At least once a month someone asks me to come up with a new way to show wallpaper.  You’d think that it’s main purpose (ie. on a wall) would be the ideal scenario, but I find that “new and exciting” is what I’m often asked to come up with.  So it was with great pleasure that I came across the book Wallpaper Projects by Derek Fagerstrom and Lauren Smith.

Their book features so many creative ways to use wallpaper that I got tingly all over!  (And the best part is the majority of their projects aren’t inventive for the sake of being filler to get to a certain page count for their book.  No!  In fact, many of these you might actually consider doing in your home!)   Here are a couple of my favorites:

Wallpapering the stair treads?  I love it!  Just a single roll would give you maximum impact!

I don’t think you know how much I love this.  I can never seem to commit to a bed frame that I love for for my master bedroom and therefore haven’t had one for years.  (It’s like the cobbler whose children have no shoes, right?)  Anyways…I think this could be an interesting solution for me.

These look simple to make and the effect is undeniably great.

I know, I know…we’ve seen silhouettes a dozen times already.  Everyone is doing them now.  But this one is particularly cute, so I had to post.  It’s a great use for those wallpaper scraps & samples that you never seem to know what to do with.  (At least, I never know what to do with.  I must have four random rolls of wallpaper sitting in my closet right now that I love, but didn’t have enough to do a big project with.)

Anyways…there are a ton of other great ideas as well as all the instructions on how-to in this book, so I definitely recommend it.

This weekend we re-arranged the furniture & art in the living room.  It feels SO much better.  I’m not sure why it took me so long to do it because I’ve hated the way I’d initially laid out the room from the beginning.  (I was probably stuck doing other projects.)  Anyways…the one thing I haven’t had the energy to tackle is my weird fireplace facade and ugly mantle.  I’m still not going to tackle it at the moment since it involves demolition and I’m in the throes of doing that in the half-bathroom.  So I thought I’d just redecorate the mantle.  Here are my inspiration pics.

We’re probably going with the last idea because the mantle itself is kinda wonky and might not hold anything really heavy.  Plus we collect postcards from all of our travels.  It could be a good way to show them off.

(Lastly, I wish I could give photo credit for these, but I only know two of them.  The red sofa is from the Wallpaper Projects by Derek Fagerstrom and Lauren Smith.  The last photo is from an old issue of Domino.  I’ve had the others saved in my inspiration file for ages.)

It’s been almost a hundred years since we actually finished the guest room, but I just realized that I never officially posted the “after” pictures of our work.   (If you like to snoop like me, then you may have already poked around my flickr and seen them, but since 99.9% of you don’t do that…I thought it might be nice to share.)  And because everyone needs a healthy dose of perspective, here are the BEFORE shots:

Pretty bluesy, right?  I mean…those mirrored closet doors made me want to poke an eye out.  (Not to mention one of them had broken glass.)   Anyways…so here is our AFTER shots:

Yes, you are correct our floors are slightly slanted…as is easily visible in shot #2.  Also, here’s the post showing the original inspiration for the guest room makeover.  On a completely un-related note, Nick has decided that whenever someone comes to visit and stays in our guest room he’d take a portrait of that guest(s), and we’d start a portrait collection.  And here’s the first one he did to celebrate our first guest since the room’s overhaul.  (It’s my best friend and soon-to-be maid of honor Ashley.)

And of course, all photo credit for the AFTER shots goes to Nick.   All the BEFORE shots….well those were all mine. 

I can’t even HANDLE the BEAUTY!!  I mean…making all your invitations out of vintage hankies?!  OMG…If I had more energy (and money) to start digging for vintage hankies, then I probably would.  As it stands now, I’m probably going to have to let this idea go by the wayside, but it literally KILLS me to do it!!

via bird & banner (oh, B&B how I love thee.)

via Green Wedding Shoes

Besides, if I used this as a Save the Date idea, how in the world would I top it for an invitation?   Everything else after that would surely seem like a letdown.  I just wish there was a way (that I knew of) to get the feeling of using a vintage hankie without having to collect 100 hankies.  Hmm…  if any of you have any thoughts on that, let me know!  (Or if you have any great invitation ideas for DIY.)

I’ve been meaning to post about stylist / creative director Faye Toogood for awhile now because I love her work so much.  It seems like often when I’ve seen one of those magical photo editorials (in the World of Interiors for instance) it was Faye who helped create it.   At any rate, these gorgeous images speak for themselves.

photographer: Bill Batten

photographer: Gregoire Alexandre

photographer: Tom Mannion

photographer: Tom Mannion

photographer: Tobias Harvey

Head over to her website for more deliciousness!  This was only just a taste after all!

First, let me say that I dislike showing photos of my house looking disheveled and ripped apart.  I realize that is part of the draw [for all of us] in reading a house blog, but it’s just that I find it somehow embarrassing as if I’m being caught picking my nose.  You know?  People gawk and stare…but not in that good way.   At any rate, in spite of not feeling as if I have anything great to show, I also feel as if real pictures (meaning warts & all photos) of my house are overdue.  So here you go.

I’ve been furiously trying to work on my guest room in time for my mother to come and visit, but the house seems to be fighting against me.  It’s as if this room just doesn’t want a nice, beautiful paint job…and to be decorated.  I present to you exhibit A.

The walls in this room are just all kinds of frustrating.  First off, they’re plaster… underneath a layer of wallpaper… underneath two layers of paint.  Sounds great, huh?   However, it’s not the painted wallpaper that bothers me, as you might think.  No, the wallpaper is actually the thin paper kind…so the fact that it’s been painted over isn’t that big of a deal.  Besides a few seams that I’m having to cut out and sand over, it’s not that bad.  It’s just that underneath this window I have a slight bit of dampness that has come in from the windowsill and it’s made the old stuff separate from the wall.  Therefore I’ve been scraping and will have to spackle it, sand it smooth….etc etc.  Oh, and did I mention that I’m also struggling to find the perfect shade to paint the walls?  Why is choosing a paint color sometimes the hardest part of the job?  For the record, I think Martha Stewart does a great job with her paint swatch program at Lowes.  (And if you’ve got lots of expendable cash to throw around, I love Farrow & Ball’s paint colors.)

Did I mention that my mom arrives this Friday?  Yeah….guess what is NOT getting done by then?  I’ll probably end up doing as much work as I can this week after work, cleaning up the mess, putting clean sheets on the bed, and calling it a day.  Not exactly how I’d like for her to spend her Thanksgiving in my guest room, but for now it’s going to have to do.  On the bright side, the first time she came to visit I had no working bathroom.

Anyways…to give you an idea of what I hope for it to look like some day in the future, here’s my inspiration images ripped from the pages of various magazines:

Wish me luck as I keep plugging ahead.

Today sfgirlbybay posted about the new “My Deco” tool on the Domino website, and so I headed over there to have a peak.  I have to say that I wasn’t optimistic about what I was going to find.  Most of the online decorating “tools” are clunky DIY-style visualizers, but this is like an online folder to store all those great images you love.  And what’s better, be able to search through other people’s deco files for great stuff that you may have missed.  I spent several hours today messing around with it, and found lots of great stuff.  Here’s a glimpse of what I’ve started so far.

If you haven’t already been toying with it (which I suspect many of you have since their website got REALLY slow later in the day), then you should go over and test it out.  There’s lots of great photos to see!!

Mixing tiles, originally uploaded by Anna Linder.

It’s like a giant patchwork quilt of color. So fab. Too bad, I’m more of a white tile / grey grout kinda girl. I can daydream, can’t I?!