Brooke: “All I do is keep picturing those boxes of Girl Scout cookies….”

Nick: “What?”

Brooke: “The boxes of Girl Scout cookies.”

Nick, awoken by my rambling, and confused, thinking I’m awake: “Uh, do you want me to go downstairs to get them for you?”

Brooke: “NO — I just keep picturing those boxes of Girl Scout cookies.”

Nick: “Okay…”

Brooke: “The boxes of cookies that are downstairs in the kitchen.”

Nick: “Right… so do you want me to get them for you?”

Brooke: “NO! Nevermind. I know I’m not making any sense.”

I never did get my Lemonades that night. But never fear — I survived.

my masterpiece.

I’m trying a new approach where I set some guidelines for myself, don’t buy anything impulsively, and if I see something that looks bold and awesome — I realllllly think about it (and usually end up realizing it’s too much and I need to scale it back a bit). So far, so good.

For the walls, I fell in love with Benjamin Moore’s Palladian Blue… but then, after painting a handful of test swatches throughout the first floor and upstairs hallway (which would all eventually be painted the same color), I realized it was waaaaayy too much blue. After a few more Goldilocks trials and errors — you know, this one’s too bold, this one’s too boring, etc. — I landed upon Sherwin Williams Sea Salt, a muted grayish blueish green (that’s the technical description). It was perfect.

We already have charcoal grey couches which will stay, along with a coffee table that Nick made, but we need some other pieces to tie everything together… and that’s where I get stuck.

Enter: Design*Sponge At Home by Grace Bonney, editor of the Design*Sponge blog. I got a copy of this book a few months ago when I attended a signing at Terrain (Grace was super nice, by the way!), and it has become my decorating bible as of late. I love that pretty much all of the sneak peeks featured in the book are far from what you’d call matchy-matchy, yet they still have a very pulled together look despite being very eclectic. So many of them speak to me and remind me why I’ve never been drawn to buying matching sets of furniture.

In deciding how to decorate the downstairs of our new home, I looked for rooms in the book that had similar wall colors to Sea Salt, and just rooms that I generally liked. After browsing a handful of pages one afternoon, it struck me that so many rooms had one great thing in common: amidst calming neutrals, there was often a distinct pop of red that stood out as a focal point, and really tied the room together. Don’t believe me? Here are just a few rooms found on Design*Sponge (the blog this time):

image 1 // image 2 // image 3 // image 4

Coincidentally, a lovely friend also gave us a gorgeous red cast iron trivet as a housewarming gift, and I was sold. Pops of red — yes! Why didn’t I think of it sooner?

Thus, our color palette was born: mostly warm neutrals, with pops of teal (I mean, I’m still me, after all) and fire engine red. It looks pretty subdued to me here, but I think that’s a good sign that I won’t get sick of it in five minutes.

I’m thinking a red statement lamp would be perfect sitting atop this pedestal end table that was my nana’s and just came to live with us over the weekend:

We have yet to hang anything on the walls and I’m sure many more colors will come into play then — but having this new red revelation has me excited to decorate so it looks like grownups live here. Grownups who have an eclectic yet pulled-together style.

What’s your decorating method?

American Flags Map from These Are Things

For Christmas, I gave Nick a framed print of a vintage map of our town; he loves all kinds of maps, and I love all the different maps that have been popping up in the design world lately. Perhaps maps could be a fun theme throughout our new home? Have I justified my inevitable purchase of this yet?

by Departika on Etsy, found via Jessica Bishop on Pinterest

What can I say: we like to be unpredictable.

We saw The Descendants, which I’ve been wanting to see for a while. We both loved it, though at times it was a little slow. (I don’t feel like that’s necessarily a bad thing, but Nick surely would have been a bit restless.) We especially loved the little girl who played Scotty, George Clooney’s youngest daughter. It was a sad movie, for sure, but it had some funny moments, mostly thanks to Scotty.

image source

Have you seen anything good lately?

Somewhere in the last year, I’ve become hesitant to blog and have also just been so very busy (you’ve heard me promise several times to get back in the swing of things here, but it hasn’t quite happened yet). During my quietness, I’m sure I lost a lot of readers, and blogging without comments is just not as fun. However, this blog has always been for me, and comments and connections with others have just been a bonus, so I’m going to try to keep that in mind as I attempt — once again — to update more regularly.

On that note, here’s a little peek into my world of late. I got a new iPhone in late November and could finally get into Instagram (since my iPhone 3G camera tended to hate me, which it expressed often by freezing, being generally slow, and taking horrible pictures). So for now, I leave you with some of my favorite pics from the last month. If you’re into that sort of thing, you can follow me — I’m claremontroad — and we also created a curiousandco business account for the occasional sneak peek into our workdays.

top: packing up some Curious & Co. orders from our new online shop; sunset view from my new home office
middle: tire tracks from the year’s first snowy dusting (this morning!); new chevron rug from Urban Outfitters
bottom: sunlight streaming in through our new front door; enjoying Christmas morning with our niece, Ginger

This one is available as a 10″ x 26″ letterpress print and it’s on my wish list, for sho’. I mean, what’s not to love? It’s a great quote, it’s letterpress, has stacked type, and includes a few of my favorite fonts. Gimme!

for sale at crazyonesquote.com, found via Donna Fung on Pinterest

Jingle Bells – Christmas Video Greeting 2011 from Jared Foster on Vimeo.

Found via Design Mom