Week 4! One of these weeks I’m going to post before Sunday. Possibly. Maybe?
So this week was challenging, blah, blah, blah. We are all tired of bloggers complaining about challenges. I do not even want to hear—or say— it. Especially since this event we are all partaking in is called the One Room CHALLENGE. There will be challenges. Duh. So let’s just say that I—and the Man of Action—suffered from old age this week. (Why am I so fucking old?) The Man cannot raise his left arm above shoulder height right now, and I threw my back out. I mean, blah, blah, blah, challenges.
So more painting did not get done. Blah, blah, blah.
Let me shake this off and talk about other important things. Because it’s not like things did not happen this week, it’s just that strenuous physical activity did not happen. Which, too often, is what we all think should be the epitome of accomplishment. (Why do we do that?) But planning and designing is just as important, if not more. That’s the biggest part of a designer’s job—researching, designing, planning, sourcing, and buying. Executing is often done by skilled tradesmen, so that up-front work is the sole domain of a designer. I love that up-front space. It’s wholly mine, mine, MINE.
I started those first steps of design—researching, sourcing, and buying—well before the ORC started. You kind of have to. But this week, since I was physically down, I got to dig through the giant pile of boxes accumulating in my house.
Yep, that’s my office. Still accessible by a small pathway. It’s still pretty even with an old carpet down to protect the pale white carpet tiles from the woodworking we were doing in there before we started this front porch project. (You can see a corner of the built-in shelves shaping up there on the lower right.) Every blogger has a room like this during a project. If it’s not filled with boxes waiting to be opened, it’s full of stuff from the room that had to be cleared out to be transformed by a new design. This is one of the least favorite things of the Man of Action. Redoing one room ALWAYS affects more than just that room.
What you don’t see in this pile is the five really large new planters I ordered for the trellis project and to flank the front door. Or the fake trees I bought to put in the front door planters. It also doesn’t show the benches and tables that came in. Those are all outside. And I’m not showing them quite yet. But they were ordered several weeks ago. Oh, I’m also not showing the lights and the fan quite yet. They are here, but I’m reluctant to unbox them until we go to put them up, because we will totally lose parts that way. Last One Room Challenge, we opened the box that my desk came in and then promptly lost the hardware for it. We eventually found it. After turning the entire house upside down FOR HOURS, then giving up, then turning the house upside down AGAIN only to find the hardware still in the original box, just hidden under another piece. FUN TIMES.
But then, we went to put up the new light in the closet and a piece for that had totally gone missing. I have blocked the details of that from my mind because I was so done with losing things at that point. I seriously do not know how the two of us function in life, we are both so absent-minded. Suffice to say, we found it, but not before complete desperation set in and THINGS WERE SAID, or rather, yelled in exasperation. So yeah, I’m not opening those boxes until we need to. We are CHAOS over here. The dogs are about to disown us.
Anyway, here’s what I am showing:
Pretty things unpacked! I’m really happy with how this is shaping up.
The other thing I did this week was plant shopping, now that Michigan no longer has frost warnings. Although, the high two days ago was just 48°. Don’t get me started on the weather again. Everybody wants to hear that rant again about as much as they want to hear about the CHALLENGES.
But the selection at my local Meijers, my usual first stop for summer container gardening because cheap!, was really lacking. I usually just get basics at Meijers, but even those were scarce. No petunias that weren’t white or weak shades of pink. So I hit Lowes and found a few things I wanted, but not a lot. I like a good mix of classic annuals plus some weirdness, whether that’s black flowers or an interesting spiky perennial. I need more weird, so I’ll be on the hunt for that this week. Here’s what I got so far:
The palette is definitely tied to my design plan, lots of greens, dark and light shades of purple, even some black, and shots of pink and a little bit of red mixed in. I don’t really do yellow or orange very often with flowers anyway. Again, orange is not my favorite color. I remember a project manager at my first graphic design job exclaiming about being shocked—*shocked, I tell you*—at a person she came across in a garden center buying flowers in a restricted palette. “Can you imagine not using all the colors?” Yes, yes, I can. I like a controlled palette. But then again, I am a control freak.
Am I saying you should not use all the colors? NO. No, I am not. If all the colors make you happy—DO IT. Design is about what makes you happy. Nobody in the world should tell you how to be happy. (You know that, right? Please tell me you know that.) I prefer control to exuberance. But that is just my preference. One way is not better than the other objectively. It’s subjective: You need to do what makes you happy.
What I will say here is that a controlled palette can give you a calmer feeling. An unrestricted palette can lean more into chaos, or busy-ness. A lot of garden designs do tend to use restricted palettes to create ambiance. But I have ambled into color theory and that will take too long to dissect in this little post. I just want to reiterate that my way is not the best way to do something—it’s just the way that makes me happy. All design is personal, please do what makes you happy. I get really fed up with the idea of hard and fast rules in design.
Do you, baby, DO YOU. See you next week.
