How Many of You Have Traditional or English-Style Interiors?
ingrid_vc so. CA zone 9
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6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoingrid_vc so. CA zone 9 thanked beckysharp Reinstate SW UnconditionallyRelated Discussions
Wish you could have interior designer or prefer your own style
Comments (38)* Posted by itltrot (My Page) on Mon, Mar 21, 11 at 13:01 I'd like the help of making what I have/like all work together. I've talked with a designer and the suggestions were to get rid of everything from my DH's recliner to DH himself. As they didn't fit with her vision of my space. Needless to say DH was not interested in working with a designer again. I think I have good taste and I know what I like. I have trouble tying it all together and making it flow. And the accessories kill me. I am to afraid to pick something because if I don't like it then I have to hear DH's comments. LOL. Ditto. Even if I could afford it, I would be extremely hesitant to give a designer carte blanche after watching shows where they get rid of everything, start over, and replace with cute but cheap stuff. I know they don't all do that. What I'd really like to have is someone who will look at all my crap and rearrange it so it bears no resemblance to crap at all. I have a tendency to go shopping and fall in love with an item, bring it home, and have no idea what to do with it. Like this lamp I bought the other day. I'm not taking it back. But it sure doesn't work on the dresser. Like someone else said, the accessories are the hardest for me....See MoreHow many styles can you mix in an open floor plan?
Comments (10)annz--thanks for the advice! You are right that I like contempory more than craftsman, but I like craftsman too as long it has light wood. I do like our current sofa and chair(even though they're really not my style-it's a long story how we ended up with them) but need to replace them because the fabric is defective and the detached back cushions roll into a big lump everytime we sit on the sofa. The manufacturer did send us new covers for the custions so the sofa and chair look better now than they did for a while, but all the cording around the base of the sofa and chair is raveling and looks bad and I can't think of a way to save the sofa, specially when you add the problem with the back cushions. I am working on the accessories. The pictures in the link are old, so it looks better now than in the pictures but I still have a long way to go. We have also added cushions on the window seats which soften the room a lot. We will be adding more wood to the room though in that we are going to do a built-in in the recess where the TV is to clean up that area a little bit and we are adding more wood to the fireplace, but not a lot more--just getting rid of the white spaces and making the mantle deeper so that I can set things on it. As you can guess, my DH loves wood. At least this house has less wood than our old house--our old house had wood ceilings in the living room and foyer and wood walls in the bathrooms which was just too dark for me. Thanks again for the help!...See MoreHow many of you change decorating styles in home?
Comments (12)I freely mix styles but only do what is pleasing to my eye. I have a fair amount of hand-me-downs (err: antiques) that I mix w/ sleek silver picture frames and more modern streamlined seating from IKEA. Those chairs also sit beside very gentlemanly dark leather Parisian styled club chairs w/ nail head trim. I have a pine TV armoire w/ rusted hinges and pulls mixed w/ a banana leaf cocktail table. In my kitchen you'll find a mahogany Duncan Phyfe style table w/ french chairs w/ cane seats in an ebony finish then move through to my mudroom that houses a Balinese hutch and a bureau w/ Eastlake drop pulls. Our office is a study in contrast: I have a fancy handcarved drop desk made by DH's great grandfather w/ a cute little French styled chair and modern curvy white floor lamp that 1/2 of GW'ers liked and 1/2 didn't. There is a sleek dark Bombay Co. console to the side that holds office supplies. DH has a large cumbersome library desk w/ an antique highback oak desk chair that I find to scream 'Heart of America' w/ a modern desk lamp. I find that it took me years to get it all to flow from room to room and to do so I ended up w/ a palette of neutral grays, browns, creams and black but used in nontraditional ways like the black ceiling in my hallway that has the very Victorian Gold Swan mini-chandelier. I've also kept my art uniform from room to room but that's not a sacrifice for me. That just gives me more reason to load up on black and white photos. I think that finally toning down my colors makes my eclectic mix of styles, wood and furniture take center stage. When I had many varied wall colors mixed w/ The riot of styles and crazy mish-mash of furniture I was on visual overload. I do have some friends who still compare their sense of style and decorating to mine and that's not fair to either them or me. They have a home full of lots of different styles that they like and maybe haven't figured out how to get it all to go and they actually apologize when I come over. And the whole time I'm thinking 'Hey - this is a home and it looks really, really wonderful! If you want me to help you tweak things then great, I will, but changes do not need to be made'....See MoreHow many of you like antiques or traditional?
Comments (80)Texashottie, although it's a charming story, there is no way that is a 1783 piece. "1783" may be a stock number from a manufacturer, wholesaler, or retailer, or simply some previous owner's wishful thinking. ;-) It's an Eastlake (late Victorian period, last quarter of the 19th century) style piece, probably American, and looks to be in pretty rough shape. I'm hoping the top section is just filthy, although it looks like there may be some veneer loss on the right side of the top? :-( Oceanna, I do urge you to contact an antiques restoration professional, not a dealer, about this cleaning issue. It depends almost more than anything what your wood finish actually is what will be the best/safest cleaning methods, but what's been done to it since will also come into play. The cleaning method that's best for one finish can do serious damage to another, some polishes or "dusting agents" can soak through a finish and into the wood making refinishing or finish repair extremely difficult, others can attract grime and exacerbate the original problem. While it's not a terribly old piece, it is very unusual and so it is worth treating with great respect. Money Pits... we HAVE a Money Pit, moved in in September. It was supposedly completely rehabbed (otherwise we wouldn't have bought it) but PO did such a shoddy job of it all that we're already sinking quantities of money into it. We knew it was going to need work but we expected it was going to be cosmetic and restoration work for the most part! We're going to try to hunker down for the winter, save some money and prioritize the work, but it's looking like next year's projects will include putting on a new roof and insulating the attic, dealing with some sagging/bouncing floors, a new bathtub (stage 1 of redoing the bathroom), some serious work on the porch floor/steps, installing a parking pad (I hope we will be able to afford brick-look pavers instead of plain asphalt), fencing the back yard, and evaluating the teeny 1910-ish garage, which just about big enough for one good-sized touring motorcycle LOL and in seriously scary condition, to decide whether to fix it up or salvage out what we can and tear it down. Unfortunately, we can't do much of this work ourselves (which was why we had wanted a house that was already repaired, even though we sacrificed a positively huge amount of architectural detail), although DH is sorta willing ;-) we simply don't have anyone for him to learn from who isn't also a halfa$$ed corner-cutter. DH grew up in a rambling Queen Anne and I lived in several old houses during my peripatetic childhood and young-adulthood, so we're no strangers to their weirdnesses. There was one modest Queen Anne we lived in briefly that had a bathroom we described as "Early Wh*rehouse" because of the red flocked wallpaper and heavy use of "wannabe gold" shiny brass! I drove by the 1930s Colonial Revival bungalow I spent my teen years in today and was greatly saddened to see that it is in quite poor repair - the big wraparound porch is beginning to sag, which broke my heart because we spent so many happy hours sitting out on that porch when I was young. We're "youngsters" in the 'tiquing world too, I'm 36 and DH is 33. I'm very nearly the only one I know IRL who likes antiques, sadly; pretty much all my friends were raised po' folks and so consider new items most desirable, because they simply never had any. I was also raised poor and did go through that phase, but I got over it. ;-) There were always some antiques around when I was a kid, but it was always "that old thing" and not worth doodly-squat, usually just stuff from yard-sales - antiques were the expensive things that the rich tourists paid too much money for! LOL Oh, and that ceiling? Since you like the old-fashioned look, how about scraping that popcorn junk off and putting up an Anaglypta-style wallpaper or similar panels (I just ordered samples from Surfacing Solution) on the ceiling? Not all of them are so overtly "Victorian" that they would look odd in your newer house, but they'd add a little something in that direction and play nicely with your possessions. At least the popcorn comes off; our previous house had sand-painted ceilings and that stuff does NOT come off. Thankfully the ceilings here have mostly been left alone, although PO made a real dog's breakfast of the living room walls by rolling on very thick paint with a too-long roller so there's this weird spiky "thing" going on! I don't look forward to getting that nasty mess off, not one bit....See Morebeckysharp Reinstate SW Unconditionally
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6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoRita / Bring Back Sophie 4 Real
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