Room for Color 2013

So I entered Apartment Therapy's Room for Color Contest again!  Yes, I know, am I just a sucker for punishment or what?  Well, anyway, it doesn't look like I'm going to do nearly as well as I have the past few years.  Unfortunately the photos I submitted don't really show the whole room and quite a few people have called me on it.  I honestly must have been having a brain fart (my son's favorite term) when I submitted the pictures.

So for all the people who have asked in the comments on AT to see more pictures, I hope these help.

You're probably thinking, that's a strange ceiling?  Yes, we have a balcony that looks down from upstairs into this room.  This room, which is the family/living room, is in the middle of the house.

The picture above shows some of the cool original features of the house.  We have 2 massive working pocket doors, and believe me, they come in handy when Roman's banging on the drums.

This window is actually bowed.  I don't know if you can tell in the photo or not, but it was a pain to find a rod for so I had to make one out of pvc pipe.  There's also some original stained glass and leaded glass windows in the house.

And below are the pictures that I submitted to Apartment Therapy.

Here's a snippet of some of the comments I've received so far.

So I hope you'll like it enough to vote!

To vote, go HERE and click on the favorite button which is a heart.  You have to sign in to vote, but Apartment Therapy don't spam you or send you emails unless you ask them to.

Thanks!!!!!!!!!!

Apartment Therapy Room for Color Winners

So I didn't win Apartment Therapy's Room for Color Contest 2012. But I did come close! I came second in my division. The room that beat me was Allie's "Contrasting Neutrals" Room. The winners are chosen on how many "favorites" they get.

Here's a round-up of how the voting went, and the rooms that made it to the finals in their division.

That's my room above. 2000+ pins, 224 favorites (votes), 49 comments (all positive apart from one person rolling their eyes at my color-coded books!).

Allie's room beat mine to win in the light division. Um, not much to say about this room. And lucky for Allie she found a loop-hole in the voting system (although it's still against the rules).

I like Amit's room probably the best out of the four. It was a little plain, but had the best design in my opinion.

Dana's Room was one of the most controversial hence the large number of comments. People felt that it only won because of her large blog following. But that's not against the rules. What is against the rules is getting people to vote multiple times for your room which one of the finalists had done (this enabled them to win their division).

Kellie's room won the whole contest. I don't think it was really people's favorite judging by the comments. I think it has some nice elements to it, but a tad over designed.

I probably won't enter again next year unless Apartment Therapy changes how the winners are decided, or does a better job of monitoring the voting. The only one that I felt truly merited their win was in the international division. Jane's Room was bold, daring and fun.

Anthropologie Pinned My Room!

I'm so thrilled to know that Anthropologie (my favorite store) liked my music room/library enough to pin it on to one of their inspiration boards.

I think I'm more thrilled about this than when I found out that Katie Couric had pinned my chair!

Don't you just love Pinterest?

Library/Music Room Update

This room is taking forever to finish!  I think it's because it's such an awkward space.  Everything seems to be in a corner.  Fireplace, piano, chair, drum kit, you name it, it's in a corner!  And having two massive pocket doors and a wall of windows doesn't help.  But I think I'm slowly getting there.  I just hope the family don't buy any more musical instruments because I'm running out of places to put them.  Anyway, a big decision I made last week was to put some doors on the bookcase.  We have way more paperbacks than nice hardcover books, and it was just looking too messy.  Plus now I have somewhere to hide the guitar amps when not in use.

Here it is with the tulip table that I bought a couple of years ago just for this space.  I think it actually looks really pretty, but it's not very practical if you want to open the bookcase doors.  So back upstairs it went.

I'm still considering spray painting the curtain rod gold.  Yes, I know, enough of the gold already!  But I really like the look of brass curtain rods and because the window is bowed, I had to make a curtain rod out of PVC pipe.  I should probably do a tutorial on that one because I'm sure there are many people with bowed windows that don't know what kind of curtain hardware they can use.

I'm not sure about the dead space between the curtain rod and the top of the window frame.  Maybe with the rod painted it won't look so odd to me.  I may even see what it looks like with matchstick blinds, but that again depends on whether I can hang them with the bow.

Roman got a new drum kit for his birthday/christmas.  I swear he chose the finish and wasn't influenced by me at all.  See that boy has good taste.  It's way bigger than his old drum kit, besides being a jazz kit which is smaller than regular kits.  But it still manages to take up the vast majority of the room, especially because he has 4 huge cymbals.  And it is really loud!  Hope the neighbors don't complain.

Call me a glutton for punishment, but I'm thinking of entering Apartment Therapy's Room for Color Contest again.  I know, it's just a popularity competition, but I do have fun doing it.  And although this room isn't perfect, I do think it has something unique about it that may appeal to the Apartment Therapy readers.  So wish me luck.

Apartment Therapy Room for Color 2011

Welcome Apartment Therapy readers!  Thanks so much for all of your kind comments.  As promised, here's some more pictures of my home office.  I've also included a before picture, shocking isn't it?

It's really hard to take a picture of the whole room because I couldn't stand far enough back.  I think I need a better lens for my camera.

I wanted to surprise my hubby with an original oversized Beatles Help movie poster which was twice the size of these ones.  But alas the bidding surpassed my meager budget by hundreds.  One day.

Yes, I'm obsessed with birds, and um it appears chevron!  Really the pattern on the back of the bookcases doesn't stand out nearly as much as it looks in the photos.  It's more of an accent.  And because I merely ironed starched fabric on to the backs, it should be an easy update if I decide to change it.

 I used cute sticky labels to add a bit of color and pattern to the generic Ikea Kasset boxes.

And here's a before picture.  I'm deliberately keeping it small so you don't see how messy it is.  Oh, who am I kidding?

Yikes, orange, faux painted walls.  So from this you can see that I reused the desk, the chair, the blinds, and the drapes.  I would like to get rid of the blinds but we need them for privacy.

Here's a tutorial on how I recovered the chair.  It's not very extensive, because I didn't know that people would be that interested, but it's been repinned a million times on Pinterest.  Next time I'll make sure that I do it step by step.  And here's how I did the light shade.

Thanks for visiting.  TTFN (ta ta for now)!

Oh, and if you want to vote for my home office go here.