House Diary: March 2002
© Mari Brodersen
Well . . . maybe "nesting" is too mild a term for what has been transpiring at our house. Whatever one chooses to call the activity around here, the saga continues.
Using Elfa shelving, in February, we redesigned the closet in the guest room (which is now the computer room)so that it better suits our needs.
In March, we received the shelving for our bedroom closet. We didn't do much with it at first, because so many other things needed to be done first (see below). However, when we could at last work on the closet, we found that some of the units we had ordered were missing or were the wrong size. Rather than immediately exchanging for what we thought we needed, we have been living with the new shelving and reconfiguring it every so often to suit our needs. Elfa's versatility, which easily accommodates such remodelings, is one of the reasons we chose this particular brand.
Spring is the season for color and, in keeping with that observation, our off-white bathroom walls have become a cheery canyon rose coral-pink. I am not a morning person, and I wanted bathroom walls that would wake me up! In addition to serving that purpose, the pink walls provide another, and unexpected, benefit. The face I see in the mirror looks less sallow and less lined, perhaps even slightly youthful. That's right, ladies - the pink light reflected from the walls makes our complexions look younger. Pink - my new favorite color!
It was a little more difficult to decide on a color for the bedroom walls. In addition, we weren't sure we should paint both bedrooms the same color. The guest room receives a glorious flood of direct sunlight, while the master bedroom's windows are shaded by trees and patio walls.
As I mentioned last month, Ron likes warm, vivid colors while I prefer soft, cool tones. We had reached an impasse. Then I read, in one of the several decorate-with-color books I'd bought, that one should not overlook a non-preferred color. Going back over our notes and preferences, I noticed that neither of us had paid much attention to the green family. Ron and I decided to explore the greens a little more. Neither of us cares for yellow-green as a decorator color, and it would probably look out of place in our Southwestern color palette. But we found a whole world of blue-greens to explore. For our bedroom, we chose a robin's egg blue (actually a soft blue-green) for the walls, and white for the Southwestern beehive fireplace. The contrast is very pleasing. We then painted the guest room a darker shade of the same color, which turned out to be the perfect choice for the natural light that room receives.
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