More Designer Tips

I bought two qt of paint for the focus wall/headboard in our bedroom, and painted the base coat last night. It's already working. The two shades of the purple color, 'purple plumage' and 'iris reverie' from Valspar, broke up the 'pink' wall, so the bedroom is more sophisticated, instead of girly. I brought my favorite calendar to Lowe's with me, but learnt that there has to be areas bigger than a quarter for the machine to pick up correct color. My sample picture is tone on tone, too much details, so obviously the machine won't work. So we had to eyeball it. It took me more than 40 minutes to finally find the almost perfect matches. I was really glad. I just have to let the background dry overnight, then I can start painting those details. I am pretty good at drawing, so feel very confident about it. Then I need to go buy some new bedding and curtains, make some new pillow cases, the master bedroom will be 'done', for now. We still haven't decided on the furniture yet. Yeah, three years after moving in we still cannot decide. But we know exactly what we want, just could not find one matches our imagination/design. We both refuse to settle for something similar, it's not any other room, it's the master bedroom, we spend 1/3 of our life in there.

I painted the entire house, room by room, never had to do this much research before. But during this research process, I found lots of designer's tips and learned a lot. The newest one I found is Color Your World. It teaches you everything about color in the interior design world, from the basic concepts and rules to the tricks and tips. I found it very useful and inspirational. I also found some great designer blogs, which contain lots of great design ideas. The most exciting part of these designer blogs is they search through all those magazines and other sources and post all the inspiration pictures together, and they always explain what is so great about that specific design and how the design elements work together. And they will tell you where to get those items, what is the price for the designer piece and where to find cheaper and almost identical one. The Material Girls from yesterday's post is a great example. And here are two more, Design Hole and Design Sponge. I will add more here once I find them again.