Home Prep

I've been in the midst of a big life change, involving a lot of designing, planning, and commuting. And within my hectic confines I've been trying to find the time for work, play, design, and creativity. To help me clarify and streamline some ideas, (and in preparation for tomorrow's post) I thought I'd share a bit of what I've done to help organize my space!

I started with a cork board. I've found them to be very expensive at Staples and Office Depot, but Ikea sells them for 6$ here. I explored design sites like Houzz and Pinterest, Dwell Living and AllModern.com to get some ideas about fusing together what my husband and I already like. In our case, we happen to love Midcentury Modern and contemporary design mixed with Art Deco.

I grabbed ideas online as well as from magazine tears and cut them out. To this, I added items I had already purchased to see how they would "marry" together. You can obviously do this online if you have layout expertise, but I like to move things around a board and see what works. Everything shown above was inspired and bought or copied. Things we found and purchased were added to the board to flesh out what our home would eventually look like!

I pinned and overlapped all my images to help determine color and style. I also added paint swatches since my house was going to be in desperate need of paint, wood stripping and lot of electrical work...

And although it's only about 50% finished, we were able to take our new living room from a purple, mustard, chocolate, pink and yellow monstrosity, to this soft, pale grey and white with stripped beans and new lamps and wiring, new fireplace tones and all new accents. All with the planning help of a cork board!

The original,  fire-engine brickwork in our living-room is now the perfect shade of dove grey! And the hideous lamp that hung before has been replaced with a ball of crystalline light. (No easy wiring feat either)!!

And we've begun to augment the kitchen from a disastrous melange of eggplant, purple and beige, to a funky, 60's style nook. I can't wait to share more images when our home is complete and renovations and furniture are all in place!

But keep reading for tomorrow's blog on how we tackled my latest, closet challenge. Until then, if you're feeling a little drab, grab a board and get cracking!

With love,

Noa B