Bad Habits and my Hilarious Husband

This comic showed up on my desk a few days ago. The morning after we had a conversation about a chair in our bedroom. Correction: make that a chair that used to be in our bedroom. I moved it to another room a week or so ago. To make way for step stool and tools and the mess of wallpaper removal. (I know. Ick.) Husband had asked "Where are you going to put your piles?", referring of course to the odds and ends, bits and pieces of wardrobe and handbag contents and shopping bags and folded-but-not-yet-put-away laundry that inevitably found a temporary home on that particular chair. All the time. To his smarty-pants question, I replied "Nowhere, I guess" realizing that I hadn't left a "pile" of anything in the bedroom since moving that chair. There is another chair in the room but we use it as a chair should be used, for reading and shoe-tying and the like, so it has never been a way station. Always a chair. I never developed the habit of dropping things there. So I'm thinking now, if the only real "purpose" the currently absent chair ever had was to attract piles, and if I'm not making piles since it's been gone, shouldn't it just stay gone? I think so.

Is there anything in your home that has proved more useful as a developer of bad habits than for its intended purpose? A convenient table or chair that makes it too easy to simply drop things and leave them for later, but later never comes? A basket meant to be a transition spot for shoes or newspapers that rarely gets emptied? A home office "in" box that's become a "leave it here forever" box? I'll bet there is. And, honestly, I think we all have a spot like that. Maybe a few. But I'll tell you, getting rid of that chair, which inadvertently helped me kick a bad habit, is feeling pretty good right now. So I'm going to take a look around the house, as I prepare for fall maintenance and repairs and nesting, to see if I can find any other "bad habit makers" to get rid of.

Tell me about your "bad habit makers". Or the one you had that you removed and kicked. I'd really like to know that I'm not the only one with this "problem". And as the husband reads the blog, you'd be doing me a big favor if he could see it's not just me! Oh, and tell me too if you think he's as hilarious as he thinks he is for having clipped this comic, leaving it "anonymously" for me to find. He's a regular laugh riot, that one.


I'll confess that I did enjoy the cartoon enough to add it to my growing "gallery of chairs" on the right sidebar. Scroll down, down, down, a little bit further, there it is! If I can't fill my house with great chairs, I'll just have to collect them here.

Color Me Quizzical

Finally! My September House Beautiful has arrived! I'd seen hints of it here and there. A sneak peek of Windsor Smith's beautiful, colorful home, something about Eric Cohler's bold color choices. Actually, the whole issue is about color. Color theory, color "personalities", color trends for fall, you name it. The most fun part though? The tidbits of expert color psychology beginning on page 94 and the color quiz on the very last page. If you don't already have this issue, or don't plan to pick it up, here are the color quiz questions. And my answers. As much to entertain myself as to illustrate for you that, when it comes to colors, there aren't really right and wrong answers. Personal preferences and better or worse choices for sure. Answering these questions, according to the HB editors, is meant to lead you to choosing better colors for your home. Or show you that you're already on the right track. So here we go:

1) What's the first color you see in the morning? Creamy ivories and golden tans on my bed linens and furniture.


This creamy, dreamy bedroom by Phoebe Howard is inspiring my current master makeover.

2) What color are your eyes? Green outlined with blue.

3) What color do you wear the most? Greens, blues and browns.

Colors I wear all the time, although not so flamboyantly, stolen from Rosemary.

4) What color do you never wear? Purple makes me look like a corpse. Pinks don't often make it into my closet either.

5) What color do you wear when you want to feel sexy? Green or black, maybe both at the same time.

6) What color gets you the most compliments? Olive green.

Greek olives. Yum.

7) What color is your lipstick? Gloss only, no color.

8) What color was your living room when you were growing up? Burnt earth-tones and browns. It was the Seventies!

Mmm. Remember Herculon? The teflon of textiles.


9) What color was your bedroom when you were growing up? Yellow and gold and cherry blossom pink then yellow with sky blue and spring green.

10) What color are your sheets? Creamy, buttery ivory.

11) What color was your favorite crayon as a child? Blue-green and green-blue equally.(Those were two different crayons right?)

Picasso's "Fleurs", 1961. Pastel and crayon on paper.

12) What color is your car? Silver. (isn't everyone's?)

13) What color was your prom dress? No prom, no dress.

Do you think an olive green prom dress would have been a good choice in 1979?


14) What's your favorite gemstone? Peridot, my husband's birthstone. I used to say Emerald, which is mine, but I like his better. As a girl, my favorite gemstone was Opal... which turned out to be my daughter's birthstone. Weird.

15) What is your favorite flower? Alstroemeria; pretty from a distance, amazing up close.

Yellow alstroemeria, above, lower left, and apricot-coral, center of photo. Pretty, bright spots in my garden.

16) What color makes you happiest? A warm, sunny yellow. See it above and below: the color of my yellow alstroemeria and the label on my favorite wine.

17) What color depresses you? Burgundy. Wine. Merlot. Whatever you want to call it, I don't like it. Unless it's in my glass.

The only "wine" that comes into my house!


18) What color calms you? There's a lot of red in my living room and, contrary to what color theory tells us about red being stimulating, I find that room very cozy and calming. (What does that mean? Maria, are you reading this?)

Red chair, red ottoman, red rug. Too much red? Not for me.

19) What color makes you grind your teeth? Bright, pumpkin-y orange and burnt, rusty oranges used in the wrong way. Like on a house. (You know who you are, my neighbor around the block. ugh.)

20) What color would you like to try, but are scared to? Colors don't scare me but I would never use purple in my own home. Lilac, maybe. Periwinkle, definitely. But no purple.

Periwinkle agapanthus are welcome in from the garden whenever they're in bloom.

So that's me. In living color. My answers reveal that I'm partial to creamy warm yellows, earthy olive greens, little bits of blue and a healthy dose of red, all tempered with ivory and brown. Yep, sounds like my house! Take the quiz yourself and find out what colors you are. Did any of your answers surprise you? Make you rethink your decor? Make you nostalgic for the Seventies? If nothing else, isn't it good to know that interior design doesn't always have to be so serious?

Goin' to The Bowl

Here's what my weekend looks like so far:

A little bit of this...


...a little bit of that...

...some of this if I have time...

...and as much of this as I can stand.

It's going to be very warm in Pasadena on Sunday. Likely requiring more than one frozen lemonade. Here's what's on my "look for" list:

1) Old white-painted window of a certain size for a particular project but only if it's cheap in case I change my mind after I get it home.

2) Vintage tablecloths that match my kitchen and won't mind being cut up for another project.

3) A shiny glass "something" for the coffee table.

4) A replacement Autumn Leaf salt shaker, with a handle, for my mom because she broke hers.

5) Old presidential campaign buttons and patriotic Americana ephemera for the husband.

And, of course, I'm open to anything else that reaches out and begs to come home with me (as long as it's not a bowl or a chair... I have too may bowls already and no more room for chairs!) Wish me luck that we get there early and don't have a meltdown before we find some fun stuff!

What do your weekend plans look like?



The bowls up top are not my own, the photo is via countryliving.com. But if I find any this weekend that look as great as these, I will totally go back on my word and buy more bowls. How do you think I got as many as I have now?

Glad Summer Sunsets

It's only the fifth of August, but I can feel fall sneaking up on me. The weather is odd. Very warm but not unbearably hot. Humid mornings, breezy afternoons. Thunder storms just over the mountains and the sun setting a little bit earlier every day. School starts in a few short weeks and regardless of what the calendar says, for many, myself included, the first day of school is the first day of fall. So before summer slips away much further, taking this particular bloom with it, I must get my Flower of the Month post published.

The Gladiolus, August's Birth Flower, has burst into bloom with the colors of summer sunsets. Their clean, tropical hues come directly from the warmest side of the rainbow-- red, fuchsia, orange, hot pink, chrome yellow. At the end of their own season in the garden, flamboyant Glads represent perfectly these bright, sultry days of late summer. Come September, summer and the Gladiolus will both be gone.

Some, perhaps not ever ready to say goodbye to summer, choose to keep the season all year 'round by bringing the warm, happy exuberance of the Gladiolus into their homes.

Both images above via "An Indian Summer"

via "Style Redux"

Angie Hranowsky

Fiona Newell Weeks

Angie Hranowsky

Kathryn M. Ireland

Amanda Nisbet

Gary McBournie

via "Style Redux"

via "Marie Claire Maison"

Stephen Shubel

I couldn't resist including this shot of a Stockholm apartment, above, designed by Swedish architects Tham & Videgard Hansson. Found on the blog Dezeen, it literally defies description. Click on the photo to read the post and see the rest of this remarkable space. Trust me, you don't want to miss it and you might not know what to make of it!

And finally, the art at the top of this post is a detail of this digital art print called "Gladiola Fiesta" by Gayle Lee, available here. I love how the bright hues are muted, and the shapes a bit blurred; blending and fading into each other like the colors and memories of a summer almost past.

Let's Play "Lamp Shade Switcheroo"!

In this previous post, (that, judging by the comments, turned out to be more about Kitty than the lessons she taught!) I talked about buying an affordable lamp base that looks more high-end than it costs and then upgrading it further by replacing the shade.

A few days after that post published, I received an email about a local lamp store's sale. I looked around at their offerings and started imagining how I might mix and match them to get an even better lamp... or at least a lamp that I liked better than any of the sale items as is.

First, I was struck by the pretty shade on the lamp you see here, above. Light tan "faux silk" with applied gold foil leaves. The base, however, which is called "Deep Bronze Artichoke", is not especially appealing visually nor is it very artichoke-like. When I think "artichoke", I see lamps like these, below, from Stray Dog Designs and Regina Andrew at Macy's. Now those are artichokes!

So now the hunt begins! I've spent $79.95 for the first lamp and I'm off to find more sale lamps that can provide potential new bases for our foil leaves shade. I searched and searched all the pages and here, below, in my humble opinion, are the three best contenders.

Sorry about cutting off the corners of the shade on the center lamp! For some reason more complex than my photo-editing skills could deal with, I simply couldn't get that particular photo to share the same proportions as the others. In real life, the overall lamp is actually shorter than the other two by an inch or so. This is where I should say that I kept proportion and height in mind when searching for base candidates. They're all very similar in height to the original "artichoke" lamp. The shades on these three bases are also nearly identical in size to the foil leaves shade I'm replacing them with. That's important to remember when you're playing this game. Definitely swap only lamp shades of the same size. And the same shape too if you want to play it really safe. These shades are all in the shape known as "empire".

I'll admit, none of these lamps is overly objectionable. The third one is actually quite chic with its banded shade and glossy base (and you should see its big brother the floor lamp!). The first two though have very plain shades and I think they could benefit from a little jazzing up! So here are my new lamps:

This one, above, is my favorite. I'm calling this style "eco chic". The brown wood base is grooved giving it an interesting texture that nicely contrasts with the smooth shiny leaves on the shade and at the same time plays well with the slightly coarse weave of the fabric. I can picture it solo on an entry hall table or as one of a pair on either side of your organic cotton-dressed bed. Total price for this "new" lamp: 79.95 shade + 69.95 base = $149.90

Our second makeover, above. Again, I apologize for the weird cropping job! Please use your fantastic imagination to see the entire lamp base and how well the brass footing coordinates with the gold and tan on the shade. The pretty celadon color of the ceramic gourd base complements the golds above and below and makes me want to call this style "vintage modern"; the vintage elements being the celadon color, brass footing, and gourd shape. The gourd base can also be considered a modern element as this shape has re-emerged in today's interiors, and the bold graphics on the shade can also read quite modern. I'd like to see this one, all by itself, as part of a bohemian-vintage-eclectic living room. 79.95 shade + 143.93 base = $223.88.

Finally, I'm calling this one, above, "far east glam" and I want to see two of them on the sleek sideboard of a very dramatic dining room. The glossy black base has a stylized bamboo or pagoda feeling and the shine here supports the shiny foil on the shade. The gold and black color combo plus silk and shine on the shade lend even more glamour. This one's the best deal: 79.95 shade + 49.95 base = $129.90

Now that you've swapped shades and cleverly created a newer, better lamp more to your liking, what do you do with the leftover base and shade? If the base and shade fit together as they should, here are my suggestions:

1) Experiment with covering or painting the plain shade and create another "better" lamp--for free! (Eddie does that in this post. Take a look.)

2) Set it out at your next tag sale or take it to a local consignment shop and recover a little bit of the original cost. That makes the new fancy lamp you kept an even better deal!

3) If you, like I do, have any just-moved-out offspring, give the lamp to him or her. It may not be the best looking lamp on the planet, but hey, beggar's can't be choosers!

Please, let me know what you think of this idea. (Even if you think I've lost my mind!) And remember, if you decide to attempt such a "switcheroo", your lamp and base do not have to come from the same source. I only did that here for the sake of simplifying my exercise; one-stop-shopping is not something I usually advise. And if you've ever done this yourself, I want to know about that too! Thanks for playing!!

The "lampshade ladies" up top were found by happy accident during a google search. They appeared in several places so I can't really say with certainty who they are or where they're from. What I can say is they look like they know how to have fun! And that's welcome here any time.