It looked better on paper.

I'm a researcher. But so is Ben. I guess that's why we get along.


A few weeks ago, when Ben pestered lobbied for me to agree that we should drop $1000 on a used Craigslist computrainer for ironman training (think the car racing games at the arcade, but on a road bike and way more advanced.), he researched and researched and researched. Of course, he goes through these feverish, sleep-depriving data-gathering sessions to find a good price or justify any big purchase/decision we make. In the end, doing our homework usually pays off and we end up saving more/spending less money. By the way, the computrainer story ends with Ben deciding on his own, after plenty of research, that he didn't really want one after all.


In the same obsessive way, I've been doing the same for the house. House stuff doesn't come to me easily, and I especially need to visualize and see things before I drop the big bucks. So, I put together a few collages after taking some photos of the front room. I'm sure architects and designers have to do this all the time, but this is a completely new concept to me!


Wikipedia tells me that this "exercise" is called a mood board.  Stolen straight from the site itself:
A mood board is a type of poster design that may consist of images, text, and samples of objects in a composition of the choice of the mood board creator. Designers and others use mood boards to develop their design concepts and to communicate to other members of the design team.
Somehow, neither of the ideas below really panned out exactly as shown, but I guess that's why you improvise and eventually find something better.


Here's attempt #1:


I built the room around the salmon-colored mirror on the left. I instantly fell in love with it on a random trip to HomeGoods (quite possibly my new favorite store). Handmade, gorgeous, and the perfect size, all for forty bucks!!


After - you guessed it - tons of research, I thought I'd figured out a way to put this room together and make it work. Overall, I'd call this room Ikea-inspired...

The aim was definitely affordable and simple. Minus the tables and the sofa, I could've filled this room for well under $500 (rug, chair, pillows, accessories).

  

I ended up scrapping this idea and regretfully returning the mirror. It turns out that all of these great ideas I had would've worked, except by the time I got to the stores where I found these items, they were no longer available or sold in those colors. It was almost painfully hard to find other accessories that tie in that color of pink/salmon, so why bend over backwards for a mirror?

Bring on Front Room 2.0:

This rug was perfect to get away from beige, beige, and more beige. The subtle hint of beige works, but it's still clearly a grey rug. I am also completely obsessed with trellis and geometric patterns like this one too! So, when I found out in October that the rug wouldn't be available until 1/30/2011, I was crushed. Sure, there are plenty of good alternatives, but I challenge you to find one that doesn't force you to choose between eating daily and buying that rug.


The room is extremely Crate & Barrel, but if I did this again, there would definitely be more colorful accessories. The yellow vase and prints above the sofa are C&B, and if you look closely at the prints, they're blueprints! How fun would it be to create a custom print of your own home/office??


What's more, I actually ended up purchasing that exact trunk from Pier1, but the difficulty in fitting it into the car should've been a tip-off; it was enormous when placed in front of the sofa. I mean, visitors could have gotten confused as to whether they should sit on the trunk or the sofa. It was functional, and you could certainly hide a lot of goodies in that thing, but the size of this solid wicker fixture was just too overbearing for this room.What did I learn? The front room needs a "see-through" piece so that it doesn't visually eat up the space.


Of the things you see above, I purchased the accent chair which I found online at an already-good price, and was able to use a coupon on top of that. Win!


Like I said, the room didn't exactly turn out as planned above, and I'm still looking for ideas. In the next posts, I'll show you what the room actually looks like and how I got here.