Bye Bye, Raspberry Pie

Big news from over here: A single frame has been hung.

I’ve been downright scared of hanging art in the wrong places ever since we moved in – strange, because I had no fear about hanging and re-hanging art in our last house. This fear can be directly attributed to having spent those long summer weekends patching, sanding, and smoothing all of the walls before we painted… I’ll be damned if I mess up that beautiful finish with misplaced nail holes.

Bite the bullet, Emily, that’s what I told myself after staring at the framed print balanced on the tank of our half bath toilet. Start low risk, start in the half bath.

The bathroom itself was a room that Pete painted on a whim during the late summer, taking it from old lady Mauve-Raspberry to a crisp, clean white. The family we bought the house from really liked their pinks, and looking at these pictures I actually think the color choice had a very special effect on the rest of the elements in the room. The vanity, lighting, and medicine cabinet had been upgraded in recent years, but in the pink room, seemed to look tired. I think the pink actually played up just how builder-grade they are. Eliminating the Raspberry and finishing the room off with a fresh coat of white actually did a lot to make these existing elements blend in more seamlessly, look more expensive. I’m looking at you, medicine cabinet, I just gave you a few more years.

The print that I hung was something I bought and framed several years ago, a special find at Hero Design when the studio was located in Buffalo, NY; it hung in my last house for awhile, but I actually like it better here, where the colors in the print have more of an opportunity to stand out. *jazz hands!*

The lighting in the bathroom had been updated in recent years, so it isn’t terrible, but that doesn’t mean I especially like it or intend to live with it for a long time. I was in love with the West Elm sconce that I hung in my last bathroom remodel, and odds are that I’m going to buy and install the same exact product again here.

I’m not a great decor stager, which may work out for us in this new house. We both envision having less decor than we had in the last house, which is why I was OK selling so much of it at our summertime garage sale. And by selling, I mean, by the end of the weekend I was basically throwing weird decorative tchotchkes at people in hopes that they would find a good home. Because, you know, you sometimes end up with a weird emotional connection to decor and don’t want to just throw it in the trash, even if that’s where it belongs.

The decorative pieces I’ve bought lately follows a more clean-lined design, like this simple $5 canister that I found at Home Goods. The air-tight seal isn’t great so I probably won’t be using it to house my ground coffee, but without the wooden lid it would work great as a vase, and with the lid, well, it’s just pretty.

That’s where we stand, in the better looking of our bathrooms. A mini-makeover goes a long way!