When I think about finally getting settled into our first home this summer, I get really excited thinking about ideas for decorating. 9+ years of renting space has left my creative interior mind dormant and it's dusting off and wheels are spinning. I enjoy thinking about how to design the inside of our family's space, a space that can finally reflect us and not a temporary set of walls to wait inside.
Don't get me wrong, our paths have been rather intenional. Owning a home has just not been the priority. Instead, we decided to fill up Mike's toolbelt and followed career and education so he could be as marketable as possible in his chosen career field now and in the future. This has meant living in places we could not reasonably afford to own in a safe neighborhood. So in the meantime, I have dulled my sense of creatively filling our space and I am bringing out those visions and dreams like floods these days. Saving websites, marking pages, and taking notes.
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The rooms I think about most often are the boys' rooms. I want to create a space for each of them to call their own. A space that reflects them, provides color, and makes them feel unique and loved. I have different ideas of how to do this, but might need help from a trained deseigner (eventually) to pull everything together so it's not a tacky result. Afterall, I know I am not trained in this field and if you saw my wardrobe you would immediately agree I have no concept of color scheming.
Zane's Room:
My favorite memories of Zane are seeing him outside running in the grass with a bright blue sky. He has so much energy and life and zest for the outdoors that I couldn't imagine his room without somehow including blue like the sky and some part white like soft clouds. Orange reminds me a lot of him for some reason, he looks good in orange shirts and it's such a happy, bright color that it suits his personality. I envision some sort of blend of blue walls and maybe an orange stripe around it, and then blue and white and maybe brown thrown into the mix of the room. White curtains with fat, orange rick rack along a large bottom hem?
He is really interested in super heroes lately and it might be fun to pull some of those pages from the comic book calendar of last year to frame? Or maybe I could decorate a wall with the belly of a few skateboards, but that might get too costly. I have also seen skateboards used for shelving. I would also like to incorporate space for my photographs of fun times with his family, friends, and cousins. Or maybe just pictures of him having fun outside?
The colors are imporant to me for some reason and the rest will just come together once I get into the space and figure things out.
Evan's Room:
For sure soft blue and white. I can't imagine any other calming colors that would be better for this baby. He has the sweetest disposition of any baby I have ever encountered. He will be a peacemaker, he just seems to have a tender hearted soul. When you look into his eyes you want to cry, it's like peeking into heaven. This kid moves my soul just by breathing.
He currently has brown, white, and green bedding. I hate the green, I am sick of it and it's not a color that makes me feel or enjoy or resemble anything, much less my baby Evan. He loves the blanky, so I might have to go all white and just keep the icky green blank. Or replace it with a blue one at some point.
When I think of his room I would want to make it like a baby spa with soothing photographs in black and white of his baby hands, close-ups with his family, and his baby feet. His aunt Lisa got him a soft, floppy bunny before he was born and it's exactly the kind of feeling I want for his room. I think that fuzzy white bunny will be the focal point to work from (color, not animal theme), along with that amazing blue color of his eyes. I wish I could make his room feel like a beachy hamptons place with wooden slats halfway up the wall painted white and sand dollars all over the place.
Our Room:
I have a major project in mind of collecting photos from every trip we have been on as a couple, even back to dating years, and somehow displaying them on a wall (or across walls) in chronological order. I think for this to look good I might need to put them all into black and white with black frames, making each a different size. Too much uniform looks corporate to me, but I also don't want it to look messy and disorganized.
Living Room:
I don't want to hide the fact that we have kids, toys and kid things will be part of it somehow. I just want there to be an organized and clean way of putting things away that doesn't make it look like a preschool. It would be great to just make it all like the movie BIG, but probably not in the budget. This is where we spend most of our time as a family, so I want a large family photo up, a picture of a temple (which one?! CA, DC, AZ?), The Family Proclamation (another project to print it on cool paper/ font in mind, can I even do that?), picture of Christ. I don't think this room has many walls, so I will need to figure out which of these ends up in the hallway.
