Design Challenges: When the Room Fights Back

Hey there! Happy New Year lovely readers! I did not abandon you! I have just been rapid cycling through manic busyness and self-indulgent laziness. But who cares about all that? The point is that I'm here now and I want to talk about some little things I've done around the DreamHaus recently and how sometimes things just don't work out. First the good stuff though: 1. New kitchen knobs! Here's one of those little things that you can do as a renter that makes life better without being expensive, permanent, or labor intensive. Pretty much any design blog will tell you that. Including this one! (If you click on the picture it will make it big enough for you to see the difference) So, even if the difference is virtually imperceptible to people who aren't Dave or I, if you do happen to be us, it was totally worth the $50 we paid for 13 (!) shiny, new knobs. 2. Pendant Light! So we actually hard-wired a lighting fixture into our rental like we're fancy-pants adults or something! I called in an expert from Taskrabbit for this one and I'm so glad I did because now my dining room looks like this:

The pendant lamp was from West Elm and came in at a totally reasonable $99.

So that's all totally quiche and everything... but then there are those projects that didn't turn out... like my "OFFICE 2.0!" makeover. So you remember my first post about the office? Okay, you don't remember my first post about the office, so here it is. Basically, its been a year and I thought our office/guestroom could use a re-vamp. The HausWitch empire needed more room, we had hung some shelves over the desk that we wanted to take down, and most importantly, neither of us ever wanted to be in that room. It's gloomy. It will probably always be gloomy since it doesn't get a ton of sunlight and the view out either window is brick wall and garbage. So I had all that working against me already. The first thing was that we needed to paint it. We painted it the same white we did the rest of the apartment and that did help to brighten it up a bit. BUT for some reason Dave had to use twice as much paint as every other room in rest of the haus. The guy at the paint store said, "Some rooms just don't want to be painted." Hmmmmmm.... The saga continued. We bought new curtains... hated the curtains... took the curtains back. We ordered a new "pillow-scape" and only half the pillows really looked good. I re-framed art, the frames broke. I bought a succulent for the bookshelf, it died. I bought a little $45 antique secretary desk to house my HausWitch supplies, and Salem jumped on the door and broke it. I started to get the feeling the guy at the paint store was right. Not only did this room not want to be painted, it didn't want to be decorated at all. So here's where I'm at now. The funny thing is that when I look at pics of the room before all this, I like them better. Although, I do love our new Star Map art work from We Are Dorothy (it's stars like movie stars, get it?) and I recovered the lampshade on our floor lamp with some pretty Marimekko fabric. (I still kinda hate that lamp though.) So much of decorating is about trial and error. Especially on rooms that clearly don't want to be decorated. Do I really believe that the energy in this room is resisting my attempts to make it cozy and functional? ABSOLUTELY. Am I going to buy some sage and try to smudge out this anti-HausWitch energy and see if that helps? YUP. In the meantime I'm also going to let this room develop organically and see if part of the problem is that we often think of this room as an after-thought. Perhaps setting more of a positive intention around this room will help. Maybe it just needs to feel loved?!!!!!! In any case, I still didn't spend that much money. All told maybe $150 bucks. In the meantime, I'm not lying when I say I have some majorly exciting things on the horizon.

• The last room of the epic JP NOOKS bedroom makeover is almost done. You can see a sneak preview shot here:
• GE sent me some free light bulbs to review, which is exciting because I am an absolute lunatic about lighting concepts so look out for that post coming soon.
• I also got a super exciting gig doing set design for a movie and the filmmakers are having me re-decorate their office at the same time. So its all coming down the pipeline and I can't wait to share it all with you!

Stay warm out there! The moon is in Taurus and the witches say: "Happy Feast of Janus!"