Staghorn Fern Lovies & Kitchen Paint

I love plants, indoors & out.  I have a lot of houseplants, and after this move - some of them are not adjusting so well.  The light is a bit less here, and the daytime temperatures a bit lower, so I sit & wait and see who can tough it out, and who will sadly leave my life.  But, there's not much I can do aside from dramatically altering the house, landscape, and microclimate, I just have to look forward and find some plants who will like our new situation. I immediately thought of, the Staghorn Fern:

Photo Credit: Anythingology

I love these! They are so bold, and wall mount? Yes please! One thing I love about Ferns is how they are  perfectly fine with a low light situation, thank goodness because
when it's winter in the forest, we are a low light household.  Don't get me wrong, I love the Redwoods,  but let a little sunshine in your heart, will ya? 

This is probably the project I'm thinking of doing, there's a full tutorial over at Apartment Therapy. I'm diggin' these wood slats, and I can already think of 4+ places that these would make my day. Or in a grid of 4 squares... delightful.  I'm a little concerned that these are a more tropical fern, and I read that temps below 55F may damage it.. but hopefully a warm summer will help these establish (indoors) and become strong to tough out the winter with me. Worth a try!

Photo Credit: The Man Of Style

In other news, this weekend we might actually tackle painting the kitchen.  (In OTHER news, we already did.. see more here: Painting Progress) We've had samples up for a while, and it's been a tough choice. My natural inclination is to rush towards bold and beautiful colors, but like I said before, we are a limited light house now (that's my nice of way saying, it's friggin dark) so I'm forcing myself to stay with the light tones of color.  So here's the two we've settled on:

 

I was going to grab a few paint sample photos from the interweb, but these colors in other photos look way too light blue. Which, as you can see, in our kitchen and our lighting, they are not.  I love how the aqua bay is a nice teal, and tropical dream - be it lighter than I ever thought I'd see myself go - is actually really pretty! So we are going to do these two walls in tropical dream,  because they receive less natural light:

And then the opposite two walls in Aqua Bay.  I would show you a picture but the only one I have is a very ... very... messy one.

... Ok fine, here it is, but don't judge me! We were mid move when I shot this....

If you look past the boxes and random lamps & wires being all over the place, you can see the walls. We'll paint the back wall, and the wall above the sink (can you even see the sink!?) in the darker, aqua bay.  Note, this picture was taken at night - it's not that dark outside in the daytime! I'm just a drama queen.

So the plan will be to bring in our fun colors in the accessories. (You better believe that hutch will be a bright teal or something..chalk paint, ooh-la-la) The whole kitchen will be shades of teal and blue, white trim and accents (maybe even white cabinets someday) and pops of burnt orange and a golden yellow. We've sat on this for a good two months now, and we still like the idea. So what the heck, let's just do it.  We already served up a healthy dose of color and fun with our new curtains:

Oh good - now you can see that it's not actually as dark as I exaggerate.  Yea, yea - messy deck, don't worry about it, it's clean now.  I love these curtains:

That's just what I needed. Bold colorful fun. What a relief! So wish us  luck, we're gonna tackle this beast this weekend.  Not the ceiling just yet (we're toying with the idea of pickling it white...) because it sounds like a messy nightmare. I'll take pictures and report back how we fare in this job... any painting ventures on the horizon in your neck of the woods?

Have a great weekend!

     -Jesse

Again.. the kitchen is different now.... see here.

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