First and foremost: We are so excited to announce that we’ve been asked to become regular contributors to the domino.com website!  Our first feature – an updated post about Mera’s downstairs bathroom – ran yesterday (we may or may not have had a squeal-filled phone call when we saw it).  You can check it out here.

And in other news…

All hail the power of paint!  I’m so desperate to finish the Chamber of Secrets (which is taking forever – this is renovation in real time folks) that this Sunday I grabbed my painting supplies, marched downstairs, and gave the hallway a little makeover.  Sound counter-productive?  The truth is that I desperately needed to finish something, and now that I did I totally have my house-fixin’ mojo back.

I’ve been steadfastly ignoring this hallway for years, but since painting the living and dining rooms, it’s become much harder.  The yellow hue – perhaps sweet and sunny in its younger life – has become through the years dingy, and more evocative of urine-soaked snow.

We use the hutch to store linens and extra bathroom supplies.  It’s a really sweet piece, and definitely deserved better than it was getting.  This hallway had become the repository for stacks of homeless art which became, in turn, repositories for Dean and Carl’s copious furballs.

Even the magical blue dining room paint that I love so much was suffering in its proximity to the hallway.

I decided to paint the hallway the same color as the living room – Miller Paint’s Crystal Ball, the prettiest shade of pale gray.  Behold the difference:

Hallelujah!  Now that the color palette is more unified, the flow through these spaces is so much better.  When the hallway was yellow, the three different colors made the view into the living room visually hectic.  Things are much more serene now.

To give the hutch a little update I lined the back with this chalkboard-printed paper by Lily & Val; I just used double-sided tape to hold it in place.

I’m crazy about the Bakelite handles.

I decided to keep the art simple (which means the stack of homeless art is now seining for furballs in another room), but these two little pieces feel right to me.  The Picasso drawing is a page torn from a Sotheby’s catalog that I got for really cheap on Etsy.

The photo of the dove is from a thrift store.  On the back someone wrote, “1980.  Taken in a small courtyard in Alicante Spain, after a night train from Madrid, killing time before an afternoon bus.”  It’s funny how photographs taken with real film have an undeniably vintage cast to the them – a look that many Instagram filters attempt but few achieve.

I’m so, so happy I made time to do this.  I get a little lift every time I walk through here and I feel reinvigorated and excited to dive back into the Chamber.

Anybody else sometimes need to switch gears when they’re in the middle of a big project?  Thanks for reading along!