If you were a color…

Room color is exciting and non-permanent, but we wanted to start with a classic palette. We thought about wall color for months, and have a basket of paint chips to prove it. When sitting with a thick paint color book in-hand the possibilities seem wonderfully endless, and yet a bit overwhelming. How does one craft a perfectly cohesive color scheme amidst so many choices?

My mother, Jane, happened upon a new offering from a partnership between Sherwin Williams and HGTV. Together they’ve created eight HGTV Home color collections, designed for room-to-room harmony. Genius!  As you know, we’re Team Neutral, and the Neutral Nuance color collection screamed out right away.

We quickly narrowed down our selections, focusing our home’s palette down to four colors. Selecting just four colors creates flow through repetition, and yet is still interesting since every space has different light. We hired an interior designer from our local Guiry’s to spend an hour with us to nail down our final color choices confidently and knock out the details of what walls are which color.

Here’s where we ended up:

• Dover White for all trim, interior doors, railing, shelves
• Sedate Grey for the living room, family room, studio, both main floor bedrooms and the master bedroom
• Ethereal Mood for the kitchen, dining room, half bath and stairway
• Netsuke for the mudroom and office
• We chose outside of the color collection for our bathroom paint. We’ve had our eye on blue-greens, but the collection’s Escape Grey just wasn’t right. We selected two slightly different colors: Silvermist for the master bathroom, and Copen Blue for the main bath. Since the master bathroom has more light, we painted it a slightly deeper/grayer shade than the more dimly lit main bathroom. Both colors worked out perfectly in their respective spaces, adding a fresh punch within our neutral palette.

We highly recommend swinging by your local Sherwin Williams store to pick up these fantastic color collections for your next home paint project. They made our decisions so much easier and the result couldn’t be more beautiful.

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Ready for your visit

As we prepared for our first official house guests, Bob’s parents, we scrambled to get the guest bedroom and main bathroom in good working order for their use. It was helpful to have a goal to keep us focused.

The main bathroom was looking great, but was being used to store paint buckets during final touch ups. Once those were removed, our wonderful builders installed our adorable Delta accessories, and we added the final touches:

You can read more about our fantastic Delta faucets and accessories in this post. We were excited to incorporate some new and old decor as well, like these amazing vintage apothecary jars that hold q-tips, cotton balls and mints for our guests:

Our old Marimekko Kaiku print shower curtain found new life with it’s perfect greens/blues/black/white palette:

And this sweet hand towel from World Market pulls the space together perfectly:

We have more work to do to finish the bathroom, like hang the sweet round black-framed mirror that we scored for 50% off at Hobby Lobby a while back.

We love how the guest bedroom turned out…

So sweet, airy and French-inspired! We have more special touches planned for this room as well.

The guest bedroom and bathroom served Bob’s parents well during their stay and we’re excited to hone these spaces further.

Book your visit today!

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Field trip!

We took a field trip to Tribble Stone Company in north of Boulder a couple weekends ago to pick out thin veneer accent stone for our fireplace surround. This is definitely one of the coolest field trips we’ve gone on for a while, Tribble was amazing! Beyond having an enormous property piled with incredible stone of every shape and color, they had huge stone-cutting machines. We like big machines at our house.

Cool rocks in neatly stacked piles and huge stone-cutting machines… it was about as cool as one place could be.

My handsome field trip buddy and I found two warm grey stone samples to take home…

We’ll post pictures of the selected stone fireplace surround as soon as it’s finished.

 

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He ain’t heavy, he’s my vanity

When we made the decision to include the second floor finish in our Phase 1 build, we knew sticking to the budget was key. We opted not to go for a custom vanity due to cost, and were on the hunt for the perfect wallet-friendly piece. We love the look and convenience of the ready-to-install Home Depot-by-way-of-CraigsList vanity we purchased  for the main bathroom. After scouring CraigsList, hoping for another miraculous find, we searched online to see what deals could be found. Although Home Depot’s Home Decorators Collection does have double sink vanities in the same style as our fabulous main bath piece for a reasonable price, their current stock did not feature the same black-on-black scheme we were hoping to repeat. We weren’t in love with either of the options they had in stock and special order is not available. We considered painting the black top model’s base, and that seemed like an okay solution. One night while we were literally browsing the site one last time, a 50% sale on a different vanity appeared. This Craftsman style vanity has elements that honor our home’s design, and although it still isn’t black-on-black, the base could be painted just as easily. 50% off was music to our ears and we couldn’t buy that baby fast enough. Score!

We thought we were golden, until it was delivered. Thankfully it arrived in perfect condition and was moved indoors for safe keeping. We even love the base color enough to leave it as-is, a bonus we didn’t expect. The issue was with transporting it upstairs. Stair railings were being built, painting was happening, and the 350 lb. vanity could not be easily dismantled and reassembled. We were temporarily stuck. We brainstormed with our builders and even considered using a lift to bring it in through a window, but it seemed simple man-power was the best option. After waiting out a week’s worth of rare Colorado rain, we had an opportunity to move it into the house and upstairs. A team of five worked to get it safely inside…

Up the stairs, including two 90* pirouettes…

And finally into the master bath, in place and ready for the plumber…

And voila! Just look at how at-home it looks there. The vanity color is fabulous against the black and white tile floor and the new blue-green walls. Next it will be centered under the window above and the two sink faucets will be plumbed in prep for inspections.

A special thank you to the five burly men who safely moved the massive vanity into place today!

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On the throne

Toilets may seem like an unassuming purchase, but we still did our homework. We agree with American Standard’s site, “American Standard is the undisputed leader in high performance residential toilets… featuring toilets that are virtually clog free, save water and keep themselves cleaner longer.” You had us at hello.

American Standard has several distinctive flushing systems, bowl heights and shapes to choose from. Since we’re both tall we wanted a “Right Height” model, and we liked the comfort of the elongated bowl shape. We wanted an efficient flush and loved the idea of getting a toilet with water-saving capability as well. We hit it lucky again with a great sale at Home Depot that made it possible for us to afford the American Standard H2Option Dual Flush Right Height Elongated Toilet with EverClean surface for all three bathrooms:

Conserve water and save money with every flush.
Our innovative new Dual Flush H2Option® toilets allow you to save water while providing you with the flexibility to choose between a mere 1.0 gallon flush or a standard 1.6 gallon flush. Featuring a two button actuator on top of the tank, the Dual Flush toilet gives you the ability to choose the most appropriate water saving flush every time.

And they’re cute!…

The tank is petite and efficient, and it’s kind of fun selecting from the “flush menu.” We’re so happy we could include another water-saving feature.

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