Panorama, Panorama, Everybody's Coming To Get Me.

Remember this song? From the 90's? Okay, so the original might've been about Paranoia, not Panoramas, but just go with it. K? 

Thought I'd finally give you a glance at the living room. Hence the panorama reference. Yeah, I think you get it. Sorry about the poor lighting, but I really don't like the overhead lights and it's super cozy like this in real life.

 

 As you can see, it could use some straightening up. I actually just threw a huge stack of old magazines into the recycling (see those trash bags in the hallway? Proof!).

Aside from tidying, here's my current to-do list:

• Switch the couches. I originally wanted the smaller couch on that wall because we had another end table next to it. But two end tables eventually proved to be too much furniture in a small Brooklyn apartment, so we moved one into our entryway and the lamp was relocated to the guest room nightstand. Good move. Now that we're down to one end table, I think the smaller couch would be better in front of the windows. It'll look like less furniture when you walk into the room. I think.
• Hang more things. We have 3 teardrop hanging vases from CB2 that were hanging up when the living room furniture was in another configuration. I love, love, love them but when we I rearranged the furniture for the 60th time, E made me promise to wait until I was sure I loved this set up before drilling any more holes in the walls. I want to put them next to the mirror, and hang that print between the one of the Chasidic Farbrengen (by the talented Elke Reva Sudin) and the bookcase. I think I'll keep the Ikea Stockholm bowl hanging on the wall, but maybe lower it. 
• Move the floor lamp. I actually did this tonight, right before I took the photos. The floor lamp had been in front of the Ikea bowl, but then all of our lighting was on one side of the room. I want to plug it into a different outlet so the wire isn't in front of the bookcase, but I need E to move the other bookcase in order for that to happen.
• Reorganize the bookshelves. They drive me crazy because they look so cluttered.
• Get things professionally framed. That's something I want to do all around the apartment. Some things just need to be matted, but the Elke Reva Sudin painting really needs a specially made frame because the print is an odd size. 
• Do something with the desk. A big chunk of wood chipped off in our move, so at minimum I'd like to stain that area. Or something. 
• Add something to the back of the bookshelves. My father-in-law actually made those for us as a wedding gift. I love them. They have really pretty detailing. I'd like to get some foam board and cover it with grass cloth or something along those lines. A couple of years ago I did that with a yellow silk fabric and it was nice but it was too much pattern. I want something natural.

I need E to hurry up and eat that Chanukah House. And we have a framed "last name meaning" certificate stuck behind the desk that obviously doesn't belong there. And a hot water urn on the side table that I was using to make tea. :) But otherwise, that's about it... "Short" list, huh?

Once You Pop, You Can't Stop

Okay so if the suspense hasn't killed you by now, you're probably my Facebook friend and know the results of Paint Indecision 2013. We finally went for it. We picked a color. Are you ready? Remember, it was between Benjamin Moore's Dolphin AF-715 and Benjamin Moore's Galveston Gray AC-27.

And the winner was....
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Galveston Gray (!!!):

We went with the lighter of the two choices. I wasn't sure it could hold it's own against the Benjamin Moore's Bird's Egg 2051-60 in the hallway, but it totally does. E repeatedly let me know that it was ultimately my decision, but that he thought that Dolphin would be too dark. That kicked my anxiety into high gear, and although I loved Dolphin and was leaning towards it the entire time, I just couldn't go through with it in the end. Galveston Gray is a nice, toasty gray. It's the same tone as Studio Taupe, but more gray than beige on the greige scale (Studio Taupe is the opposite- more beige than gray). For the sake of full disclosure, it's still a little bland behind the beige couches in some lights (I wish the couches "popped" more) but it's definitely better than before, and I love it with everything else in our living room. It's part of BM's "America's Colors" collection, and I'm guessing it's named after Galveston, TX, but I'm not really sure what's so greige about Texas. I'm a New England girl, remember?

Here's a sneak peek:

My warrior of a husband worked an overnight shift, went to grad school, and picked up a gallon and a quart of this bad boy from Home Depot "on his way" home for me. Okay, it's not exactly on his way. It's pretty much out of his way, actually. Which scores him even more props.

I'm not sure why, but we usually get our Benjamin Moore picks color matched to Behr paint+primer in one. I used to think it was because I liked the Behr coverage/application more, but people always seem surprised when I tell them that. So I'm piecing it together that it's actually a combination of Home Depot's hours being way more convenient (open till 10 or 11pm) than those of the smaller hardware stores that sell BM paint (which all close by 7pm) and the fact that BM "sample" sizes are like $6+ each vs getting a color matched to a Behr sample size costing $3-4. I'm sure the Behr gallon is also cheaper than the BM gallon. So that's probably why.

Then on one of his next overnight shifts, (the night before Yom Kippur actually) I hit my breaking point of not being able to handle the patchwork quilt of paint swatches on our walls (see here) and decided to just do the edging. That way it'd be easier when I decided to do the full walls... I'd just have to move all of the furniture to the middle of the room and go for it without worrying about details.

Yeah, but that didn't happen. Once you pop, you just can't stop.

Ok, this might be TMI but it happened to be really hot and humid that night, and I don't think I've EVER sweat that much in my life. Someone should make a DIY Workout video. I literally thought I was going to pass out (I'm sure it had nothing to do with the paint fumes).

Anyway, this little Brooklyn apartment living room of ours is feeling more and more "us". E walked into the room the next morning and said "It feels so much more home-y!" BOOM. Those were the exact words I was looking for. BTW Our new theme for the house is somewhere between "Urban Lumberjack" and "Urban Hobbit Hole". Yep. I've clearly given this too much a lot of thought.

I'll post some photos of the actual room tomorrow (or "soon"), but first you should know that I've been at it again with my poor poor photoshop skillz. No, it's not even photoshop. It's from "Instacollage" on my iPhone. I'm hanging my head in shame, don't worry. But this, my friends, is our current collection of paint colors in our apartment.

The guest room might get repainted with Behr's Studio Taupe at some point (we have a bunch leftover from our first living room painting experience- and I love the color, just not in the living room) but for now it's Stone, which is a gray with purple undertones. And after this super uncomfortably hot painting experience, it might be awhile before I tackle a paint job again. 

Regardless, I'm actually pretty pleased with the combination. It honestly goes together better in the photo than in real life, but we'll roll with it. And speaking of rolling, I'm out of here. Hopefully I'll get that next post up tomorrow!

50 Shades of Gray

Yeah, I went there. No, I haven't read it. I don't even know much about it. Okay, fine. I saw one parody.

And honestly, the title is actually a low estimate of how many shades of gray I've considered for our living room. Like maybe multiply "50" by 3 and we'll be closer. I'm not joking. I'm that much of a crazy woman. And by the end of this post, you will all have lost any respect for the decorating abilities that you *thought* I posessed. Spoiler alert: It's all trial and error, baby.

It started back in 2011. We were moving into our THIRD apartment in the span of just over 2 years. We loved our first one-bedroom apartment, but found a two-bedroom for less money per month, in a building where a bunch of our friends lived. It was in a sketchier neighborhood, but we jumped on it like white on rice (what?!). Less than a week later it was broken into and we were robbed. COOL! We somehow lasted 8 more months there, but one day I snapped. We started looking for a new place that night, the next morning we went to look at an apartment, and by midday we had signed a new lease. True story.

We really wanted to mark this place as a fresh start, so we asked for permission to paint from our landlord. The exact words: "I wouldn't do, say, 'burnt orange' or anything, but otherwise yes, you can paint." GREEN LIGHT!

Turns out, I had no idea what I was doing. The only paint-picking experience I had up until then was picking my room color when I was a kid. I'd go to the store with my mom, I would point to a color I liked, and that was it. There was no bringing home paint chips and seeing what they looked like in different lights. There were no paint samples that you painted on walls to compare. There was no process, you just did it. So... that's what I did this time. I went to the store and picked out this awesome "greige" for the living room (Studio Taupe by Behr). I was so in love with it that I wanted to paint the whole apartment that color. E, thankfully, stopped me. Because that would've been weird.

Then we moved our furniture in. I don't think it hit me for awhile, probably because of all the excitement of moving, but as time went on I realized that this paint color was mighty similar to the color of our couches. And once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. I've been searching my computer for a photo, but the best I can come up with is this:

It's doesn't even look that bad there. In real life the color has more brown undertones. The couch and walls just look bland together. Side note: that rug kicked the bucket awhile ago. Even though it was way too small for our living room, I miss it because it really tied the room together.... OMG!!!

My life is now complete. I can't believe I just worked that into this blog. YES. 

ANYWAY. We I started looking obsessive-compulsively searching for "the perfect gray" back in March or April. Yes, it's been that long. I tried Benjamin Moore, Behr, Martha Stewart, Glidden... I'd have added Sherwin Williams and Olympic and Valspar into the mix too but Lowe's is harder to get to while carless in Brooklyn (we I learned that lesson while doing this same exact process for the hallway). Even Home Depot is a pain(t) in the tush of a trip, but sometimes a girl needs an excuse to head to Manhattan. ;) We hung up paint chips, painted paint samples, conducted extensive Pinterest, Houzz.com and google image searches. I've literally probably lost weeks of my life to this quest... Just take a look. This is only a small selection-- most of this process took place before I had considered starting Fruitful Furbishings, so I didn't document it. But prepare to be shocked and appalled.

Here's the earliest photographed stage. At one point there were way more paint chips taped to the wall and they were admittedly all roughly the same shade of gray. I'm already hanging my head in shame: 

Stage two. We had it narrowed down to two colors. Zinc #MSL267 by Martha Stewart, Dolphin AF-715 by Benjamin Moore. But then we I still couldn't decide. So I started tapping into our previously vetoed paint chip and paint sample supply. In the first photo, the top right is MS Zinc, the top middle is BM Dolphin, the top right is BM's Dolphin at 75% strength (oh yes I'm serious), purple-ish one on the bottom right is Stone 2112-40 by Benjamin Moore (which we had bought for the kitchen, hated it there, and then used in our guest room), and the light one on the bottom left is Galveston Gray AC-27 by Benjamin Moore: 

 Stage 3. We narrowed it down to two very different looks. Dark: Dolphin AF-715 by Benjamin Moore and Light: Galveston Gray AC-27 by Benjamin Moore. I painted over the majority of the other paint samples (missed a small block of MS Zinc in the 3rd pic). Please excuse miscellaneous items and dust balls that made their way into the shots. And the blue paint chip stuck into that frame is our hallway color, Bird's Egg 2051-60 by Benjamin Moore, and there for reference.

 

I couldn't decide- I could honestly go either way but it's two totally different vibes. My husband is adamantly pro-GG. So I did the mature, well thought-out thing. I posted a photo on Facebook and asked my friends to decide. I'm not kidding. There were a few votes for one wall dark and three light walls, but one of our walls already has faux brick detailing so I thought the combination would be too much. There were also rogue votes for blue, green and burgundy. 

In the end, team "Dark" won the Facebook poll 27-17. 

But which did I we actually decide to go with? You'll have to wait and see. E's at Home Depot right now.... I know, the suspense must already be killing you.