ecleptic's Profile

I love red. Lipstick red, stop light red. The brighter the better (but no yellow, it needs to be a pure red or lean towards the blue). I can wear it and it looks really really nice with my complexion. But just like in my house- I like to wear it as an accent with neutrals. Red coats, red scarfs, red gloves, red shoes... Red pillows, red throws, red in my art, one red accent wall.

But I also use taupes, browns, and greys in decorating that completely wash me out in person- Black is the only neutral that works in my closet and you can't decorate heavily in black. I can't wear walnut or beige. But my husband can! It looks amazing on him.

Our house is a lovely mix of what looks good on him and what looks good on me :) But this article does make me think I need some dark teal in the house- it's the one color that I love in my closet but have never bothered to bring into the house.

Lived in apartments and rentals for most of my life (with a brief time in a new construction house with my parents before I moved out) so it wasn't until we bought our first house a year and a half ago that we had the opportunity to inherit anything left behind.

The property was a foreclosure so we considered anything left behind as fair game. There was a large (3ft by 3ft) oil rubbed bronze decoration above the fireplace. We loved it so much we've not only kept it on the wall- but when we redid the kitchen and started updating light fixtures- we updated everything to the same metal and used it as a jump point for picking the fabrics and accessories for our living room.

Everything else but paint buckets, a couple of bricks that match the house, and a couple of pieces of wood was cleaned out by the bank.

I'm with Seapup (and probably others). Clear plastic boxes from the Container Store. We started using them about 6 years ago and have added more over time until they are our primary storage box in the house. We have open top ones in the closet to sort clothes. We have a stack of them with out of season clothes in the laundry room. I have a dozen or so of the shoe box size (most of ours are sweater size) in the master bathroom to corral all the haircare/makeup/medicine. We've got stacks of the bigger ones in the guest bedroom holding linens, in the master closet holding photographs and ongoing projects, and even in the kitchen cabinets corralling baking tools and spices.

A labeling gun helps. The real place that the labeling gun helped was in the kitchen cabinets. Every shelf is labeled so that anyone can find or put something away. Previously my husband would just put things back where there was space because he wasn't sure where it went. Friends over for baking wouldn't be sure where anything was or should go. I spent the better part of a week cleaning the cabinets out and organizing them with the label maker and it's been a breeze to upkeep.

And the other strange but very handy organizing fix was dedicating closet space to be the library. We have about 80feet of books (in terms of necessary bookshelf space). We're both bookworms and they're not the pretty books you necessarily want to display in the living room. He reads fantasy, I ready trashy romance. We both read urban horror. We take the loss of closet space and installed elfa bookshelves in two of the four sections of our master closet. It's very library like and keeps the books out of the public areas of our house. Yes we have less closet space but we only put out the seasonally relevant stuff.

Right now all the shorts and short sleeved shirts along with half of our jeans, and wardrobe basics (stuff that it's nice to rotate and change up) are in clear plastic boxes in the laundry room waiting for the season to change.

We have a jar like the one with pez dispensers filled with Legos in our entry way and Where the Wild Things Are figurines dance on top of our Shakespeare collection on our fireplace mantle. We love a touch of whimsey. Luckily we don't entertain in such high circles that we have to be serious all the time.