How beautiful is this light and airy house? I love all the windows and all the white, even if an all white house wouldn’t stay all white for long with my current kid- and cat-infested lifestyle. There’s just something so cheery about it, like I feel like I wouldn’t even stay sad for long in an interior like this one. Also, how about that bare log crosspiece in the last picture? It’s such a fun, natural way to give anyone roaming this house a break from those all-white walls and ceilings!

Images via Stadshem

The short answer: Just do it.

The Beard was initially skeptical when I suggested that we paint our kitchen purple, and a fairly intense purple, at that. But he’s gotten used to it, and when he happened to see some photos of how our kitchen used to look, he couldn’t believe how much the purple improved the space. Literally, I get nothing but compliments – though sometimes these are paired with comments like “I really didn’t think it would be as great as it is.” Uh, thanks?

And hey, if you told me you were thinking of painting your kitchen cabinets a pretty wild shade of pink, I might balk just a little bit. But if this kitchen from Sweden.se is any indication, painting a kitchen pink can be totally delicious. While there are some projects that don’t lend themselves to a quick do-over, why not go bright and bold when it comes to paint? You can always repaint the following weekend!

Copper is a beautiful thing to bring into your home, whether in the form of a single copper colander or you’re outfitting your entire drain spout system and overhangs in it. Shiny or patina-ed, I love it, and here are some of the things I love. Hopefully they give you a few good ideas!

A pretty French kitchen photographed by Simon Watson

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The color inspiration posts I occasionally put up are among my favorites, if only because they give me a valid excuse to sit at my computer browsing through photos of awesome interiors. Even if, say, pink isn’t your thing, how it’s used can still give you some insight into how you use colors in your own home. Right now, I’m loving red. If you’ve been reading long enough, you’ll know that my now disused home office is a deep cherry red that was hard as hell to apply (tinted primer is your friend, use it), so really, I’ve never not loved red. Some people, though, are a little afraid of red because it’s such a powerful, influential, and sometimes overwhelming color.

But I’m here to tell you, don’t be afraid. Red is awesome. See what I mean?

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It should be so simple… How do you clean a house for a party? You just, I don’t know, clean it?

But then why does party prep send so many folk into spirals of the kind of procrastination where instead of doing what you ought to be doing, you end up doing something you want to do even less? It’s just one of those things. And frankly, too many articles that purport to show the reader how to clean house for a party are too involved, too boring, and assume that everyone just loves to clean and probably also doesn’t have a job or children.

So with that in mind, here is a quickie guide to the busy person’s party prep cleanup that will get you through your upcoming event with the least amount of stress and the maximum amount of returns.

Make a Plan, Man
This is where you identify “problem areas.” Is your sink perpetually full of dishes? Is your bathroom totally gnarly at the moment? Has your couch disappeared under a layer of dog hair? Imagine that you are a first-time visitor to your house – what messy, dirty thing would you notice first? That’s the thing you want to clean first. Once that’s done, it will be (mentally, and possibly physically) a lot easier to clean everything else. Making a list can help you stay focused, but at the very least clean one room or area all the way before starting another.

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I have to say that I am all at once inspired and mortified by this amazing girls’ room put together by Christina of Full House – inspired because oh em gee she did everything for less than $250 and mortified because I’d started to feel like my daughter’s room was coming together just a little bit and good lord it certainly is not in comparison.

I cry that I was not born with the gene that lets some people do amazing things on a tiny budget. But to all of you I say if you’ve got it, flaunt it! You can see how Christina did it here at Little Green Notebook!

Plastic cheap? Perish the thought! Sometimes plastic can be downright pricey.

Kartell Frilly Chair by Patricia Urquiola

Pink lucite tables

Tube Top Colors Table Lamp by Pablo

Pink lucite tray via Living Etc.

Pink table by Yuka Izutsu for MoCo Loco

The cute all apparently got sucked into Martha’s Vineyard, where there are more than 300 dainty rainbow-hued Victorian-style cottages with elaborate balconies, turrets, cornices, and gables with all manner of adorable details.

This is the Oak Bluffs neighborhood – formerly campgrounds for Methodist church group retreats, the houses themselves were built in the mid-1800s by members of the church community and to this day surround a open-sided wrought iron tabernacle that seats thousands.

Color abounds here, as do themed embellishments like balcony cut-outs shaped like everything from gingerbread men to grapes to Martha’s Vineyard itself. And the houses, of course, wear their colors and cut-outs with pride, sporting names like Sea Shrimp Cottage and Big Enuf.

The one downside to all the tooth-melting sweetness you’ll find in Martha’s Vineyard is that the gingerbread cottages are often (though not always) extremely close together. I’m talking about distances like six inches between exterior walls – you might as well be living in a townhouse.

Photos via: 1, 2, 3

I’m not really sure how owls became a thing, but here I sit on a couch decorated with owl throw pillows. Maybe I’m getting a little zany in my old age – please look away from my sock monkey kitchen chair pillows – but I can’t help but love animal inspired decor. Once upon a time that would have meant a leopard print chair, but now it’s more likely to mean a framed quilt patch featuring stylized songbirds or a pint glass with an elephant on it.

So how cute is all this?

Owl throw pillows in a living room via Dwell

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For an easy update, you can’t beat wainscoting (especially the fakey stuff that doesn’t need much other than cutting down to size, though of course it doesn’t look as sharp as the real deal). But what is wainscoting, exactly? And how do you say it? According to Webster’s, the proper pronunciation is not waynescahtting but rather waynescoating – though either is acceptable in a pinch. As to what it is, wainscoting is paneling typically applied to the lower three feet of a wall below a chair rail and above the baseboard molding, though it can be much taller. According to Wikipedia, the original purpose of wainscoting was to cover the lower part of walls which, in houses constructed with poor or nonexistent damp-proof courses, are often affected by rising dampness. Nowadays, it’s purely decorative.

Here’s what it looks like:

Raised panel wainscoting (via)

Flat panel wainscoting (via)

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