neutralize, neutralize

It really comes as no shock, but apparently my husband and I are not the "average" home buyers. The average home buyer wants neutral walls ("Pottery Barn" colors are also popular I hear), flower boxes and (as previously discussed) granite counter tops: these are the things I learned after having our house on tour this morning. We took care of the granite, so I guess the next thing to tackle are the brightly hued walls--sounds like a great project during my eighth month of pregnancy. But I have to ask--how do you distinguish one beige from the next? Are all shades of beige created equal?

According to Benjamin Moore, the following rich neutral hues are great to consider without sacrificing the feeling of color in a space. It's a far cry from the bright blue that currently coats my dining room walls, but I can see barley working in that space.

Other suggestions from Benjamin Moore--in this case to help maximize your space--are the light neutrals below that magically make a room feel more spacious. While I find it boring, manchester tan could possibly cover the acid yellow walls in our bedroom.

Of course, I'm not breaking out the paintbrush just yet (or rather, I'm not enlisting my husband to do so). I want to get my realtor's advice on the subject and weigh the pros and cons of the situation. Is it really worth the time and money only to end up selling our house for less than we'd hoped anyway? Is it a great time to take on such a project with the baby due next month? But on the other hand, will it sell the house?

going on tour

Tomorrow my realtor is putting our house on "tour" (I believe that's the official lingo), hoping that brokers will stop in and check out the property during a given two-hour window. I'm psyched to have some foot traffic come through here, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that someone has the perfect client in mind to show them our house. Of course all this means that I'm spending tonight getting the house ready. And tonight my son decided to throw half his dinner on the floor, chuck all his toys out of the bathtub and pee on the floor--how do they know?

The good news is that I run a pretty tight ship around here, so the house stays relatively in order (especially while my husband is traveling and isn't home to turn our dining room into his home office).   I just hope the slightly overgrown front yard isn't a turn off to anyone...the "lawn guy" will be back in town on Thursday.

i heart eBay

What can I say? I love eBay! I've often said if you want something, anything, there's someone on eBay who wants to sell it to you. Just yesterday I discovered the Vladimir Kagan lookalike Lucite chair that I couldn't live without (see my favorite color), and today I'm the proud owner of said chair. Before going to bed last night, I once again enlisted the great resource eBay to track down a certain Schumacher fabric that would be the perfect cushion cover. You can guess how the story ends (hint: I wouldn't "heart" eBay if I hadn't found it). So here it is:

photo from http://fschumacher.com

Schumacher's Chiang Mai fabric--a busy print, but with a clean slate like a clear plastic chair, you can let your imagination run wild. Of course the best part of the story is that I'm getting 1 1/2 yards of the fabric for less than what one yard would cost retail. In addition, you generally can't even get the fabric without using a professional interior designer--make it another reason to love eBay.

The chair should be arriving in about 6 - 8 weeks. The only negative is that it will be delivered to my nearest Greyhound station where it will wait patiently to be picked up (I haven't told my husband yet, but the pickup is his department). The fabric is shipping from England and should be here in about ten days. If I'm calculating correctly the chair should arrive shortly before baby #2, so this should be an interesting  project. Stay tuned.

my favorite color

I remember once when I was in high school at some sort of leadership function where we were forced to wear name tags and say something interesting about ourselves, I wrote "Hi, my name is Sarah and my favorite color is clear." At the time I thought I was just being a witty 16 year-old, but the phrase has turned out to be a prophecy for my taste in home decorating. As I look around my house, I see that I am drawn to clear plastic (or rather "Lucite") furniture. It all started with this coffee table from CB2:

The table replaced the moving boxes that my husband and I had used as a coffee table for six months, and it's turned out to be a great investment with a toddler in the house--unbreakable, virtually scratch-proof and smudge-proof. From the coffee table, I moved on to Philippe Starck's Louis Ghost Armchair, a longtime obsession of mine:

I originally purchased one as an desk chair and then decided to get three more and use them in the dining room. The only downside to this decision was being left without a chair for the desk. For the past two years I've been waiting for the right chair to come along when, lo and behold, I just discovered something that would be perfect. Yes--it's clear (and plastic):

Image from 1stdibs.com

This vintage Vladimir Kagan chair fits right into my design sense; however, with a price tag that stretches into the $1,000's, it's not an option. Determined to see my dream come to fruition, I've been scouring eBay and came up with this suitable alternative:

The resemblance to the Kagan chair is amazing, and if I get rid of the grandma-inspired palm tree cushion, it would beautifully compliment my red parsons desk. If I win the chair, my next mission will be to find the perfect fabric to reupholster the seat. Actually, I already have an idea...

my first sale

Over the five years that I've been a homeowner, I've logged more hours with HGTV than I care to recount. Whether it's Buy this House, Sell this House, House Hunters or Design Star, it's the white noise that occupies my living room on Saturday afternoons or lazy Friday nights. Just when I thought I'd seen them all I came across a new show--My First Sale--that, coincidentally, coincides with my life as it documents the first-time home selling process. What I've learned so far is 1) listen to your realtor 2) lower your asking price and 3) hold open houses. On television, this seems to be the magic formula for selling your house. My husband and I have implemented each of these practices over the past year and yet we're no closer to packing up than we were when this whole process began. I'm only hoping that another summer season, where the market has seemingly been picking up in our area, will bring some good luck. I've already purchased the packing tape.

the papered hall

Why is it that pregnant women come up with the most insane ideas? About two years ago, when I was six months pregnant with my son, I decided it would be the perfect time for my husband and I to try our hand at wallpapering our hallway. There were two inherent flaws in this plan (three if you count the fact that my belly was protruding about six inches from my body): 1) neither one of us had ever hung wallpaper and 2) our hallway is about four feet wide with irregular walls and no surrounding space for a "work" area. However, you cannot deter a pregnant woman with a plan, so the wallpaper was ordered and thus began the blowup of 2008.

While I'd like to take credit for coming up with the wallpapering idea all on my own, I was actually inspired by a feature in the now defunct Domino magazine (sigh!). The article led me to Walnut Wallpaper where I found this amazing print, Kimura, by Romo. I was ecstatic to have a new project; my husband rolled his eyes. With the paper on its way to Charlotte, NC from England, we purchased the remaining supplies necessary--glue, roller, seam something-or-other--and waited for the excitement to begin.

One word of advice I have to offer while ordering wallpaper is to take advantage of "asking the experts." I asked the experts, but I didn't listen to them. Similar to fabrics, wallpaper comes in different repeats and widths and are packaged in single, double or even triple rolls (whatever that means). If you give the "experts" the measurements of the walls you want to cover, they'll let you know how many rolls to order. The half-assed measurements I provided equated to at least two rolls of wallpaper for my project. I ordered one. After a (long) day of intense hanging and several you drive me crazies, we were left with about a dozen scraps of unusable paper, two headaches and only one wall fully covered. I ordered another roll; we waited the three weeks that it took to arrive from England and repeated the process.

Although there are too many flaws to count--patches of wallpaper stuck to the baseboards, uneven alignment and even a patch hung upside down (see pictures below for the correct orientation versus upside down)--I was proud that my husband and I completed it on our own. Actually, "completed" might be too strong a word since we ran out of paper a second time and decided to paint the remaining wall the color of the paper's background instead of waiting for yet another roll.

Although the wallpaper hanging didn't go as smoothly as outlined in the magazine, it's actually turned out to be one of my favorite projects. If my husband is willing to undertake another such adventure with me, I promise to listen to the experts and choose a big, blank wall free of windows and doors (with plenty of surrounding workspace) next time.

art for the rest of us

Because I'm already decorating my next home in my mind, and because I've decided that I've reached a point in my life where I need to own artwork--and because I don't have a slush fund of cash required to begin collecting original pieces--I've been searching online for affordable art. A great site that I recently discovered is WOW (Works on Whatever), part Art Production Fund's WOW project, which brings "art off of walls and into homes as everyday objects."Spectrum, pictured above, is a printed canvas "prop art" reproduction of a piece by artist Richard Phillips and can sass up your home for just $250.

A favorite site of mine for discovering new artists is Charming Wall. A gallery located in New York's West Village, Charming Wall provides fine art prints from a motley crew of artists for just $20 each. I've purchased two prints from the site, and I'm totally happy with the variety and quality. My only wish is that they offered more print sizes--I'd be willing to pay for a larger version of Matthew Doubek's Brought Down by a Winchester Last Tuesday.

I just discovered 20x200 a couple weeks ago, and I can't stop thinking about these pants. Another site who's mission is to bring art to everyone, 20x200 introduces new editions every week and offers most works in three or four sizes (starting at $20 for 8"x10" up to $2,000 for 30"x40"). They only produce a certain number of prints in each size, so check the site often if you can't stop thinking about Patsy Cline and Hank Williams by Mark Ulriksen.

If you have plenty of time on your hands and the patience to sift through all the still life with fruit, etsy offers thousands of choices for fine artwork. I personally don't have the willpower to keep my mind from wandering as I click through one mixed media piece to the next, but I don't doubt there are great works to be discovered.