This is the hallway/laundry area at the top of the stairs on the second (or is it third? I don't know if we count our garage as the first floor or not) floor.
I absolutely adore these Michael Sowa prints that sit at the top of the stairs. I first feel in love with them when watching Amélie, but had no idea who made them or if they were just made for the movie. About a year ago, I found out who the artist was, and my bff (*wink*) Sumiko got me the dog for my last birthday (which actually has significance beyond my love of the print) and I got the regal eagle (hen? peacock?) to complete the collection before we moved in. There's such an air of mock seriousness in them and it makes me smile to see them every day.
Before we found this house, I told Herman that one of my wishes (that I didn't think would happen) would be to have a laundry room near the bedrooms. In Florida I got so tired of dragging laundry up and down the stairs, and of course, in Providence we had to use communal laundry rooms (bleh). So this is definitely one of my favorite things about this house. Although, it is a very small closet and they "highly recommended" getting a junior washer and dryer, Herman and I weren't too excited about that, so we took the door off of the laundry closet and went for the full size ones. And I'm glad we did.
Because I used a wide angle lens, this area is looking a lot bigger than it really is (and white. The walls are actually the same light gray as the office). So you can imagine what a pain in the arse it was, first, for the Sears guys to install the washer and dryer and then, with the water overflow situation, for the construction guys to come in and fix everything. I have to say though, that it's nice that doing laundry is no longer a much dreaded chore.
In our master bedroom, it was all about creating a comfortable, soothing, and relaxing space, and finding the perfect shade of blue was a huge part of that.
We also wanted to make the space personal and full of the lovey-dovey stuff that I usually laugh at...only we tried to do the lovey-dovey stuff in a cool way, of course. The red print above our bed on the right is a screen print that says, "All You Need is Love". I got it for us for Valentines day (awww...) because of our love of a certain Beatles song (trust me, you'll want to follow that link. I might have watched that a crazy number of times, and it may or may not be my ring tone). The other screen print says "We Are So Good Together", and was an extremely hard to track down because it's always sold out. On the right is this great bird mobile that I love, and that Dexter sometimes thinks he needs to attack, but, thank goodness, hasn't yet.
Our vows, a pop of color (love from Paris!), our very own Eiffel Tower (thanks Dean and Soom!), and some old cameras - one belonged to my grandmother, the other to my great grandmother.
About three years ago, I stepped into a friends house in Providence in which the living room was painted a beautiful brown color. I decided then and there that if we ever had a place of our own, I'd have to have brown walls somewhere. Herman was sort of hesitant about it at first, being sort of unsure about how heavy it might end up feeling. But when I got done painting the brown wall in our bedroom, he loved it. So much that we even ended up using a lot of brown in our bathroom as well (unfortunately, I don't have photos of the bathroom. There is no natural light in there, so the photos weren't coming out very well). Now, I know that a lot of people think that the whole brown/light blue trend is one that has passed, but we still love it. And just so you know, painting this wall was like painting with milk chocolate it went on so nice and deliciously.
I absolutely love have a smaller living space. And since we got to start over from scratch, we were really able to edit the junk out of our lives. But one problem we ran into was what to do with all of our books. We've had to spread them out between all of the bedrooms, and are even planning on putting bookshelves in the garage to contain the overflow. For this room, we bought the Ikea Lack floating shelves which are stronger than I thought they'd be and easily hold our collection of classics. And an owl. Naturally. We call her Helga. She's the robust German bride of our dear Bernardo.
This is one of my favorite corners of my house. Right now, we just have an extra dining room chair here, but my dream is to have this guy sitting here. But he's quite expensive and it'll take me awhile to save up for 2 (yes, two. One here, one downstairs) of them. I put my favorite pair of shoes here because they make me happy.
Just so you can see better the layout of the top floor. And Dexter.
When Herman and I were in Paris, one of our favorite places (besides Montmarte) was Île Saint-Louis (Amy, did you and Justin spend much time there?). During our last week, we were walking around there, and came across this little gallery that was showing the work of graphic artist Ted Naifeh. I love this sort of work, and we were so disappointed that the gallery was already closed. But we went back the next day, perused the gallery, and bought this poster which shows one of his characters, Courtney Crumrin, walking down the same street in Paris that the gallery is on (the street that I took this photo on). We managed to get it back in one piece and now it's safely framed and hanging in our room.
So there you have it. Our house. And of course, more photos on flickr. Hope I didn't bore you too much.
What am I going to post about now?