Book Review: Decorate by Holly Becker and Joanna Copestick

Title: Decorate: 1,000 Design Ideas for Every Room in Your Home
Author: Holly Becker and Joanna Copestick
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Hardback Copy

Maybe it's just the fact that I had finished reading two home design books that were memoirs in disguise, but I was a little underwhelmed by Holly Becker's Decorate. I used to follow her blog pretty regularly, and I always liked what I saw there, but this book lacks the focus that Elements of Style and The Nesting Place had. Becker also devotes a chapter of her book to each room of the house, and her book is a riot of photos, each more gorgeous than the next, but what I took away was a lot of pictures of pretty houses and very little about how to apply that to my own life and my own home. If you want a book to page through on your coffee table, you can't go wrong with this one, but the book doesn't seem to lend itself easily to practical application because it's just too big and too sprawling.

Book Review: Elements of Style by Erin Gates

Title: Elements of Style: Designing a Home and a Life
Author: Erin Gates
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Hardback Copy

Although Erin Gates has been blogging (at Elements of Style) for a long time, I only stumbled onto her recently. While we were starting our renovation of the casita kitchen, I got really into looking at other remodeling projects in progress. Gates happened to be redoing her garage/master bedroom and bath/laundry room (and maybe some other stuff), and I was blown away by what she was doing (the tile in her bathroom is swoony and her bedroom built-ins are amazing-- follow her on Instagram to check it out). Anyway, I quickly learned that she was about to release her first book, and like the lemming that I am, I ordered it.

The book is amazing. She uses her own design work (which is gorgeous-- I seriously love the New England bones of her buildings and the way she combines traditional and modern elements in almost all of her work), and her own home to showcase how to create a stylish home, room by room. These are not cookie cutter projects-- in fact, for each room she talks about different design traditions and how to apply them stylishly. She weaves in personal stories about her own life which kept me enthralled as a reader. This book has it all, and for once, I'm happy about making an impulse purchase of a coffee table book. This is one that I'll come back to again and again.

Book Review: The Nesting Place by Myquillyn Smith

Title: The Nesting Place: It Doesn't Have to be Perfect to be Beautiful
Author: Myquillyn Smith
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Hardback Copy

Have you ever felt that isn't worth it to make your house a home? Maybe you're in a crappy apartment or living in your parents' basement or living for just a few months in a dorm. Maybe you're in a house that needs so much done it seems overwhelming to start. Whatever your situation, Myquillyn Smith has probably lived it too. In fifteen years (or so) of marriage, she and her husband have lived in seventeen (or so) places (I can't remember the exact details), and for a long time she felt paralyzed by the idea of decorating a small budget or learning to love a rental house. But over the years, she has learned the tricks of making a house a home, and it has very little to do with square footage or granite countertops, and everything to do with learning to live with imperfections, being willing to change things up, and just digging in.

The Nesting Place is filled with pictures of the rental home in which she lived with her husband and three sons while she was writing the book (the family recently bought a new house). It's part memoir, part pep talk, and filled with practical suggestions of how to decorate a house that can be awesome and a reflection of your personal style, even if it's never going to be absolutely perfect. While I'm in a more settled place in my life, I still found this book extremely enjoyable to read and finished it with a bunch of practical applications I could use in my own home and life.

The Master Bedroom and Bath

When we first walked through the house, I didn't think the master bedroom was all that special. Sure, it had a lot of nice windows, and a fantastic bathroom, but the room itself seemed just adequate. It wasn't until we moved in a few months later, and loaded in two dressers, two nightstands, a California King size bed and an old tan recliner that we realized that the room was enormous. At the time we thought we'd make one of the basement bedrooms into an office, but we soon realized that we had room to sleep, do our work, watch tv, and play basketball in this bedroom, so we decided not to have a separate office, and we've divided the room into different sections.

In the center of the room, you have the normal bedroom stuff. Dressers (Three four-drawer Malm dressers from IKEA, all pushed together to look like one unit), a bed, and a ginormous television (one of the few concessions to the fact that Eddie does live in the house). The bed is from Overstock. I made the headboard a long time ago and covered it with a new fabric for this house. The bedding is also from Overstock. We bought the nightstands (Bogart Collection by Thomasville) from several garages around Salt Lake County. The big blue lamps are from eBay. I love them.

When I talk about the books on my bedside table, this is what I'm talking about.

The north side of the room is the reading/lounging/one-of-the-kids-had-a-nightmare-and-wants-to-sleep-in-our-room zone. I didn't want to paint this room a funky color, so I got a big square of fabric and hemmed it and stuck it up on the wall to add some visual interest. Yes, I do have a plan for how to readjust the pictures when we have five kids instead of four. The only thing I haven't figured out is how to get professional 8x10s of Rose at 6, 12, 18 and 24 months if she's living in an orphanage in China at some of those ages. The couch and bookcase are from IKEA, but I drove up to Layton (which is much further north than I thought it was) through a snowstorm to get the couch for less than half price out of some guy's house. The end tables are from the 1950s and purchased from another SLC-area garage. Les found the aqua Star of David bowl at the Salvation Army in Massachusetts and I decided it was way too cool to hang up on the dining room wall.

Finally, here's the business area of the bedroom (not that kind of business). I wanted to take advantage of this big bank of windows by being able to look out at the mountains while I wrote, or paid bills, or wasted time on Facebook. The chairs are Tolix and match the ones in the dining room (we can seat ten at the dining room table in a pinch). Desks are cobbled together from IKEA, the recliner is from Macy's. Shelves from IKEA. Justin Hackworth did the photos of me and the girls. Isaac did the Abe Lincoln art. Annie painted the floral still life. Don't you love the print of Emma Smith? And the little doll we bought for Rose? Have you been counting lamps? Eight. I know, it's overkill, but remember, this room is big enough to play basketball in.

When I saw the pictures of the house online for the first time, I laughed out loud when I saw this bathroom. Who needs a chandelier over the bathtub? Apparently me, I guess. All of the prints are from Etsy. You may notice lots of Asian-themed art. By the time we decided to adopt Rose, the bathroom was just about the only place that still needed pictures on the walls. We may move some around in the future so she doesn't associate being Asian with using the bathroom.

That's it until October. I hope to show exterior pictures, the kitchen and the basement when I can get my hands on Les's camera again.

The Kids' Rooms and Bathroom

When I was pregnant with Bryce, my mom offered to paint his bedroom. We were renting at the time, and the rest of the house had flat white paint, but one weekend we painted the baby's room a sunny yellow, and she stenciled navy blue stars as a border around the room. Since that time, it's become a tradition for my mom to do something over-the-top in the kids' rooms. We've had whales and sailboats, flowers and frogs, lots of hot pink flowers, fairies, and in this house she really outdid herself.

The boys' room was one of the first rooms in the house to reach a state of near-completion, and it's stayed this way for two years. Isaac had surgery shortly after we moved to Utah, and we decided that while he was in a full-body cast recuperating, we'd entertain him by transforming his bedroom (I'm guessing he didn't think it was as much fun as we did). He and Bryce have always been huge fans of the zoo, and what do you do to decorate a bedroom for huge zoo fans? You fill the walls with huge elephants, of course. We actually drew the elephants on the wall with washable magic marker, then painted in the lines. Bedding is from The Company Store, beds are from Overstock, dressers are from West Elm. We plan to put cork tiles on the slanted part of the ceiling, but haven't actually gotten that far yet.

When we visited the house for the first time, Annie ran upstairs and claimed this bedroom for her and Maren. I still don't think Isaac has quite forgiven her, but I have to say that I can't blame her. I would have chosen this bedroom for myself if I'd been a kid too. Although we bought the bedding while we still lived in Texas and assembled the beds (from IKEA) in this room before the moving truck arrived, my Mom didn't finish painting the room until about a month ago, and we're currently in the process of adding another bed to the room (we're having a neighbor build a built-in bed in what has been called "the reading nook"). I'd also like to add some curtains, so Annie can have her own little preteen lair in the room she'll soon share with two little sisters. We also have some lovely Olli and Lime wallpaper sitting in the closet that I'll get around to putting up on the slants over the existing beds one of these days. The chairs are from PB Teen and Overstock, bedding from PB Teen, dresser from KSL Classifieds. The embarrassingly large collection of American Girl dolls is courtesy of the Grandmas.

It took me a long time to decide what to do in the bathroom upstairs. I decided that rather than going for something over-the-top (since the bedrooms are already so wild) we'd go understated in the bathroom. I filled it with bird prints painted by Ashley Mae, a friend from my MFA program. The prints are much more lovely in real life than they look in the pictures, and I like the way that this room feels serene.

Up Tomorrow: Master bedroom and bath

The Family Room

We spent most of our time in the family room, so I knew it had to be comfortable and functional. It also had to have a lot of room for lounging, and our favorite pastime, watching television. I found a Room and Board sectional I LOVED, but since that one was more than $5,000, we settled for one from Macy's at less than half the price. It works for now, but a few months ago I went to Room and Board and actually sat on the couch I really wanted, and I had a little moment of silence for what could have been. The chair is also from Macy's, and so is the ottoman (which usually functions as a coffee table but is all skewed and crazy in the picture). The bookshelves are from IKEA and if you look closely, you'll notice that they're backed with the same fabric that's on the benches beneath the windows on the south side of the house. This room is always in a state of chaos, so it's nice to see it looking (mostly) nice for a change. Leslie painted the yellow and orange branch paintings near the back door.

 

Next time: I'll take you upstairs!

Hallway, Half Bath, Laundry Room

After passing through the living and rooms, a visitor to our house enters the hallway, which happens to be the spot of one of my most prized possessions. My Aunt Kate Gorman, a fabric artist, made this quilt and we bought it about a year ago. It took a while to figure out how to accessorize it, but I think we finally got a subtle sexually-charged theme working for us. There's space beneath for some of our favorite coffee table books.

When I finished covering a zillion pillows, we had a lot of fabric left over. I'm not one to keep scraps of fabric, so having the fabric in my sewing cupboard made me all twitchy. I'd seen some fabric-covered hoops in different places and decided to try to use them in this bathroom. They're colorful, cheap, and hung just high enough that the boys can't spray them with an errant pee.

I always imagined that when we moved into our "forever" house we'd have a mudroom with lockers for the kids. Although this house doesn't have a mudroom, it does have a nice big laundry room, which was a big, empty laundry room for the first year. Last year I decided to add some organizational stuff, and lockers for the kids. Because of an air-conditioning vent on the floor we had to mount the lockers, which are an IKEA hack (Expedit bookcase turned on its side with some of the shelves taken out). In fact, the room is basically all IKEA, from the kids' art display to the table to the cupboard next to the washer and dryer. The prints are from Leslie's "domestic series." The Donkey Kong piece is by Bryce Miner.

You may notice that we have only four lockers. I haven't figured out how we'll fix that when we have five kids!

Up tomorrow: The Family Room (but not the messy kitchen!)