Looking forward: I want this wallpaper!

I have a lot of nursery things that I'm almost ready to post about. Maybe, if someone hadn't put his Math Olympiad books right on top of my special scissors and double sided tape and ribbon in the buffet, so that I had to spend forever looking for them, I would even be ready for one of those posts right now. But no.

So for now I'll just stop in briefly to share what I wasted some time doing this weekend. Which is looking at wallpaper. Remember my giant fireplace?

I have long wanted a wall somewhere in the house with fabulous wallpaper. Just a little wallpaper. So I got to thinking that the wall with the fireplace on it might be perfect. If that fireplace isn't begging to be part of an accent wall....then I don't know what else it could possibly be saying. "Look at me! Look at me!" seems to pretty well sum it up.

Here's the thing about my den. It has giant brown couches in it. And right now everything in there is brown and green and red and doesn't flow well into the library with its blues and grays at all. Then my mom got a new sofa and gave us her old sofa. Only it's still brown. It's brown leather, and it's not in super terrific shape, so I'm not sure how long it will stick around, either. If I were rich, I would go out tomorrow and buy a big gray sectional, with a nice low profile, so it wouldn't cut off the flow from the library, but would still have plenty of seating for everyone. But...I'm not.

So I get all confused whenever I think about the den, because I want it to work with the brown couch now, but be able to someday morph into a room with a gray couch, and also flow well with the cooler colors in the adjacent room right now. Still with me?

Anyway, I decided I love this wallpaper, and I am trying to think if the colors in it can do what I need them to do:

Source: Sanderson

It's called Squirrel & Dove, even though I have never seen a squirrel with ears like that. Maybe that is what English squirrel ears look like. 

Certainly this will work with the brown couch, but what about bringing gray in? I can't decide if those branches are a gray-y enough brown. Because I want to paint the fireplace gray, I think. It gives me a headache to think about. I like the idea of bringing in teal and red, too, though. Because my other idea was MORE BLUE. And I am in danger of having an entirely blue house if I'm not careful. 

Also, there is the issue of the other walls. I spend a lot of time squinting at various shades of taupe on my computer screen, looking for one with just enough gray in it. 

Sigh. I don't know. Maybe I need to keep up the wallpaper hunt and find something grayer. What say you all?

And now back to the nursery! 

House Tour: Den

Continuing on our glacially paced house tour, we arrive at the den. Here it is before we moved in:

It looks bigger in the picture than it really is, I do believe. Tricky lenses.

And it's a tricky room, too....the trickiest in the house, I think. I cannot figure out what to do with it. It feels very dark, even though it has that giant bay window. And it has doors and windows and giant fireplaces everywhere, making furniture placement very tricky. I stay up nights trying to figure out where to put couches and whether I can get away with a darker color and on and on and on. For the moment, though, it is necessarily on hold while more time sensitive projects take priority.

Here's where it is now:

Really, more or less this is just our living room from our old house, transported! Only it doesn't work as well here. Okay, so here are our giant sofas. These were at Goodwill, and they were cheap, so they are what we have. We've had them in pretty much every conceivable arrangement in here. The loveseat used to be in front of the bay window, which opened things up more, but meant the loveseat kept getting pushed back against the window and that no one could see the TV very well from it. And the couch used to be pulled out from the wall enough to walk behind it. Only just barely. And it kept getting pushed back, too. We really need a rug.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure this is as good as it gets with these couches. There's a "console table" that's actually a long shelf from Ikea behind the sofa. Against the wall and it's too far away from the TV; away from the wall and the room shrinks too much. And having the loveseat there makes things kind of choppy coming from the library, but, well, it has to go somewhere. We have a lot of people who need to watch TV around here! I think in a perfect world we'd have a sectional with a nice low profile. But that's not likely to happen anytime terribly soon.

Note incredibly beat up coffee table. I bought that at a garage sale for $8 years and years ago and painted it black. It's served us well, but years of kids standing on it and dogs chewing on it have taken their toll. I think for now I'm going to move one of the trunks that's hanging out in the master bedroom down here to be the coffee table, but it might only work until the baby is walking around, because it's a little rough around the edges.

View from the library. Yes, it's too backlit to actually take this picture. And, yes, incompetent sunroom DIY'er put a chimney right in front of the bay window.

Ostentatious fireplace! It looks like it has feet. Lots and lots of feet.

When my mom saw my lovely mantel display, she said, "it looks junky" sending me into a spiral of self doubt. Thanks, mom.

Cross stitched pheasants! Maybe junky is what I'm going for. Ever think of that, mom?! These were at the thrift store, and I couldn't just leave them there. Because they're cross stitched pheasants.

Junky mantel, up close!

Bird automaton. I should post a video of her in action. She sounds like a real bird! She's not junky; she is valuable. She was in my mom's house for years, and when my mom didn't want her anymore, I talked her into giving the bird to us for Christmas instead of selling it.

This is Sandycast. That's what it says on his tag anyway. He sat outside my grandmother's apartment for years, and he was the thing I asked for when she passed away last year. Sandycast is an interesting conversation piece. I have been stunned more than once by people thinking he's real. When we were selling the old house, we got one report of a buyer too creeped out by him to enter the room he was in. People are weird about ceramic labradors.

My Dad gave me this campaign chest a long time ago, when he went through a brief period of collecting/selling antiques. I didn't know it was called a campaign chest until very recently, when I started seeing them pop up on blogs everywhere.

And on top of the campaign chest is this Oliver shrine. Because Oliver was the best dog ever. He died last fall. That box has his ashes in it. Kind of creepy. But I don't really know what else to do with it.

Picture of the picture. That's Oliver on a beach in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Oh, this picture of our oversized couch and gallery wall is more in focus than the last one!

Here's a TV cabinet that worked well in our last living room, but isn't really right here. I'd like something lower and...less green.

Random shelf! It's behind the loveseat, on the wall next to the archway to the library. It's the poetry/drama shelf. But it's not alphabetized...not yet.

Future plans? I don't even know! I'd like for things to flow a lot better from the library into here. The colors are all completely different. But those brown couches kind of limit things. It is entirely possible the room will hobble along for quite awhile while we tend to other things and save up for a new couch.

Picture ledge hanging: proving we can accomplish things on weekdays, too

Yesterday I kept thinking about doing a photo tour of some of the little projects that we really need to get knocked out/finished. But I couldn't even work up the motivation to post about how hard it is to work up the motivation to do these small things.

So I was surprised to find us, last night just before bed, actually doing one of them! I commented yesterday on Stately Kitsch that her picture ledge hanging might be enough to inspire some picture ledge hanging around here. And I guess it actually did!

We picked up the picture ledges during the shelf buying Ikea expedition, so....almost a month ago? They've been leaning against various walls ever since. They started out in the foyer and then made the big move into the den where they belong. And then they sat there until last night.

My original plan was to put a gallery wall here, but we ended up with the picture ledges for a couple of reasons. It's easier to switch pictures around from time to time, helping to prevent the problem we've run into historically with pictures, wherein all the pictures of August stop when he is 2 because the wall's full and I stop ordering prints. Also....easier. Although it took a bit longer than I expected to get everything hung up....we had one long and one short Ribba picture ledge for each of the two planned rows, so we needed to make sure they were level, and even with each other, and decide on the height and spacing and all that.

Finished!

Walls around it are still looking a little bare (and this is a room that still has the original paint; plan is for this room to end up some kind of taupe, but I'm a little gun shy about picking it out; it seems like a lot can go wrong with taupe). We're thinking more photos hanging around the ledges (like maybe some of our favorites, so we're less likely to want to switch them around in the near future). We also need more light in that area, so that we can actually see the pictures. This room gets less natural light than the front rooms and the only light in there right now are two sort of....spotlights over the fireplace and a couple of lamps. Like with the library, we're not sure whether we want to spring for more overhead lights or just buy some more lamps.

But I will just bask in this sense of weeknight accomplishment for now. And admire how much smaller the big pile of pictures got last night:

Aww, look at that one on top: it's Dave and Oliver, my favorite dog ever (who died about a year ago, at 16. This is back when Dave was in college (I had just graduated) and Oliver was around 2 or 3):

It didn't make the cut for the picture ledges because it's not in a black frame. Oh! I hope it comes out of that frame okay; it appears to be unmatted. And this is a picture from pre-digital days; I suspect the chances of me managing to find the negative somewhere are pretty much zero.