily kept it to just the white and grey paint.

Since it was such a long surface and the first wall you see in the room from the front door I didn't want to clutter it with a lot of stuff, and it had to be just the right combo of accessories.

I made a stop at HomeSense to see what they had on clearance that would maybe help me out.

I didn't know which ones I would like best, so I decided to bring them all home and then return what didn't work out. These all ranged from $10-$13 each which was a super deal!

I had been eyeing these black terracotta pots in this caddy for about a month now and was enthralled to find in on clearance for $20... it was the first thing in my cart!

I bought this antique wooden bowl at an estate sale for $40 in Palm Springs back in April and have been waiting for the perfect spot.

I like to bring everything out and then try pretty much every combination until it feels right to me. This is obviously the most subjective part, and everyone has a different perspective but I wanted it to feel fresh, clean and simple. I am not a cluttered-vignette kind of girl.

So I thought it over for a few days and settled on one I liked. As soon as I put it all together I felt like I was done (for now at least LOL), which doesn't happen often unless I am really happy with it all~

In case you don't remember, this is what the living room looked like when we bought the house:

The day we moved in we just sort of piled everything in here and that seems to be when this room turned into a revolving door of furniture.

And here it is today! (including a sweet cameo by my beloved Mung Kee)

Thanks to my new pot caddy I have now planted about half of the thyme my mom sent over.

I am still on the hunt for the perfect rug, hopefully a lot larger than the one that is in here now. But rugs are that size tend to be pricey so I am holding out until it feels right.

My final decision was to go with the chrome lanterns and the bowl, with extra pillows stacked for guests in grey baskets.

I love how thyme looks a little unruly.

I like to think of my style as a combination of coastal, what I call "vintage minamalist", and hints of french country.

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I am pretty happy with how it feels right now... and things will probably stay in this general style.

But who knows if it will look completely different in a week or month from now~