I'm a winner!!

Apartment Therapy is one of my favorite design & inspiration websites. They frequently have Thursday Giveaways where they award anything from vacuum cleaners to vases to the latest decor accessories. Well, last Thursday they were offering a free consultation with Designers Call, an interior design service that makes house calls! I thought,"What the heck... I could use some professional advice as we try to put our place together," so I entered the giveaway. Tonight I was about to empty the spam box in my email when the words "Congrats from Apartment Therapy" caught my eye. I won!! I'm so excited to a) win something (who doesn't like that?!) and b) have the opportunity to get feedback and ideas from a real designer about our space! Thank you Apartment Therapy and Designers Call!

Finally!

We finally have color on our walls! I don't know why it took me so long to figure out what I wanted to do but we made some decisions and I'm pretty excited about how it all turned out!

Here's our downstairs living/dining room. That's a bright pink/fuschia on that wall and in the little niche. I was going to do green or orange but Kurt persuaded me to do pink after I bought a little sample paint and put a patch of the pink on the wall. It's fun and different and, as I always say, it's just paint! If we get tired of it, we can change it all in the course of a weekend!

The rest of the walls downstairs are a light gray which is my current favorite neutral. :) You can see the rug we got which ended up being a bit different than I expected it to be. It's growing on me but I'm not completely sold on it yet - it's a lot lighter and softer in color than I anticipated. (I guess that's what I get for buying sight unseen on overstock.com!) We still need to paint the fireplace a dark gray and get some art but it's starting to look a little more put together! Yay!

Here's our room. We did a brown gray on all the walls except the one above our bed which is a very fun green! Love it! We still have projects to do but this is coming together too.

The office is a little more of a yellowy green or pea green. I like it. I think it's soothing yet inspiring. Plus, I love the shot of orange and want to incorporate that here and there throughout the room.


This has nothing to do with paint but I wanted to show our new "yard!" We bought some fake grass to put up on our deck and I think it makes the space way more inviting. Plus, now Liv can crawl around out there which has been so fun! Don't worry, we'll have a party here pretty soon!

What is my problem?

I know I haven't blogged about our New York trip but I am working on it and it was a wonderful vacation. Right now I am trying to find a rug. When we were in New York I made a point to go to a few of the cool design stores to try to find something that would fit with our new couches... something fun, modern, different. Well, I found the PERFECT rug! We were meandering through one of my favorite sections of Soho and found a store called The Rug Company (original, I know!) We popped in and the super nice sales guy went through this huge pile of rugs with us and then we saw it.... THE rug. (It would look way better on my dark bamboo floors with my charcoal gray couches... in my opinion, of course!)


It's fun, different, modern AND it has both green and orange in it! (I've been trying to make my mind up about which one to have as my accent color downstairs.) Awesome! And, when we asked if they shipped, they told us they had a store in LA. Even more awesome! The super helpful sales guy wrote down the info for me and then I asked about the price. Ummmmm... yeah. He said it was one of their less expensive rugs because it didn't have any silk in it. Cool... I usually have a knack for picking out the most expensive thing in a store. Seriously, take me to a 99 cent store and I will probably find the one thing that is $1.50. Anyway, the price. $5700. Yeah... for a rug. Needless to say we won't be buying that rug. Not with our budget, and definitely not with a little girl who likes to spit-up.

So, I'm still looking for a rug. What do you think about these:




They are all significantly cheaper than my New York find, but I just can't make up my mind. Am I the only person out there who obsesses about a rug? Probably. If you have an opinion about the rugs, let me know!