Design Trick For On-the-Go

It’s Friday!  🙂  This has been a long-awaited day for me this week — it’s been crazy.  Looking forward to not over-scheduling myself this weekend and being pretty darn relaxed.  I hope you have a fun one ahead of you.

Last week I wrote a post about our long-term design ideas for our living room.  I mentioned in that post that we have a new rug layered on top of our sisal rug from IKEA.  Today’s the day we talk a little bit about it!

Let’s get the most important development out of the way — Kuma loves this rug!  That’s obviously the most pressing matter.  😉  He lays on it all the time.  It’s very soft underfoot, and has that perfect pop of blue that I want in this room and in the other rooms in our house.  Remember — I’m trying to keep the palette cohesive throughout since our house is pretty tiny (just over 1,000 square feet).

We found the rug on a random trip to HomeGoods and I really liked the colors in it.  The rug, as a whole, I was kind of undecided about.  But we brought it home, laid it out, and I took a couple of days to consider it.  It wasn’t like those instant love-at-first-sight kind of things…but I knew that this rug had all of the colors I wanted in this room.

What was throwing me off were my accessories in this room as it is now.  The furniture all works with the rug — I have purposefully kept everything really neutral because I always wanted to be able to change out accessories, not furniture pieces, if we wanted to do any kind of room refresh.  It’s easier on the budget to switch out accessories than it is to get brand new furniture!  😉  Currently, my accessories are not really doin’ it for me.  I’m excited to bring in some new fun things in this color palette — especially that beautiful blue.  Which brings me to…

The design tip!

The colors in this rug are very specific, which makes them difficult to shop for when I’m out and about.  We’ve all had that experience where we find the perfect pillows that we just have to have while we’re out shopping and we get them home and they don’t look right.  I hate that!  So I wanted to come up with a way that I could carry around the colors with me so that I can have a reference for anything I want to bring home.

I brought out my trusty paint decks and started trying to match the colors.  And I found some that were really good!  Then I went to Sherwin-Williams and Dunn Edwards and picked up the samples.  If you don’t have a paint deck, try taking a picture of the color with your phone and then grabbing a few samples from the stores that you think would match.  Oh, and make sure you do this with plenty of natural light in your space.

Of course, lighting in stores is going to factor into color perception a little bit, so I’ll need to be mindful of that.  But overall, this is going to be a great way to have a pretty solid representation of the color that I’m searching for at the ready so that I can hopefully make fewer mistakes and returns.  😉

See?  Goin’ in for a little relaxation on the rug again!  Love him so much.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!