One Girl, Two Cats: Finding Your Inspiration

Inspiration can come from many places – magazines and catalogs, other peoples’ homes, a favorite motif, pattern or color, nature, architecture. Lately for me it has been a specific object. For my master bedroom it was this lamp, picked up at Marshall’s for $30-$40.

It is not at all my typical style – more modern than my Shabby-Chic-Meets-Pottery-Barn-in-the-90s look (which I'm slowly trying to update and modernize), and it's blue when I’ve always favored greens. Anyway, once the lamp was purchased, the Target melamine plates and Dwell Studio for Target bedding and striped 100% no-iron cotton sheets from Target joined our household.

I’m in the process of painting my old dressers dark brown to coordinate with the new dresser and the vanity in the adjoining master bath. For the bed, I’m thinking of an aqua blue palette something like this one from Pottery Barn’s teen collection (even though I am far from my teenhood). It is hard for me to commit to color because I do like to change out linens and such with the seasons.

The time has also come to tackle the mess of an office-guest-room-storage-space (it's too messy to even show you a picture. Really) and fortunately I recently scored a pair of vintage Loewenstein cane backed chairs from the thrift and some killer yellowish-green lattice print upholstery fabric that have me swooning and very inspired.

I see lots of great furniture cast-offs on my thrifting trips, and mostly I think “yeah, that would be great if I felt like doing a project, but I don’t” so these chairs must be really special to have inspired me so and they were only $11/pair – go look at what Loewensteins charges for similar chairs in their catalog. Yes, that is $670+ per chair! Score! The plan is to paint the chairs white and redo the seats with the fabric, which was only $3 for 3 yards, get a mattress for the antique brass bed I’ve been storing for years (still on the fence on what to do about the finish – it was painted brown at one time, kind of shabby chic now) and use it as a day bed with some of the extra fabric from the chairs as pillows. I shopped long and hard many years ago for a library table to use for the computer, but I wish there was a way to hide all the electronics junk without getting rid of my desk (I have an idea for that that might work involving my “just hide it all behind a curtain” strategy below – stay tuned).

The one drawback to this room is that it has no closet. I have a cheap shelving unit and dresser that are functional and in good condition, just not very inspiring, and a vanity that I’ve had basically all of my life that I’m not willing to part with and that will serve well for a sewing table, so the plan for right now is to line all of those up along the wall with the “big ugly mirror I haven’t been able to work around” attached to it and then use IKEA’s Kvartal track system and panels to just hide it all. Eventually I’d love to do a built-in custom system. I’ve physically rearranged the room 2 or 3 times in the past year and finally sat down and drew out a measured floor plan with furniture cut-outs so I could rearrange on paper and I think I’m going to do one more rearrange and hopefully be done. Fortunately I don’t think I have to move and rewire computer equipment this time. Anyway, stay tuned, maybe in a year I’ll have this done. I’m hoping the mood board below helps speed me along though, ‘cause I really am sick of this mess.