Green Design – Home Makeover Crisis
Posted: January 11th, 2012 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: design | Tags: decorating, design, economy, environment, fabric, furniture, home, rugs, shoppingOh crap. So, yesterday’s post has made me rethink my entire new year’s plan. January 1 arrived and I was overcome by the need to do a complete overhaul on our house. One major problem with having strong feelings about the aesthetics of things – you get tired of them really fast. As much as I might like to, I’m not completely redoing our home every year or two, so I came up with a list of fairly low cost projects that would give some of the more tired parts of the house a very necessary facelift.
Item 1: Re-do the mistress of the house
AKA, lose ten pounds. Fortunately, that one’s free, although significantly easier said than done.
Item 2: Re-cover dining room chairs
This is what our dining room chairs look like right now.
I can’t believe I just showed you that. The point is, as one might imagine, under the circumstances my husband is more than happy to let me give a go at upholstering them myself. I found a how to video that looks pretty doable, so it seems worth a shot. Clearly we don’t have much to lose.
There is a gorgeous fabric that I have been eyeing for ages which I thought I would use. I saw it in a different colorway on a chair in Elle Decor a number of years ago and have been looking for an occasion to use it ever since.
Awesome, right? But for some reason, right now busy is just not working for me. And despite the fact that, while I strongly support all environmentally conscious initiatives in spirit, the “green aesthetic” as it were has always held no appeal for me whatsoever. And despite my dislike of theme rooms of any kind for their ridiculous literalism. I’ve been envisioning this whole nature theme for my redo.
So here’s the fabric I found for the chairs that I would now like to use.
The fabric is 100% cotton from Robert Allen’s eco line and is meant to look like lemongrass swaying in the breeze.
The dining room opens onto the front hall. And when the chairs aren’t in use, they live in the front hall (as pictured above). Which brings us to …
Item 3: Buy a new rug for the front hall
The rug currently in the front hall is a pretty, colorful, floral rug with lots of mossy greens, purples, turquoise and yellow. It receives plenty of complements, and clearly at some point I liked it too. But, being, unfortunately, fickle about these things, it now seems to me busy and the green and yellow tones are just not at all appealing. It makes me sad each time I come down the stairs. So while there isn’t a particularly good excuse for replacing a rug I bought five years ago, sometimes these things just have to be done. And I’ve found the perfect rug.
It’s kind of too awesome, no? On the hardwood floor. Nothing like hitting you over the head with a ton of bricks.
Problem:
After criticizing Sergey Makhno and Vasily Butenko’s design for the Twister bar yesterday, my remodeling plan is feeling a little hypocritical. I can’t decide if it’s sufficiently tongue in cheek to work, or if it’s just too silly and I should be downright embarrassed. (There are more items on the list, but I’m stuck on the first three.) Thoughts? …
