#to the point sw and art feel impossible but they’re the only thing keeping me eating and on my one current med barely

[the-fog-system]

.

[swfanficbyjz]

SW AU - Ahsoka Stays in the Order - Ch. 4

<- Chapter 1 

 <- Chapter 3

It was dark by the time she made it back to the temple and then to her room. "There you are!" Anakin said, practically pouncing on her when she made it to her door. "I've been worried sick, are you alright?" Speaking of overprotective…

"Yes," she said breathlessly. "I'm fine."

He crossed his arms like he didn't believe her. "I know you're tired but come with me." He'd said it nicely, but she felt the order in it. She really hoped he wasn't about to take her in front of the council. Okay, so she'd shirked her responsibilities and her studies for the day, but didn't she deserve a day or two off to recover from what she'd been through?

To her surprise, he led her to the temple hangar and aboard the Twilight. She watched him out of the corner of her eye as he started it up and took off, flying up and out of the atmosphere. "Where are we going?" she asked nervously. 

"Somewhere you can't run away," he replied simply, focused on the task at hand. He inputed some coordinates into the computer and jumped them to hyperspace. 

"So, you're holding me hostage now?" she sat back against the seat in frustration and pulled her knees up. 

"I'm not holding you hostage, but I am worried about you. You've hardly eaten, you've hardly slept. You won't talk to me, you keep running away and then you disappear for hours. I can't help you if you won't tell me what's going on," he said gently, turning to face her. "Look, I know what it's like to not agree with the council. I've questioned them a hundred times at least. But..."

"You know what, master?" She sat up. "I appreciate what you're trying to do, but you don't have a clue what this is like. That's why I don't know how to tell you! All you see is that you ran in and played the hero like you always do. But that's not what I see. Don't you get it? Yes, you saved my life. But coming back to the order? It was a mistake! I don't belong there anymore. The council made that clear. I've fought for them, I've risked my life for them, but on circumstantial evidence not a single one of them fought for me or stood up for me or tried to protect me. One of my closest friends tried to frame me for something I didn't do. I still have no idea why. The Republic demanded the death sentence for it. These are people that raised me. People that taught me everything I know. People that are the closest thing to family I have ever had. People that I loved and trusted and truly believed loved and cared about me too. How can I fight for them now? Tell me! How am I supposed to put my faith in people that don't give a damn about me? I trusted them!" She heaved so hard this time, she almost did throw up. She ran to the refresher and collapsed over the toilet, throwing up everything she'd eaten that day. It wasn't much but it was all there. The pain wracked her stomach and chest as she dry heaved a few times before finally managing to calm down. 

She flushed it down, crying over the toilet bowl. She heard the door open behind her and buried her face on her arms. He sat down on the floor behind her and pulled her back into his arms. She curled up into him and cried until she couldn't cry anymore. Her eyes stung, her chest hurt, her throat burned. "You're right. They failed you. What they did to you was wrong." She waited for him to make some excuse for them, but he didn't. He fell silent and held her tighter. 

At that moment it felt like Anakin was her only true friend in the world, but she knew that wasn't true. She didn't want to let him down. He had so much faith in her. But she really had no idea how she could keep pretending everything was alright. 

She looked up at him after awhile. "Can we go to Christophsis?"

"Why?" he asked, looking at her confused. 

"There's something I need to do."

"Well... okay, I guess." He helped her up and they headed back to the bridge. She was shaky and weak, she was probably dehydrated. But she didn't feel like eating or drinking right now. He reset the nav computer and they jumped in a different direction. They sat in silence, her shivering, and holding herself tightly. Eventually he went to go get a blanket and he put it around her. She could tell he was trying not to stare at her, but he kept glancing in her direction. She felt guilty again. 

All she'd ever wanted to do from the moment she found out she would be his padawan was prove to him she was worthy to stand by his side. She'd admired him for years, even more so after becoming his apprentice. He was rough around the edges; stubborn, infuriating even, but he had the biggest heart of anyone she'd ever known. At the very least among the Jedi. Though after what she'd seen, maybe that wasn't saying much. She fought hard for him because she believed in him. And she believed in the way he saw the world. He wasn't perfect in any stretch of the imagination, but she'd always been convinced he had it right. 

Now though, she didn't know anymore. She was afraid no matter what happened, she was going to let him down. If she didn't complete her training to become a knight, it would delay his chances of becoming a master by at least another four years. That wasn't fair at all, he deserved the rank more than most. That was assuming though, that he'd take on another padawan if she were to leave. She wasn't a gambler, but the odds of that happening were next to none. He hadn't even wanted to take her as a padawan. 

She had a feeling she knew exactly what she'd find on Christophsis. She was starting to think it was impossible for her gut to sink any further. The closer they got to the planet that had started it all, the sooner she believed the words she'd spoken to Nyx would be true. I'm not a Jedi. I don't know what I am. 

Anakin reached out and took her hand. She brought it up to her face and leaned her cheek onto it. It was getting harder and harder to breathe. Where would she go? What would she do? What would she become away from the order? She was scared. And it was pointless to deny it anymore. 

They flew low over the capital city as they both stared in silence at the ruins and emptiness beneath them. Far as the eye could see, the planet was practically a junkyard now. She'd never seen Christophsis before the war, but she had seen pictures of it. It had once been one of the wealthiest planets, a people of culture devoted to art and architecture and fine goods. There was so little of that left now though. 

It had been almost four years since the battle of Christophsis, one of the earliest of the war. She'd been so desperate to prove herself to the person now sitting next to her, she'd never really seen what was around her. Now though... now memories of the fighting replayed all around her. And the city still looked just as ruined today as it had been then. Four years… and they still hadn’t recovered from the battle here. It didn’t even look like they’d tried to rebuild.

They landed near the center of the city and disembarked the Twilight. Anakin looked around, either confused by it's still ruined state or what they were doing here. They both looked up when a man hobbled out of the building in front of them.

"Jedi?" he said, a strange lilt to his words. "Thank the maker!" He bowed before them.

"Where is everyone?" Anakin asked as the wind blew through the empty buildings around them. Other than this man in front of them, there were no signs of life. The place was deserted. 

"Very few of us live in the city anymore," the man said sadly. "As you can see, the buildings still standing are ruined so badly they're not safe to live in." As if to prove his point there was a loud crash from nearby, causing the ground beneath them to tremor and the glass to rattle. Then in the final throes of death several windows on the upper floor of the building to the left shattered, raining shards down on the street below it. "Fearing for their lives, the population remaining headed out into the fields forming makeshift shelters out of debris."

"Why not rebuild?" Anakin suggested. 

“We simply don’t have the resources. What wasn’t destroyed during the war, has been looted. The people are just trying to survive.” He beckoned for them to follow and he led the way towards what was left of a farm within the city limits. “We had fields of food we could grow, but the droid army razed most of them, leaking oil and fuel into the ground. The soil is no longer viable for crops, we have to search far and wide for clean water. We don’t even have a way to clear the roads, so we can get machinery here to start rebuilding. That is if we actually had the machinery necessary to clean this place up.”

“Why hasn’t the Republic sent aid?” She glanced up at Anakin, surprised at how quickly he was suddenly intent on doing something. He hadn’t even heard the things that Nyx had said, and he probably still didn’t even know why she wanted to come here.

“I don’t know,” the man looked down at his feet. “I imagine they have more important matters to attend to. I’ve sent numerous correspondences, but we never get any response. I was hoping that was why you were here.”

“How can we help?” Ahsoka asked before Anakin could say that wasn’t at all why they were here. “Maybe we could start clearing the roads? We have some supplies aboard our ship, it’s not much but it will help for now.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you!” The man bowed before them. “We would be most grateful.”

Anakin looked at her in confusion and she just shrugged. “Follow me,” she said. She led the way back to the Twilight and they went through the supplies that they keep stocked aboard the ship. They found several crates of food and water, so they turned on the repulser lifts and unloaded them from the ship. Bedraggled people seemed to emerge from the woodwork as they set up a place to hand them out. There were only a handful of people left. Some claimed they had others they needed to take supplies to. She looked from face to face, her heart breaking at the state they were in. Four years they’d been living in poverty, starving to death while people on Coruscant had lavish parties and safe places to sleep. Four years, they’d been abandoned and forgotten and left to fend for themselves. It was even worse than Nyx had described. The food they provided would feed these stragglers for barely a week. It burned her stomach.

Anakin put his hand on her shoulder and she looked up at him, a tear rolling down her cheek. A few of the people milled about, talking amongst themselves. “Tell me, why did you want to come here?” he whispered.

“Come with me,” she said. Leading the way into the city and up into a precariously dangerous building. They came out on the roof of one of their vantage points during the battle. “Look at this.” She gestured to the ruined city laid out before them in the waning light of the afternoon. “This is the legacy of the Jedi and the Republic.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, furrowing his brow.

“I mean, this is how people will remember us. We know what we do, right? We’re fighting for freedom. We repel the Separatist droid armies. We do good, right?”

“Of course…”

“Wrong,” she interrupted. “This is what the rest of the galaxy sees. This is the cost of our victories. Why did no one stay to help them clean this up? Why didn’t anybody send them supplies to help them rebuild? Why did we run off to the next mission and forget about them? Can’t you see how wrong this is? Yes, fighting the droid army and freeing the planet it is important. But what good is that if this is all we leave behind?”

“Is this what’s been bothering you?” he asked.

“It’s part of it, Anakin.” She crossed her arms and sighed. “I used to believe in the Jedi order. I used to believe we were warriors for the light. That we fought for the people and what was right and good. But all I see around me anymore is not just how they failed me, but also how they’re failing everyone else. Does this look like good to you? Does this look right? Is this the way it should be? I can’t stop thinking about what Bariss said in that courtroom about how all the Jedi care about anymore is violence. I don’t want to believe that’s true, but that’s what the world sees. We come, we fight, we destroy, we leave… And worse than all of that… we forget.”

“You know as well as I do that the Jedi can’t be everywhere. Our people are spread thin throughout the galaxy. With constant battles to attend to, well… we don’t have people to spare for relief missions.”

She looked up at him and shook her head. Anakin believed in what they were doing. How fair was it to shake his faith in it now too? “For peacekeepers… we sure do a lot of fighting. And if we don’t have the people to spare for relief missions, then perhaps we need to pull back some of our generals.” She headed back down the stairs and towards the edge of the city. She went to work using the force to clear the roads as best she could. She made pile after pile of droid parts, and glass, and debris. She couldn’t move the tanks by herself, so she had to work around them. In the silence of her thoughts, she could hear every creak and groan as though the city itself was crying out for help.

Chapter 5 ->

[statusreview]

Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”)

I’m not gonna lie. Simultaneously choosing a bunch of finishes – like paint colors for walls and ceilings and trim and doors, cabinets for two kitchens, and tile for six bathrooms (plus two mudroom/laundry rooms along with two kitchen backsplashes) has felt overwhelming at times. Heck, planning just one room, like a bathroom renovation on its own, can feel overwhelming… and here we are planning six different bathrooms, two different kitchens, and 10 other rooms simultaneously! But we’ve managed to keep our heads on straight (so far) and even have some advice to offer through it all.

So whether you’re working on a new construction and have to make a lot of decisions like this all at once, or just trying to systematically renovate your home while keeping each room in mind so it all ends up feeling cohesive without being boring or too repetitive, this post is for you. We actually talked a little bit in this week’s podcast about how we chose each side of the duplex’s (not white!) kitchen cabinets and tile, but we knew that collectively showing you a bunch of our selections all in one post – and breaking down our process for picking them – might help other people out there who have burning questions like these ringing in their ears:

“Is this tile/paint color/cabinetry the right choice?”

“Am I going to regret this?!”

“How is this all going to look together?”

“Am I being too safe and boring? Too out there and crazy?”

“I keep going round and round – how can I actually make a decision?!”

Basically, this is the stage where you’re past all of your inspiration gathering and general planning (we shared our duplex style planning with you here) and you’re trying to take those images you saw on Pinterest or in a magazine (or just that dream room that lives in your head) and make it a real room in your real home. How do you do that? You have to find actual products that you can buy and paint colors that will tie it all together (and did I mention there’s a budget that you have to work with too)?

So here’s what we do to keep things feeling organized and to help focus ourselves and visualize things a lot better – you know so it feels less like throwing darts at a board while blindfolded – and more like following a streamlined process of steps to narrow things down and picture them before you make any final decisions.

First, Make A List

Before you start attempting to making finish selections, you need to know what decisions need to be made. And what helps us to to keep things feel more manageable is to arrange that in the order that each selection needs to be made (with the most urgent ones up top). For example, with so many decisions ahead of us – rugs, furniture, art, bedding, the list goes on and on –  we’ve chosen to focus on just the most urgent things that we need to select before any of that: paint, tile, cabinetry, plumbing, and lighting. These are the things that will go into each of the duplex’s freshly drywalled rooms to make them feel like actual rooms instead of white boxes (if you haven’t seen the most recent video tour, watch that and then come back to this post since it’ll make a lot more sense).

However you make and organize your list is up to you. For us, what starts off as a paper list often ends up as a spreadsheet once we start ordering. Here’s an example of one we used when ordered lighting for the pink house. Those first two columns (item & quantity) are the list we’re talking about. We took inventory of exactly what each space was wired for (did we need a pendant? a can light? a wall sconce? a chandelier? a fan?). It usually helps to walk through your space in person or look at a floor plan (or both!) to make sure you’re not missing anything.

The chart above is incomplete because at some point we typically move over to a more visual list, like a mood board, so we can better see how everything is coming together. Here’s one we’re in the process of making for the duplex, but more on that  – and the actual items in it – in a minute.

Then, Pick Your Star(s)

We learned long ago that a room where too many things scream for your attention can get chaotic. Plus, choosing which pieces will be the focal point relieves the pressure to make every single item in a room “interesting” which can be a tiresome, budget busting, and sometimes impossible goal. So we often break design choices loosely into two categories: stars and supporting players. The stars are the items you want people to notice when they first walk in – like the bold wallpaper, colorful rug, large chandelier, or dramatic paint on the walls.

Some rooms have only one star, others may have several – that’s up to you. But pretty much everything else functions to support those items – like the neutral couch that falls into the background or the white wall that helps your starring artwork or chandelier stand out. For example, readers of our email newsletter know that we’ve been hung up on the idea of colorful doors in the duplex. In fact, we’re using one of the exact colors we saw in this showhouse that we worked on earlier this year (Sherwin William’s Oyster Bay), which is pictured below, for all of the interior doors on one side of the duplex.

We knew if the doors were going to be “stars” then the wall paint around them probably shouldn’t compete for attention. So all of the walls are going to be a very light warm gray (SW Spare White). The interior doors, all of which are solid wood five-paneled doors, are actually going up in the duplex this week and we snapped some in-progress photos over the weekend. They haven’t been painted yet, but I photoshopped the image below to give you an idea of what the other side of the duplex might look like. For that side we picked a muted pink tone (SW White Truffle) which should pair nicely against the same very light warm gray walls on that side (they’ll also be SW Spare White).

We also picked our stars for the bathrooms to help focus our tile shopping. We learned from doing the pink house that we prefer a fun tile floor versus a fun tile shower wall in a bathroom (we can enjoy our cool patterned hex tile floor in the master bath from any vantage point nearby, but the pretty accent tile that we used on the back wall of the hall bathroom’s shower is often hidden by the bathroom door swinging in front of it and the shower curtain itself. Choosing to focus on some playful and beachy floor tile greatly simplified the process of tile shopping because we could focus our efforts on finding interesting things for just that area, knowing that almost anything would work with some incarnation of white subway-esque tile on the walls of the shower.

Next, Give Yourself Limiting Parameters

Having a million ideas and possibilities is exciting at the start of a design project, but at some point you have to face reality and actually order something. So I know limits don’t sound fun, but they ARE YOUR FRIEND at this stage. Some parameters may be out of your control – like your budget, which clearly puts a cap on your tile’s price per square foot. Or your contractor’s requirement that you order lights from certain vendors or something like that. Plus, you may already know that you want only a certain color, or finish, or size.

Whatever parameters you’ve established, it’s helpful to use those to filter results when you’re searching online. Sites like Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Wayfair are becoming better and better about their search filters. USE THEM. This will save you time and keep you from going crazy.

One parameter we set for ourselves when shopping for floor tile was “no super small tiles like the patterned hex we laid in the master bathroom at the beach house.” As much as we love how that floor turned out – it was very, very, VERY time consuming to install compared to the other spaces where we used larger tiles.

Choosing larger tiles with interesting patterns instead of relying on smaller tiles isn’t a parameter that makes sense for everyone or every tile project – but it really helped our decision-making process when we imposed that limit on ourselves. And the good news is that we were still able to have some fun within that guideline. For instance, we discovered that The Tile Shop sells these long 4″ x 24″ porcelain tile planks in several hues (their display shows all one color being used together) but we realized it would be fun to use all three tones together. So we bought an equal amount of pink, white, and taupe tiles to create our own large-scale herringbone for one of the mudroom floors. This was us mocking it up on the store’s floor:

We also wanted extremely durable tile materials – porcelain and ceramic only. They’re both hardworking non-porous surfaces that are typically much easier to maintain than marble and cement tile (both of which are porous, so they can get stained and you need to worry more about sealing them, etc). So that material parameter immediately cut out a ton of higher maintenance (and higher budget) choices for us. So again, it really helped us focus on the best options for this project.

Lastly, Visualize Before You Finalize

By this point we often still have 10 million tabs open in our web browser with potential options. So after a couple of passes of nixing things we don’t feel strongly about, we usually find it helpful to visualize all of the pieces together. Believe me, you can go round and round liking 20 things and not knowing how they’ll fit together or how you’ll narrow it down for hours, clicking from browser screen to browser screen – and then you finally visually group them so you can see things together AND IT MAKES THE DECISION 100% EASIER!

The actual way that you choose to visualize them will vary – it may be a mood board of some sort (we use Photoshop) or you can just pin everything to a Pinterest folder to see them all together as a group. Heck, you can even print things out to make a collage and swap things in and out to see what combos you like most. However you approach it, just the exercise of viewing your top contenders together, and moving one thing in and pulling another thing out will help you see what works well together.

For instance, while we were sifting through tile options we kept a Photoshop file like this open – and we kept dragging different contenders in and out (this isn’t the final version below, btw – it’s what it looked like in the middle of the process). It was a quick way to evaluate what looked good together and what didn’t – and much easier than clicking from tab to tab in our browser, which can make your head spin and leave you feeling like you might never make a decision.

*Note: most of these tile choices will be linked for you later in the post*

As we got clearer and clearer on what we liked together, we moved on to creating the floor plan images that you saw earlier, where we just dragged selections into actual rooms on each side of the duplex. Not only can we see everything in one place, but we can also stay organized as to what is going where.

With two identical-but-mirrored floor plans, sometimes it’s hard to keep things straight, so this definitely helps us stay on top of where each tile or cabinet color (or door color) will go. Plus we have the added benefit of getting to see how everything will look all together on each side of the house.

So now that we’ve shared a little bit about our process for selecting items, we’ll tell you about the items we chose themselves!

Duplex Tile, Cabinetry, & Paint

We didn’t set out to create a “pink side” and a “blue side” but once we chose the two interior door colors, it started to naturally lean that way. But we still plan to inject both colors – along with mint and various neutrals and wood tones – throughout each side as we furnish and decorate. So, in the end, it won’t feel as monochromatic as this mood board suggests.

Here are the product links for you guys, as promised:

Mudroom floor in pink, white, and taupe

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

Kitchen backsplash 

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Kallarp

Interior doors: SW White Truffle in semi-gloss

Interior walls: SW Spare White in eggshell (both sides)

Interior trim: SW Extra White in semi-gloss (both sides)

Kitchen backsplash

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Askersund

Interior doors:  SW Oyster Bay in semi-gloss

Mudroom floor

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

The wood tone on both sides is just to represent the wood floors, which are oak hardwoods that we plan to sand down and stain with Minwax Provincial (the same stain we used for our own floors in Richmond).

You can hear more about how we chose the kitchen cabinetry in this week’s podcast, but we knew we wanted to do non-white cabinets on the lowers to keep things a little more unexpected and playful (if you can’t take a few fun risks at a beach house where people will only stay for a week, where can you?!). To stick to our tight kitchen budget, which is around 4-5K for each fully finished kitchen (including appliances), we wanted to work with the stock options at Ikea since we have been really happy with their cabinetry at the pink house. And we were psyched to find both a wood toned cabinet and a painted cabinet option that we loved. In one duplex kitchen we’re pairing this pink tile with these gray-turquoise flat front cabinets. We will probably do a few white uppers on each side too – maybe with some open shelving.

On the other side of the duplex in the other kitchen, instead of colorful cabinets, we’re pairing these beachy wood flat front cabinets with a similar tile, but in a blue colorway. We bought both tile choices from The Tile Bar and they look like cement tile, but they’re porcelain! Three cheers for easier maintenance and added durability.

Here’s a look at some of the other tiles that we purchased. Three of these are from Wayfair (top right, bottom right, and bottom left), since we had such good luck ordering tile from them for the pink house, and the one in the top left is from Home Depot. Both Home Depot and Lowe’s seem to be upping their tile game lately, so it was fun to find an option like this there! And all of this tile is porcelain – again: super durable – and it’s all specifically made for floors, since we don’t want to get anything too slick that’s not meant for that surface.

I know it all looks a little chaotic put together like that, but keep in mind that these are all going in separate rooms with a lot of “supporting players” – like white subway tile, very light gray walls, fluffy white towels, white vanities, and wood/neutral touches. So in the end they should add some fun and interest to each bathroom, but not be too overwhelming since they’re all going to be tempered by everything else in the room. Here’s hoping, anyway!

P.S. If you missed last week’s duplex video tour, go watch that because Sherry talks about a lot of plans we haven’t covered here – like the window we’re adding to each of the hall bathrooms – and the shelves we’re adding to each side of the master bedroom in front of the exposed brick chimneys. And just for comparison’s sake, you can check out how the pink house turned out. It feels a little more old/historic since there was more original stuff that we could save in that house. Sherry keeps saying that she thinks the duplex will feel like its playful younger sister with a beachier and slightly more colorful wardrobe. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”) appeared first on Young House Love.

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[lukerhill]

Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”)

I’m not gonna lie. Simultaneously choosing a bunch of finishes – like paint colors for walls and ceilings and trim and doors, cabinets for two kitchens, and tile for six bathrooms (plus two mudroom/laundry rooms along with two kitchen backsplashes) has felt overwhelming at times. Heck, planning just one room, like a bathroom renovation on its own, can feel overwhelming… and here we are planning six different bathrooms, two different kitchens, and 10 other rooms simultaneously! But we’ve managed to keep our heads on straight (so far) and even have some advice to offer through it all.

So whether you’re working on a new construction and have to make a lot of decisions like this all at once, or just trying to systematically renovate your home while keeping each room in mind so it all ends up feeling cohesive without being boring or too repetitive, this post is for you. We actually talked a little bit in this week’s podcast about how we chose each side of the duplex’s (not white!) kitchen cabinets and tile, but we knew that collectively showing you a bunch of our selections all in one post – and breaking down our process for picking them – might help other people out there who have burning questions like these ringing in their ears:

“Is this tile/paint color/cabinetry the right choice?”

“Am I going to regret this?!”

“How is this all going to look together?”

“Am I being too safe and boring? Too out there and crazy?”

“I keep going round and round – how can I actually make a decision?!”

Basically, this is the stage where you’re past all of your inspiration gathering and general planning (we shared our duplex style planning with you here) and you’re trying to take those images you saw on Pinterest or in a magazine (or just that dream room that lives in your head) and make it a real room in your real home. How do you do that? You have to find actual products that you can buy and paint colors that will tie it all together (and did I mention there’s a budget that you have to work with too)?

So here’s what we do to keep things feeling organized and to help focus ourselves and visualize things a lot better – you know so it feels less like throwing darts at a board while blindfolded – and more like following a streamlined process of steps to narrow things down and picture them before you make any final decisions.

First, Make A List

Before you start attempting to making finish selections, you need to know what decisions need to be made. And what helps us to to keep things feel more manageable is to arrange that in the order that each selection needs to be made (with the most urgent ones up top). For example, with so many decisions ahead of us – rugs, furniture, art, bedding, the list goes on and on –  we’ve chosen to focus on just the most urgent things that we need to select before any of that: paint, tile, cabinetry, plumbing, and lighting. These are the things that will go into each of the duplex’s freshly drywalled rooms to make them feel like actual rooms instead of white boxes (if you haven’t seen the most recent video tour, watch that and then come back to this post since it’ll make a lot more sense).

However you make and organize your list is up to you. For us, what starts off as a paper list often ends up as a spreadsheet once we start ordering. Here’s an example of one we used when ordered lighting for the pink house. Those first two columns (item & quantity) are the list we’re talking about. We took inventory of exactly what each space was wired for (did we need a pendant? a can light? a wall sconce? a chandelier? a fan?). It usually helps to walk through your space in person or look at a floor plan (or both!) to make sure you’re not missing anything.

The chart above is incomplete because at some point we typically move over to a more visual list, like a mood board, so we can better see how everything is coming together. Here’s one we’re in the process of making for the duplex, but more on that  – and the actual items in it – in a minute.

Then, Pick Your Star(s)

We learned long ago that a room where too many things scream for your attention can get chaotic. Plus, choosing which pieces will be the focal point relieves the pressure to make every single item in a room “interesting” which can be a tiresome, budget busting, and sometimes impossible goal. So we often break design choices loosely into two categories: stars and supporting players. The stars are the items you want people to notice when they first walk in – like the bold wallpaper, colorful rug, large chandelier, or dramatic paint on the walls.

Some rooms have only one star, others may have several – that’s up to you. But pretty much everything else functions to support those items – like the neutral couch that falls into the background or the white wall that helps your starring artwork or chandelier stand out. For example, readers of our email newsletter know that we’ve been hung up on the idea of colorful doors in the duplex. In fact, we’re using one of the exact colors we saw in this showhouse that we worked on earlier this year (Sherwin William’s Oyster Bay), which is pictured below, for all of the interior doors on one side of the duplex.

We knew if the doors were going to be “stars” then the wall paint around them probably shouldn’t compete for attention. So all of the walls are going to be a very light warm gray (SW Spare White). The interior doors, all of which are solid wood five-paneled doors, are actually going up in the duplex this week and we snapped some in-progress photos over the weekend. They haven’t been painted yet, but I photoshopped the image below to give you an idea of what the other side of the duplex might look like. For that side we picked a muted pink tone (SW White Truffle) which should pair nicely against the same very light warm gray walls on that side (they’ll also be SW Spare White).

We also picked our stars for the bathrooms to help focus our tile shopping. We learned from doing the pink house that we prefer a fun tile floor versus a fun tile shower wall in a bathroom (we can enjoy our cool patterned hex tile floor in the master bath from any vantage point nearby, but the pretty accent tile that we used on the back wall of the hall bathroom’s shower is often hidden by the bathroom door swinging in front of it and the shower curtain itself. Choosing to focus on some playful and beachy floor tile greatly simplified the process of tile shopping because we could focus our efforts on finding interesting things for just that area, knowing that almost anything would work with some incarnation of white subway-esque tile on the walls of the shower.

Next, Give Yourself Limiting Parameters

Having a million ideas and possibilities is exciting at the start of a design project, but at some point you have to face reality and actually order something. So I know limits don’t sound fun, but they ARE YOUR FRIEND at this stage. Some parameters may be out of your control – like your budget, which clearly puts a cap on your tile’s price per square foot. Or your contractor’s requirement that you order lights from certain vendors or something like that. Plus, you may already know that you want only a certain color, or finish, or size.

Whatever parameters you’ve established, it’s helpful to use those to filter results when you’re searching online. Sites like Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Wayfair are becoming better and better about their search filters. USE THEM. This will save you time and keep you from going crazy.

One parameter we set for ourselves when shopping for floor tile was “no super small tiles like the patterned hex we laid in the master bathroom at the beach house.” As much as we love how that floor turned out – it was very, very, VERY time consuming to install compared to the other spaces where we used larger tiles.

Choosing larger tiles with interesting patterns instead of relying on smaller tiles isn’t a parameter that makes sense for everyone or every tile project – but it really helped our decision-making process when we imposed that limit on ourselves. And the good news is that we were still able to have some fun within that guideline. For instance, we discovered that The Tile Shop sells these long 4″ x 24″ porcelain tile planks in several hues (their display shows all one color being used together) but we realized it would be fun to use all three tones together. So we bought an equal amount of pink, white, and taupe tiles to create our own large-scale herringbone for one of the mudroom floors. This was us mocking it up on the store’s floor:

We also wanted extremely durable tile materials – porcelain and ceramic only. They’re both hardworking non-porous surfaces that are typically much easier to maintain than marble and cement tile (both of which are porous, so they can get stained and you need to worry more about sealing them, etc). So that material parameter immediately cut out a ton of higher maintenance (and higher budget) choices for us. So again, it really helped us focus on the best options for this project.

Lastly, Visualize Before You Finalize

By this point we often still have 10 million tabs open in our web browser with potential options. So after a couple of passes of nixing things we don’t feel strongly about, we usually find it helpful to visualize all of the pieces together. Believe me, you can go round and round liking 20 things and not knowing how they’ll fit together or how you’ll narrow it down for hours, clicking from browser screen to browser screen – and then you finally visually group them so you can see things together AND IT MAKES THE DECISION 100% EASIER!

The actual way that you choose to visualize them will vary – it may be a mood board of some sort (we use Photoshop) or you can just pin everything to a Pinterest folder to see them all together as a group. Heck, you can even print things out to make a collage and swap things in and out to see what combos you like most. However you approach it, just the exercise of viewing your top contenders together, and moving one thing in and pulling another thing out will help you see what works well together.

For instance, while we were sifting through tile options we kept a Photoshop file like this open – and we kept dragging different contenders in and out (this isn’t the final version below, btw – it’s what it looked like in the middle of the process). It was a quick way to evaluate what looked good together and what didn’t – and much easier than clicking from tab to tab in our browser, which can make your head spin and leave you feeling like you might never make a decision.

*Note: most of these tile choices will be linked for you later in the post*

As we got clearer and clearer on what we liked together, we moved on to creating the floor plan images that you saw earlier, where we just dragged selections into actual rooms on each side of the duplex. Not only can we see everything in one place, but we can also stay organized as to what is going where.

With two identical-but-mirrored floor plans, sometimes it’s hard to keep things straight, so this definitely helps us stay on top of where each tile or cabinet color (or door color) will go. Plus we have the added benefit of getting to see how everything will look all together on each side of the house.

So now that we’ve shared a little bit about our process for selecting items, we’ll tell you about the items we chose themselves!

Duplex Tile, Cabinetry, & Paint

We didn’t set out to create a “pink side” and a “blue side” but once we chose the two interior door colors, it started to naturally lean that way. But we still plan to inject both colors – along with mint and various neutrals and wood tones – throughout each side as we furnish and decorate. So, in the end, it won’t feel as monochromatic as this mood board suggests.

Here are the product links for you guys, as promised:

Mudroom floor in pink, white, and taupe

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

Kitchen backsplash 

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Kallarp

Interior doors: SW White Truffle in semi-gloss

Interior walls: SW Spare White in eggshell (both sides)

Interior trim: SW Extra White in semi-gloss (both sides)

Kitchen backsplash

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Askersund

Interior doors:  SW Oyster Bay in semi-gloss

Mudroom floor

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

The wood tone on both sides is just to represent the wood floors, which are oak hardwoods that we plan to sand down and stain with Minwax Provincial (the same stain we used for our own floors in Richmond).

You can hear more about how we chose the kitchen cabinetry in this week’s podcast, but we knew we wanted to do non-white cabinets on the lowers to keep things a little more unexpected and playful (if you can’t take a few fun risks at a beach house where people will only stay for a week, where can you?!). To stick to our tight kitchen budget, which is around 4-5K for each fully finished kitchen (including appliances), we wanted to work with the stock options at Ikea since we have been really happy with their cabinetry at the pink house. And we were psyched to find both a wood toned cabinet and a painted cabinet option that we loved. In one duplex kitchen we’re pairing this pink tile with these gray-turquoise flat front cabinets. We will probably do a few white uppers on each side too – maybe with some open shelving.

On the other side of the duplex in the other kitchen, instead of colorful cabinets, we’re pairing these beachy wood flat front cabinets with a similar tile, but in a blue colorway. We bought both tile choices from The Tile Bar and they look like cement tile, but they’re porcelain! Three cheers for easier maintenance and added durability.

Here’s a look at some of the other tiles that we purchased. Three of these are from Wayfair (top right, bottom right, and bottom left), since we had such good luck ordering tile from them for the pink house, and the one in the top left is from Home Depot. Both Home Depot and Lowe’s seem to be upping their tile game lately, so it was fun to find an option like this there! And all of this tile is porcelain – again: super durable – and it’s all specifically made for floors, since we don’t want to get anything too slick that’s not meant for that surface.

I know it all looks a little chaotic put together like that, but keep in mind that these are all going in separate rooms with a lot of “supporting players” – like white subway tile, very light gray walls, fluffy white towels, white vanities, and wood/neutral touches. So in the end they should add some fun and interest to each bathroom, but not be too overwhelming since they’re all going to be tempered by everything else in the room. Here’s hoping, anyway!

P.S. If you missed last week’s duplex video tour, go watch that because Sherry talks about a lot of plans we haven’t covered here – like the window we’re adding to each of the hall bathrooms – and the shelves we’re adding to each side of the master bedroom in front of the exposed brick chimneys. And just for comparison’s sake, you can check out how the pink house turned out. It feels a little more old/historic since there was more original stuff that we could save in that house. Sherry keeps saying that she thinks the duplex will feel like its playful younger sister with a beachier and slightly more colorful wardrobe. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”) appeared first on Young House Love.

[interiorstarweb]

Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”)

I’m not gonna lie. Simultaneously choosing a bunch of finishes – like paint colors for walls and ceilings and trim and doors, cabinets for two kitchens, and tile for six bathrooms (plus two mudroom/laundry rooms along with two kitchen backsplashes) has felt overwhelming at times. Heck, planning just one room, like a bathroom renovation on its own, can feel overwhelming… and here we are planning six different bathrooms, two different kitchens, and 10 other rooms simultaneously! But we’ve managed to keep our heads on straight (so far) and even have some advice to offer through it all.

So whether you’re working on a new construction and have to make a lot of decisions like this all at once, or just trying to systematically renovate your home while keeping each room in mind so it all ends up feeling cohesive without being boring or too repetitive, this post is for you. We actually talked a little bit in this week’s podcast about how we chose each side of the duplex’s (not white!) kitchen cabinets and tile, but we knew that collectively showing you a bunch of our selections all in one post – and breaking down our process for picking them – might help other people out there who have burning questions like these ringing in their ears:

“Is this tile/paint color/cabinetry the right choice?”

“Am I going to regret this?!”

“How is this all going to look together?”

“Am I being too safe and boring? Too out there and crazy?”

“I keep going round and round – how can I actually make a decision?!”

Basically, this is the stage where you’re past all of your inspiration gathering and general planning (we shared our duplex style planning with you here) and you’re trying to take those images you saw on Pinterest or in a magazine (or just that dream room that lives in your head) and make it a real room in your real home. How do you do that? You have to find actual products that you can buy and paint colors that will tie it all together (and did I mention there’s a budget that you have to work with too)?

So here’s what we do to keep things feeling organized and to help focus ourselves and visualize things a lot better – you know so it feels less like throwing darts at a board while blindfolded – and more like following a streamlined process of steps to narrow things down and picture them before you make any final decisions.

First, Make A List

Before you start attempting to making finish selections, you need to know what decisions need to be made. And what helps us to to keep things feel more manageable is to arrange that in the order that each selection needs to be made (with the most urgent ones up top). For example, with so many decisions ahead of us – rugs, furniture, art, bedding, the list goes on and on –  we’ve chosen to focus on just the most urgent things that we need to select before any of that: paint, tile, cabinetry, plumbing, and lighting. These are the things that will go into each of the duplex’s freshly drywalled rooms to make them feel like actual rooms instead of white boxes (if you haven’t seen the most recent video tour, watch that and then come back to this post since it’ll make a lot more sense).

However you make and organize your list is up to you. For us, what starts off as a paper list often ends up as a spreadsheet once we start ordering. Here’s an example of one we used when ordered lighting for the pink house. Those first two columns (item & quantity) are the list we’re talking about. We took inventory of exactly what each space was wired for (did we need a pendant? a can light? a wall sconce? a chandelier? a fan?). It usually helps to walk through your space in person or look at a floor plan (or both!) to make sure you’re not missing anything.

The chart above is incomplete because at some point we typically move over to a more visual list, like a mood board, so we can better see how everything is coming together. Here’s one we’re in the process of making for the duplex, but more on that  – and the actual items in it – in a minute.

Then, Pick Your Star(s)

We learned long ago that a room where too many things scream for your attention can get chaotic. Plus, choosing which pieces will be the focal point relieves the pressure to make every single item in a room “interesting” which can be a tiresome, budget busting, and sometimes impossible goal. So we often break design choices loosely into two categories: stars and supporting players. The stars are the items you want people to notice when they first walk in – like the bold wallpaper, colorful rug, large chandelier, or dramatic paint on the walls.

Some rooms have only one star, others may have several – that’s up to you. But pretty much everything else functions to support those items – like the neutral couch that falls into the background or the white wall that helps your starring artwork or chandelier stand out. For example, readers of our email newsletter know that we’ve been hung up on the idea of colorful doors in the duplex. In fact, we’re using one of the exact colors we saw in this showhouse that we worked on earlier this year (Sherwin William’s Oyster Bay), which is pictured below, for all of the interior doors on one side of the duplex.

We knew if the doors were going to be “stars” then the wall paint around them probably shouldn’t compete for attention. So all of the walls are going to be a very light warm gray (SW Spare White). The interior doors, all of which are solid wood five-paneled doors, are actually going up in the duplex this week and we snapped some in-progress photos over the weekend. They haven’t been painted yet, but I photoshopped the image below to give you an idea of what the other side of the duplex might look like. For that side we picked a muted pink tone (SW White Truffle) which should pair nicely against the same very light warm gray walls on that side (they’ll also be SW Spare White).

We also picked our stars for the bathrooms to help focus our tile shopping. We learned from doing the pink house that we prefer a fun tile floor versus a fun tile shower wall in a bathroom (we can enjoy our cool patterned hex tile floor in the master bath from any vantage point nearby, but the pretty accent tile that we used on the back wall of the hall bathroom’s shower is often hidden by the bathroom door swinging in front of it and the shower curtain itself. Choosing to focus on some playful and beachy floor tile greatly simplified the process of tile shopping because we could focus our efforts on finding interesting things for just that area, knowing that almost anything would work with some incarnation of white subway-esque tile on the walls of the shower.

Next, Give Yourself Limiting Parameters

Having a million ideas and possibilities is exciting at the start of a design project, but at some point you have to face reality and actually order something. So I know limits don’t sound fun, but they ARE YOUR FRIEND at this stage. Some parameters may be out of your control – like your budget, which clearly puts a cap on your tile’s price per square foot. Or your contractor’s requirement that you order lights from certain vendors or something like that. Plus, you may already know that you want only a certain color, or finish, or size.

Whatever parameters you’ve established, it’s helpful to use those to filter results when you’re searching online. Sites like Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Wayfair are becoming better and better about their search filters. USE THEM. This will save you time and keep you from going crazy.

One parameter we set for ourselves when shopping for floor tile was “no super small tiles like the patterned hex we laid in the master bathroom at the beach house.” As much as we love how that floor turned out – it was very, very, VERY time consuming to install compared to the other spaces where we used larger tiles.

Choosing larger tiles with interesting patterns instead of relying on smaller tiles isn’t a parameter that makes sense for everyone or every tile project – but it really helped our decision-making process when we imposed that limit on ourselves. And the good news is that we were still able to have some fun within that guideline. For instance, we discovered that The Tile Shop sells these long 4″ x 24″ porcelain tile planks in several hues (their display shows all one color being used together) but we realized it would be fun to use all three tones together. So we bought an equal amount of pink, white, and taupe tiles to create our own large-scale herringbone for one of the mudroom floors. This was us mocking it up on the store’s floor:

We also wanted extremely durable tile materials – porcelain and ceramic only. They’re both hardworking non-porous surfaces that are typically much easier to maintain than marble and cement tile (both of which are porous, so they can get stained and you need to worry more about sealing them, etc). So that material parameter immediately cut out a ton of higher maintenance (and higher budget) choices for us. So again, it really helped us focus on the best options for this project.

Lastly, Visualize Before You Finalize

By this point we often still have 10 million tabs open in our web browser with potential options. So after a couple of passes of nixing things we don’t feel strongly about, we usually find it helpful to visualize all of the pieces together. Believe me, you can go round and round liking 20 things and not knowing how they’ll fit together or how you’ll narrow it down for hours, clicking from browser screen to browser screen – and then you finally visually group them so you can see things together AND IT MAKES THE DECISION 100% EASIER!

The actual way that you choose to visualize them will vary – it may be a mood board of some sort (we use Photoshop) or you can just pin everything to a Pinterest folder to see them all together as a group. Heck, you can even print things out to make a collage and swap things in and out to see what combos you like most. However you approach it, just the exercise of viewing your top contenders together, and moving one thing in and pulling another thing out will help you see what works well together.

For instance, while we were sifting through tile options we kept a Photoshop file like this open – and we kept dragging different contenders in and out (this isn’t the final version below, btw – it’s what it looked like in the middle of the process). It was a quick way to evaluate what looked good together and what didn’t – and much easier than clicking from tab to tab in our browser, which can make your head spin and leave you feeling like you might never make a decision.

*Note: most of these tile choices will be linked for you later in the post*

As we got clearer and clearer on what we liked together, we moved on to creating the floor plan images that you saw earlier, where we just dragged selections into actual rooms on each side of the duplex. Not only can we see everything in one place, but we can also stay organized as to what is going where.

With two identical-but-mirrored floor plans, sometimes it’s hard to keep things straight, so this definitely helps us stay on top of where each tile or cabinet color (or door color) will go. Plus we have the added benefit of getting to see how everything will look all together on each side of the house.

So now that we’ve shared a little bit about our process for selecting items, we’ll tell you about the items we chose themselves!

Duplex Tile, Cabinetry, & Paint

We didn’t set out to create a “pink side” and a “blue side” but once we chose the two interior door colors, it started to naturally lean that way. But we still plan to inject both colors – along with mint and various neutrals and wood tones – throughout each side as we furnish and decorate. So, in the end, it won’t feel as monochromatic as this mood board suggests.

Here are the product links for you guys, as promised:

Mudroom floor in pink, white, and taupe

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

Kitchen backsplash 

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Kallarp

Interior doors: SW White Truffle in semi-gloss

Interior walls: SW Spare White in eggshell (both sides)

Interior trim: SW Extra White in semi-gloss (both sides)

Kitchen backsplash

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Askersund

Interior doors:  SW Oyster Bay in semi-gloss

Mudroom floor

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

The wood tone on both sides is just to represent the wood floors, which are oak hardwoods that we plan to sand down and stain with Minwax Provincial (the same stain we used for our own floors in Richmond).

You can hear more about how we chose the kitchen cabinetry in this week’s podcast, but we knew we wanted to do non-white cabinets on the lowers to keep things a little more unexpected and playful (if you can’t take a few fun risks at a beach house where people will only stay for a week, where can you?!). To stick to our tight kitchen budget, which is around 4-5K for each fully finished kitchen (including appliances), we wanted to work with the stock options at Ikea since we have been really happy with their cabinetry at the pink house. And we were psyched to find both a wood toned cabinet and a painted cabinet option that we loved. In one duplex kitchen we’re pairing this pink tile with these gray-turquoise flat front cabinets. We will probably do a few white uppers on each side too – maybe with some open shelving.

On the other side of the duplex in the other kitchen, instead of colorful cabinets, we’re pairing these beachy wood flat front cabinets with a similar tile, but in a blue colorway. We bought both tile choices from The Tile Bar and they look like cement tile, but they’re porcelain! Three cheers for easier maintenance and added durability.

Here’s a look at some of the other tiles that we purchased. Three of these are from Wayfair (top right, bottom right, and bottom left), since we had such good luck ordering tile from them for the pink house, and the one in the top left is from Home Depot. Both Home Depot and Lowe’s seem to be upping their tile game lately, so it was fun to find an option like this there! And all of this tile is porcelain – again: super durable – and it’s all specifically made for floors, since we don’t want to get anything too slick that’s not meant for that surface.

I know it all looks a little chaotic put together like that, but keep in mind that these are all going in separate rooms with a lot of “supporting players” – like white subway tile, very light gray walls, fluffy white towels, white vanities, and wood/neutral touches. So in the end they should add some fun and interest to each bathroom, but not be too overwhelming since they’re all going to be tempered by everything else in the room. Here’s hoping, anyway!

P.S. If you missed last week’s duplex video tour, go watch that because Sherry talks about a lot of plans we haven’t covered here – like the window we’re adding to each of the hall bathrooms – and the shelves we’re adding to each side of the master bedroom in front of the exposed brick chimneys. And just for comparison’s sake, you can check out how the pink house turned out. It feels a little more old/historic since there was more original stuff that we could save in that house. Sherry keeps saying that she thinks the duplex will feel like its playful younger sister with a beachier and slightly more colorful wardrobe. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”) appeared first on Young House Love.

Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”) published first on https://novaformmattressreview.tumblr.com/

[lowmaticnews]

Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”)

I’m not gonna lie. Simultaneously choosing a bunch of finishes – like paint colors for walls and ceilings and trim and doors, cabinets for two kitchens, and tile for six bathrooms (plus two mudroom/laundry rooms along with two kitchen backsplashes) has felt overwhelming at times. Heck, planning just one room, like a bathroom renovation on its own, can feel overwhelming… and here we are planning six different bathrooms, two different kitchens, and 10 other rooms simultaneously! But we’ve managed to keep our heads on straight (so far) and even have some advice to offer through it all.

So whether you’re working on a new construction and have to make a lot of decisions like this all at once, or just trying to systematically renovate your home while keeping each room in mind so it all ends up feeling cohesive without being boring or too repetitive, this post is for you. We actually talked a little bit in this week’s podcast about how we chose each side of the duplex’s (not white!) kitchen cabinets and tile, but we knew that collectively showing you a bunch of our selections all in one post – and breaking down our process for picking them – might help other people out there who have burning questions like these ringing in their ears:

“Is this tile/paint color/cabinetry the right choice?”

“Am I going to regret this?!”

“How is this all going to look together?”

“Am I being too safe and boring? Too out there and crazy?”

“I keep going round and round – how can I actually make a decision?!”

Basically, this is the stage where you’re past all of your inspiration gathering and general planning (we shared our duplex style planning with you here) and you’re trying to take those images you saw on Pinterest or in a magazine (or just that dream room that lives in your head) and make it a real room in your real home. How do you do that? You have to find actual products that you can buy and paint colors that will tie it all together (and did I mention there’s a budget that you have to work with too)?

So here’s what we do to keep things feeling organized and to help focus ourselves and visualize things a lot better – you know so it feels less like throwing darts at a board while blindfolded – and more like following a streamlined process of steps to narrow things down and picture them before you make any final decisions.

First, Make A List

Before you start attempting to making finish selections, you need to know what decisions need to be made. And what helps us to to keep things feel more manageable is to arrange that in the order that each selection needs to be made (with the most urgent ones up top). For example, with so many decisions ahead of us – rugs, furniture, art, bedding, the list goes on and on –  we’ve chosen to focus on just the most urgent things that we need to select before any of that: paint, tile, cabinetry, plumbing, and lighting. These are the things that will go into each of the duplex’s freshly drywalled rooms to make them feel like actual rooms instead of white boxes (if you haven’t seen the most recent video tour, watch that and then come back to this post since it’ll make a lot more sense).

However you make and organize your list is up to you. For us, what starts off as a paper list often ends up as a spreadsheet once we start ordering. Here’s an example of one we used when ordered lighting for the pink house. Those first two columns (item & quantity) are the list we’re talking about. We took inventory of exactly what each space was wired for (did we need a pendant? a can light? a wall sconce? a chandelier? a fan?). It usually helps to walk through your space in person or look at a floor plan (or both!) to make sure you’re not missing anything.

The chart above is incomplete because at some point we typically move over to a more visual list, like a mood board, so we can better see how everything is coming together. Here’s one we’re in the process of making for the duplex, but more on that  – and the actual items in it – in a minute.

Then, Pick Your Star(s)

We learned long ago that a room where too many things scream for your attention can get chaotic. Plus, choosing which pieces will be the focal point relieves the pressure to make every single item in a room “interesting” which can be a tiresome, budget busting, and sometimes impossible goal. So we often break design choices loosely into two categories: stars and supporting players. The stars are the items you want people to notice when they first walk in – like the bold wallpaper, colorful rug, large chandelier, or dramatic paint on the walls.

Some rooms have only one star, others may have several – that’s up to you. But pretty much everything else functions to support those items – like the neutral couch that falls into the background or the white wall that helps your starring artwork or chandelier stand out. For example, readers of our email newsletter know that we’ve been hung up on the idea of colorful doors in the duplex. In fact, we’re using one of the exact colors we saw in this showhouse that we worked on earlier this year (Sherwin William’s Oyster Bay), which is pictured below, for all of the interior doors on one side of the duplex.

We knew if the doors were going to be “stars” then the wall paint around them probably shouldn’t compete for attention. So all of the walls are going to be a very light warm gray (SW Spare White). The interior doors, all of which are solid wood five-paneled doors, are actually going up in the duplex this week and we snapped some in-progress photos over the weekend. They haven’t been painted yet, but I photoshopped the image below to give you an idea of what the other side of the duplex might look like. For that side we picked a muted pink tone (SW White Truffle) which should pair nicely against the same very light warm gray walls on that side (they’ll also be SW Spare White).

We also picked our stars for the bathrooms to help focus our tile shopping. We learned from doing the pink house that we prefer a fun tile floor versus a fun tile shower wall in a bathroom (we can enjoy our cool patterned hex tile floor in the master bath from any vantage point nearby, but the pretty accent tile that we used on the back wall of the hall bathroom’s shower is often hidden by the bathroom door swinging in front of it and the shower curtain itself. Choosing to focus on some playful and beachy floor tile greatly simplified the process of tile shopping because we could focus our efforts on finding interesting things for just that area, knowing that almost anything would work with some incarnation of white subway-esque tile on the walls of the shower.

Next, Give Yourself Limiting Parameters

Having a million ideas and possibilities is exciting at the start of a design project, but at some point you have to face reality and actually order something. So I know limits don’t sound fun, but they ARE YOUR FRIEND at this stage. Some parameters may be out of your control – like your budget, which clearly puts a cap on your tile’s price per square foot. Or your contractor’s requirement that you order lights from certain vendors or something like that. Plus, you may already know that you want only a certain color, or finish, or size.

Whatever parameters you’ve established, it’s helpful to use those to filter results when you’re searching online. Sites like Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Wayfair are becoming better and better about their search filters. USE THEM. This will save you time and keep you from going crazy.

One parameter we set for ourselves when shopping for floor tile was “no super small tiles like the patterned hex we laid in the master bathroom at the beach house.” As much as we love how that floor turned out – it was very, very, VERY time consuming to install compared to the other spaces where we used larger tiles.

Choosing larger tiles with interesting patterns instead of relying on smaller tiles isn’t a parameter that makes sense for everyone or every tile project – but it really helped our decision-making process when we imposed that limit on ourselves. And the good news is that we were still able to have some fun within that guideline. For instance, we discovered that The Tile Shop sells these long 4″ x 24″ porcelain tile planks in several hues (their display shows all one color being used together) but we realized it would be fun to use all three tones together. So we bought an equal amount of pink, white, and taupe tiles to create our own large-scale herringbone for one of the mudroom floors. This was us mocking it up on the store’s floor:

We also wanted extremely durable tile materials – porcelain and ceramic only. They’re both hardworking non-porous surfaces that are typically much easier to maintain than marble and cement tile (both of which are porous, so they can get stained and you need to worry more about sealing them, etc). So that material parameter immediately cut out a ton of higher maintenance (and higher budget) choices for us. So again, it really helped us focus on the best options for this project.

Lastly, Visualize Before You Finalize

By this point we often still have 10 million tabs open in our web browser with potential options. So after a couple of passes of nixing things we don’t feel strongly about, we usually find it helpful to visualize all of the pieces together. Believe me, you can go round and round liking 20 things and not knowing how they’ll fit together or how you’ll narrow it down for hours, clicking from browser screen to browser screen – and then you finally visually group them so you can see things together AND IT MAKES THE DECISION 100% EASIER!

The actual way that you choose to visualize them will vary – it may be a mood board of some sort (we use Photoshop) or you can just pin everything to a Pinterest folder to see them all together as a group. Heck, you can even print things out to make a collage and swap things in and out to see what combos you like most. However you approach it, just the exercise of viewing your top contenders together, and moving one thing in and pulling another thing out will help you see what works well together.

For instance, while we were sifting through tile options we kept a Photoshop file like this open – and we kept dragging different contenders in and out (this isn’t the final version below, btw – it’s what it looked like in the middle of the process). It was a quick way to evaluate what looked good together and what didn’t – and much easier than clicking from tab to tab in our browser, which can make your head spin and leave you feeling like you might never make a decision.

*Note: most of these tile choices will be linked for you later in the post*

As we got clearer and clearer on what we liked together, we moved on to creating the floor plan images that you saw earlier, where we just dragged selections into actual rooms on each side of the duplex. Not only can we see everything in one place, but we can also stay organized as to what is going where.

With two identical-but-mirrored floor plans, sometimes it’s hard to keep things straight, so this definitely helps us stay on top of where each tile or cabinet color (or door color) will go. Plus we have the added benefit of getting to see how everything will look all together on each side of the house.

So now that we’ve shared a little bit about our process for selecting items, we’ll tell you about the items we chose themselves!

Duplex Tile, Cabinetry, & Paint

We didn’t set out to create a “pink side” and a “blue side” but once we chose the two interior door colors, it started to naturally lean that way. But we still plan to inject both colors – along with mint and various neutrals and wood tones – throughout each side as we furnish and decorate. So, in the end, it won’t feel as monochromatic as this mood board suggests.

Here are the product links for you guys, as promised:

Mudroom floor in pink, white, and taupe

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

Kitchen backsplash 

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Kallarp

Interior doors: SW White Truffle in semi-gloss

Interior walls: SW Spare White in eggshell (both sides)

Interior trim: SW Extra White in semi-gloss (both sides)

Kitchen backsplash

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Askersund

Interior doors:  SW Oyster Bay in semi-gloss

Mudroom floor

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

The wood tone on both sides is just to represent the wood floors, which are oak hardwoods that we plan to sand down and stain with Minwax Provincial (the same stain we used for our own floors in Richmond).

You can hear more about how we chose the kitchen cabinetry in this week’s podcast, but we knew we wanted to do non-white cabinets on the lowers to keep things a little more unexpected and playful (if you can’t take a few fun risks at a beach house where people will only stay for a week, where can you?!). To stick to our tight kitchen budget, which is around 4-5K for each fully finished kitchen (including appliances), we wanted to work with the stock options at Ikea since we have been really happy with their cabinetry at the pink house. And we were psyched to find both a wood toned cabinet and a painted cabinet option that we loved. In one duplex kitchen we’re pairing this pink tile with these gray-turquoise flat front cabinets. We will probably do a few white uppers on each side too – maybe with some open shelving.

On the other side of the duplex in the other kitchen, instead of colorful cabinets, we’re pairing these beachy wood flat front cabinets with a similar tile, but in a blue colorway. We bought both tile choices from The Tile Bar and they look like cement tile, but they’re porcelain! Three cheers for easier maintenance and added durability.

Here’s a look at some of the other tiles that we purchased. Three of these are from Wayfair (top right, bottom right, and bottom left), since we had such good luck ordering tile from them for the pink house, and the one in the top left is from Home Depot. Both Home Depot and Lowe’s seem to be upping their tile game lately, so it was fun to find an option like this there! And all of this tile is porcelain – again: super durable – and it’s all specifically made for floors, since we don’t want to get anything too slick that’s not meant for that surface.

I know it all looks a little chaotic put together like that, but keep in mind that these are all going in separate rooms with a lot of “supporting players” – like white subway tile, very light gray walls, fluffy white towels, white vanities, and wood/neutral touches. So in the end they should add some fun and interest to each bathroom, but not be too overwhelming since they’re all going to be tempered by everything else in the room. Here’s hoping, anyway!

P.S. If you missed last week’s duplex video tour, go watch that because Sherry talks about a lot of plans we haven’t covered here – like the window we’re adding to each of the hall bathrooms – and the shelves we’re adding to each side of the master bedroom in front of the exposed brick chimneys. And just for comparison’s sake, you can check out how the pink house turned out. It feels a little more old/historic since there was more original stuff that we could save in that house. Sherry keeps saying that she thinks the duplex will feel like its playful younger sister with a beachier and slightly more colorful wardrobe. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”) appeared first on Young House Love.

Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”) published first on https://landscapingmates.blogspot.com

[endlessarchite]

Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”)

I’m not gonna lie. Simultaneously choosing a bunch of finishes – like paint colors for walls and ceilings and trim and doors, cabinets for two kitchens, and tile for six bathrooms (plus two mudroom/laundry rooms along with two kitchen backsplashes) has felt overwhelming at times. Heck, planning just one room, like a bathroom renovation on its own, can feel overwhelming… and here we are planning six different bathrooms, two different kitchens, and 10 other rooms simultaneously! But we’ve managed to keep our heads on straight (so far) and even have some advice to offer through it all.

So whether you’re working on a new construction and have to make a lot of decisions like this all at once, or just trying to systematically renovate your home while keeping each room in mind so it all ends up feeling cohesive without being boring or too repetitive, this post is for you. We actually talked a little bit in this week’s podcast about how we chose each side of the duplex’s (not white!) kitchen cabinets and tile, but we knew that collectively showing you a bunch of our selections all in one post – and breaking down our process for picking them – might help other people out there who have burning questions like these ringing in their ears:

“Is this tile/paint color/cabinetry the right choice?”

“Am I going to regret this?!”

“How is this all going to look together?”

“Am I being too safe and boring? Too out there and crazy?”

“I keep going round and round – how can I actually make a decision?!”

Basically, this is the stage where you’re past all of your inspiration gathering and general planning (we shared our duplex style planning with you here) and you’re trying to take those images you saw on Pinterest or in a magazine (or just that dream room that lives in your head) and make it a real room in your real home. How do you do that? You have to find actual products that you can buy and paint colors that will tie it all together (and did I mention there’s a budget that you have to work with too)?

So here’s what we do to keep things feeling organized and to help focus ourselves and visualize things a lot better – you know so it feels less like throwing darts at a board while blindfolded – and more like following a streamlined process of steps to narrow things down and picture them before you make any final decisions.

First, Make A List

Before you start attempting to making finish selections, you need to know what decisions need to be made. And what helps us to to keep things feel more manageable is to arrange that in the order that each selection needs to be made (with the most urgent ones up top). For example, with so many decisions ahead of us – rugs, furniture, art, bedding, the list goes on and on –  we’ve chosen to focus on just the most urgent things that we need to select before any of that: paint, tile, cabinetry, plumbing, and lighting. These are the things that will go into each of the duplex’s freshly drywalled rooms to make them feel like actual rooms instead of white boxes (if you haven’t seen the most recent video tour, watch that and then come back to this post since it’ll make a lot more sense).

However you make and organize your list is up to you. For us, what starts off as a paper list often ends up as a spreadsheet once we start ordering. Here’s an example of one we used when ordered lighting for the pink house. Those first two columns (item & quantity) are the list we’re talking about. We took inventory of exactly what each space was wired for (did we need a pendant? a can light? a wall sconce? a chandelier? a fan?). It usually helps to walk through your space in person or look at a floor plan (or both!) to make sure you’re not missing anything.

The chart above is incomplete because at some point we typically move over to a more visual list, like a mood board, so we can better see how everything is coming together. Here’s one we’re in the process of making for the duplex, but more on that  – and the actual items in it – in a minute.

Then, Pick Your Star(s)

We learned long ago that a room where too many things scream for your attention can get chaotic. Plus, choosing which pieces will be the focal point relieves the pressure to make every single item in a room “interesting” which can be a tiresome, budget busting, and sometimes impossible goal. So we often break design choices loosely into two categories: stars and supporting players. The stars are the items you want people to notice when they first walk in – like the bold wallpaper, colorful rug, large chandelier, or dramatic paint on the walls.

Some rooms have only one star, others may have several – that’s up to you. But pretty much everything else functions to support those items – like the neutral couch that falls into the background or the white wall that helps your starring artwork or chandelier stand out. For example, readers of our email newsletter know that we’ve been hung up on the idea of colorful doors in the duplex. In fact, we’re using one of the exact colors we saw in this showhouse that we worked on earlier this year (Sherwin William’s Oyster Bay), which is pictured below, for all of the interior doors on one side of the duplex.

We knew if the doors were going to be “stars” then the wall paint around them probably shouldn’t compete for attention. So all of the walls are going to be a very light warm gray (SW Spare White). The interior doors, all of which are solid wood five-paneled doors, are actually going up in the duplex this week and we snapped some in-progress photos over the weekend. They haven’t been painted yet, but I photoshopped the image below to give you an idea of what the other side of the duplex might look like. For that side we picked a muted pink tone (SW White Truffle) which should pair nicely against the same very light warm gray walls on that side (they’ll also be SW Spare White).

We also picked our stars for the bathrooms to help focus our tile shopping. We learned from doing the pink house that we prefer a fun tile floor versus a fun tile shower wall in a bathroom (we can enjoy our cool patterned hex tile floor in the master bath from any vantage point nearby, but the pretty accent tile that we used on the back wall of the hall bathroom’s shower is often hidden by the bathroom door swinging in front of it and the shower curtain itself. Choosing to focus on some playful and beachy floor tile greatly simplified the process of tile shopping because we could focus our efforts on finding interesting things for just that area, knowing that almost anything would work with some incarnation of white subway-esque tile on the walls of the shower.

Next, Give Yourself Limiting Parameters

Having a million ideas and possibilities is exciting at the start of a design project, but at some point you have to face reality and actually order something. So I know limits don’t sound fun, but they ARE YOUR FRIEND at this stage. Some parameters may be out of your control – like your budget, which clearly puts a cap on your tile’s price per square foot. Or your contractor’s requirement that you order lights from certain vendors or something like that. Plus, you may already know that you want only a certain color, or finish, or size.

Whatever parameters you’ve established, it’s helpful to use those to filter results when you’re searching online. Sites like Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Wayfair are becoming better and better about their search filters. USE THEM. This will save you time and keep you from going crazy.

One parameter we set for ourselves when shopping for floor tile was “no super small tiles like the patterned hex we laid in the master bathroom at the beach house.” As much as we love how that floor turned out – it was very, very, VERY time consuming to install compared to the other spaces where we used larger tiles.

Choosing larger tiles with interesting patterns instead of relying on smaller tiles isn’t a parameter that makes sense for everyone or every tile project – but it really helped our decision-making process when we imposed that limit on ourselves. And the good news is that we were still able to have some fun within that guideline. For instance, we discovered that The Tile Shop sells these long 4″ x 24″ porcelain tile planks in several hues (their display shows all one color being used together) but we realized it would be fun to use all three tones together. So we bought an equal amount of pink, white, and taupe tiles to create our own large-scale herringbone for one of the mudroom floors. This was us mocking it up on the store’s floor:

We also wanted extremely durable tile materials – porcelain and ceramic only. They’re both hardworking non-porous surfaces that are typically much easier to maintain than marble and cement tile (both of which are porous, so they can get stained and you need to worry more about sealing them, etc). So that material parameter immediately cut out a ton of higher maintenance (and higher budget) choices for us. So again, it really helped us focus on the best options for this project.

Lastly, Visualize Before You Finalize

By this point we often still have 10 million tabs open in our web browser with potential options. So after a couple of passes of nixing things we don’t feel strongly about, we usually find it helpful to visualize all of the pieces together. Believe me, you can go round and round liking 20 things and not knowing how they’ll fit together or how you’ll narrow it down for hours, clicking from browser screen to browser screen – and then you finally visually group them so you can see things together AND IT MAKES THE DECISION 100% EASIER!

The actual way that you choose to visualize them will vary – it may be a mood board of some sort (we use Photoshop) or you can just pin everything to a Pinterest folder to see them all together as a group. Heck, you can even print things out to make a collage and swap things in and out to see what combos you like most. However you approach it, just the exercise of viewing your top contenders together, and moving one thing in and pulling another thing out will help you see what works well together.

For instance, while we were sifting through tile options we kept a Photoshop file like this open – and we kept dragging different contenders in and out (this isn’t the final version below, btw – it’s what it looked like in the middle of the process). It was a quick way to evaluate what looked good together and what didn’t – and much easier than clicking from tab to tab in our browser, which can make your head spin and leave you feeling like you might never make a decision.

*Note: most of these tile choices will be linked for you later in the post*

As we got clearer and clearer on what we liked together, we moved on to creating the floor plan images that you saw earlier, where we just dragged selections into actual rooms on each side of the duplex. Not only can we see everything in one place, but we can also stay organized as to what is going where.

With two identical-but-mirrored floor plans, sometimes it’s hard to keep things straight, so this definitely helps us stay on top of where each tile or cabinet color (or door color) will go. Plus we have the added benefit of getting to see how everything will look all together on each side of the house.

So now that we’ve shared a little bit about our process for selecting items, we’ll tell you about the items we chose themselves!

Duplex Tile, Cabinetry, & Paint

We didn’t set out to create a “pink side” and a “blue side” but once we chose the two interior door colors, it started to naturally lean that way. But we still plan to inject both colors – along with mint and various neutrals and wood tones – throughout each side as we furnish and decorate. So, in the end, it won’t feel as monochromatic as this mood board suggests.

Here are the product links for you guys, as promised:

Mudroom floor in pink, white, and taupe

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

Kitchen backsplash 

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Kallarp

Interior doors: SW White Truffle in semi-gloss

Interior walls: SW Spare White in eggshell (both sides)

Interior trim: SW Extra White in semi-gloss (both sides)

Kitchen backsplash

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Askersund

Interior doors:  SW Oyster Bay in semi-gloss

Mudroom floor

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

The wood tone on both sides is just to represent the wood floors, which are oak hardwoods that we plan to sand down and stain with Minwax Provincial (the same stain we used for our own floors in Richmond).

You can hear more about how we chose the kitchen cabinetry in this week’s podcast, but we knew we wanted to do non-white cabinets on the lowers to keep things a little more unexpected and playful (if you can’t take a few fun risks at a beach house where people will only stay for a week, where can you?!). To stick to our tight kitchen budget, which is around 4-5K for each fully finished kitchen (including appliances), we wanted to work with the stock options at Ikea since we have been really happy with their cabinetry at the pink house. And we were psyched to find both a wood toned cabinet and a painted cabinet option that we loved. In one duplex kitchen we’re pairing this pink tile with these gray-turquoise flat front cabinets. We will probably do a few white uppers on each side too – maybe with some open shelving.

On the other side of the duplex in the other kitchen, instead of colorful cabinets, we’re pairing these beachy wood flat front cabinets with a similar tile, but in a blue colorway. We bought both tile choices from The Tile Bar and they look like cement tile, but they’re porcelain! Three cheers for easier maintenance and added durability.

Here’s a look at some of the other tiles that we purchased. Three of these are from Wayfair (top right, bottom right, and bottom left), since we had such good luck ordering tile from them for the pink house, and the one in the top left is from Home Depot. Both Home Depot and Lowe’s seem to be upping their tile game lately, so it was fun to find an option like this there! And all of this tile is porcelain – again: super durable – and it’s all specifically made for floors, since we don’t want to get anything too slick that’s not meant for that surface.

I know it all looks a little chaotic put together like that, but keep in mind that these are all going in separate rooms with a lot of “supporting players” – like white subway tile, very light gray walls, fluffy white towels, white vanities, and wood/neutral touches. So in the end they should add some fun and interest to each bathroom, but not be too overwhelming since they’re all going to be tempered by everything else in the room. Here’s hoping, anyway!

P.S. If you missed last week’s duplex video tour, go watch that because Sherry talks about a lot of plans we haven’t covered here – like the window we’re adding to each of the hall bathrooms – and the shelves we’re adding to each side of the master bedroom in front of the exposed brick chimneys. And just for comparison’s sake, you can check out how the pink house turned out. It feels a little more old/historic since there was more original stuff that we could save in that house. Sherry keeps saying that she thinks the duplex will feel like its playful younger sister with a beachier and slightly more colorful wardrobe. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”) appeared first on Young House Love.

Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”) published first on https://bakerskitchenslimited.tumblr.com/

[vincentbnaughton]

Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”)

I’m not gonna lie. Simultaneously choosing a bunch of finishes – like paint colors for walls and ceilings and trim and doors, cabinets for two kitchens, and tile for six bathrooms (plus two mudroom/laundry rooms along with two kitchen backsplashes) has felt overwhelming at times. Heck, planning just one room, like a bathroom renovation on its own, can feel overwhelming… and here we are planning six different bathrooms, two different kitchens, and 10 other rooms simultaneously! But we’ve managed to keep our heads on straight (so far) and even have some advice to offer through it all.

So whether you’re working on a new construction and have to make a lot of decisions like this all at once, or just trying to systematically renovate your home while keeping each room in mind so it all ends up feeling cohesive without being boring or too repetitive, this post is for you. We actually talked a little bit in this week’s podcast about how we chose each side of the duplex’s (not white!) kitchen cabinets and tile, but we knew that collectively showing you a bunch of our selections all in one post – and breaking down our process for picking them – might help other people out there who have burning questions like these ringing in their ears:

“Is this tile/paint color/cabinetry the right choice?”

“Am I going to regret this?!”

“How is this all going to look together?”

“Am I being too safe and boring? Too out there and crazy?”

“I keep going round and round – how can I actually make a decision?!”

Basically, this is the stage where you’re past all of your inspiration gathering and general planning (we shared our duplex style planning with you here) and you’re trying to take those images you saw on Pinterest or in a magazine (or just that dream room that lives in your head) and make it a real room in your real home. How do you do that? You have to find actual products that you can buy and paint colors that will tie it all together (and did I mention there’s a budget that you have to work with too)?

So here’s what we do to keep things feeling organized and to help focus ourselves and visualize things a lot better – you know so it feels less like throwing darts at a board while blindfolded – and more like following a streamlined process of steps to narrow things down and picture them before you make any final decisions.

First, Make A List

Before you start attempting to making finish selections, you need to know what decisions need to be made. And what helps us to to keep things feel more manageable is to arrange that in the order that each selection needs to be made (with the most urgent ones up top). For example, with so many decisions ahead of us – rugs, furniture, art, bedding, the list goes on and on –  we’ve chosen to focus on just the most urgent things that we need to select before any of that: paint, tile, cabinetry, plumbing, and lighting. These are the things that will go into each of the duplex’s freshly drywalled rooms to make them feel like actual rooms instead of white boxes (if you haven’t seen the most recent video tour, watch that and then come back to this post since it’ll make a lot more sense).

However you make and organize your list is up to you. For us, what starts off as a paper list often ends up as a spreadsheet once we start ordering. Here’s an example of one we used when ordered lighting for the pink house. Those first two columns (item & quantity) are the list we’re talking about. We took inventory of exactly what each space was wired for (did we need a pendant? a can light? a wall sconce? a chandelier? a fan?). It usually helps to walk through your space in person or look at a floor plan (or both!) to make sure you’re not missing anything.

The chart above is incomplete because at some point we typically move over to a more visual list, like a mood board, so we can better see how everything is coming together. Here’s one we’re in the process of making for the duplex, but more on that  – and the actual items in it – in a minute.

Then, Pick Your Star(s)

We learned long ago that a room where too many things scream for your attention can get chaotic. Plus, choosing which pieces will be the focal point relieves the pressure to make every single item in a room “interesting” which can be a tiresome, budget busting, and sometimes impossible goal. So we often break design choices loosely into two categories: stars and supporting players. The stars are the items you want people to notice when they first walk in – like the bold wallpaper, colorful rug, large chandelier, or dramatic paint on the walls.

Some rooms have only one star, others may have several – that’s up to you. But pretty much everything else functions to support those items – like the neutral couch that falls into the background or the white wall that helps your starring artwork or chandelier stand out. For example, readers of our email newsletter know that we’ve been hung up on the idea of colorful doors in the duplex. In fact, we’re using one of the exact colors we saw in this showhouse that we worked on earlier this year (Sherwin William’s Oyster Bay), which is pictured below, for all of the interior doors on one side of the duplex.

We knew if the doors were going to be “stars” then the wall paint around them probably shouldn’t compete for attention. So all of the walls are going to be a very light warm gray (SW Spare White). The interior doors, all of which are solid wood five-paneled doors, are actually going up in the duplex this week and we snapped some in-progress photos over the weekend. They haven’t been painted yet, but I photoshopped the image below to give you an idea of what the other side of the duplex might look like. For that side we picked a muted pink tone (SW White Truffle) which should pair nicely against the same very light warm gray walls on that side (they’ll also be SW Spare White).

We also picked our stars for the bathrooms to help focus our tile shopping. We learned from doing the pink house that we prefer a fun tile floor versus a fun tile shower wall in a bathroom (we can enjoy our cool patterned hex tile floor in the master bath from any vantage point nearby, but the pretty accent tile that we used on the back wall of the hall bathroom’s shower is often hidden by the bathroom door swinging in front of it and the shower curtain itself. Choosing to focus on some playful and beachy floor tile greatly simplified the process of tile shopping because we could focus our efforts on finding interesting things for just that area, knowing that almost anything would work with some incarnation of white subway-esque tile on the walls of the shower.

Next, Give Yourself Limiting Parameters

Having a million ideas and possibilities is exciting at the start of a design project, but at some point you have to face reality and actually order something. So I know limits don’t sound fun, but they ARE YOUR FRIEND at this stage. Some parameters may be out of your control – like your budget, which clearly puts a cap on your tile’s price per square foot. Or your contractor’s requirement that you order lights from certain vendors or something like that. Plus, you may already know that you want only a certain color, or finish, or size.

Whatever parameters you’ve established, it’s helpful to use those to filter results when you’re searching online. Sites like Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Wayfair are becoming better and better about their search filters. USE THEM. This will save you time and keep you from going crazy.

One parameter we set for ourselves when shopping for floor tile was “no super small tiles like the patterned hex we laid in the master bathroom at the beach house.” As much as we love how that floor turned out – it was very, very, VERY time consuming to install compared to the other spaces where we used larger tiles.

Choosing larger tiles with interesting patterns instead of relying on smaller tiles isn’t a parameter that makes sense for everyone or every tile project – but it really helped our decision-making process when we imposed that limit on ourselves. And the good news is that we were still able to have some fun within that guideline. For instance, we discovered that The Tile Shop sells these long 4″ x 24″ porcelain tile planks in several hues (their display shows all one color being used together) but we realized it would be fun to use all three tones together. So we bought an equal amount of pink, white, and taupe tiles to create our own large-scale herringbone for one of the mudroom floors. This was us mocking it up on the store’s floor:

We also wanted extremely durable tile materials – porcelain and ceramic only. They’re both hardworking non-porous surfaces that are typically much easier to maintain than marble and cement tile (both of which are porous, so they can get stained and you need to worry more about sealing them, etc). So that material parameter immediately cut out a ton of higher maintenance (and higher budget) choices for us. So again, it really helped us focus on the best options for this project.

Lastly, Visualize Before You Finalize

By this point we often still have 10 million tabs open in our web browser with potential options. So after a couple of passes of nixing things we don’t feel strongly about, we usually find it helpful to visualize all of the pieces together. Believe me, you can go round and round liking 20 things and not knowing how they’ll fit together or how you’ll narrow it down for hours, clicking from browser screen to browser screen – and then you finally visually group them so you can see things together AND IT MAKES THE DECISION 100% EASIER!

The actual way that you choose to visualize them will vary – it may be a mood board of some sort (we use Photoshop) or you can just pin everything to a Pinterest folder to see them all together as a group. Heck, you can even print things out to make a collage and swap things in and out to see what combos you like most. However you approach it, just the exercise of viewing your top contenders together, and moving one thing in and pulling another thing out will help you see what works well together.

For instance, while we were sifting through tile options we kept a Photoshop file like this open – and we kept dragging different contenders in and out (this isn’t the final version below, btw – it’s what it looked like in the middle of the process). It was a quick way to evaluate what looked good together and what didn’t – and much easier than clicking from tab to tab in our browser, which can make your head spin and leave you feeling like you might never make a decision.

*Note: most of these tile choices will be linked for you later in the post*

As we got clearer and clearer on what we liked together, we moved on to creating the floor plan images that you saw earlier, where we just dragged selections into actual rooms on each side of the duplex. Not only can we see everything in one place, but we can also stay organized as to what is going where.

With two identical-but-mirrored floor plans, sometimes it’s hard to keep things straight, so this definitely helps us stay on top of where each tile or cabinet color (or door color) will go. Plus we have the added benefit of getting to see how everything will look all together on each side of the house.

So now that we’ve shared a little bit about our process for selecting items, we’ll tell you about the items we chose themselves!

Duplex Tile, Cabinetry, & Paint

We didn’t set out to create a “pink side” and a “blue side” but once we chose the two interior door colors, it started to naturally lean that way. But we still plan to inject both colors – along with mint and various neutrals and wood tones – throughout each side as we furnish and decorate. So, in the end, it won’t feel as monochromatic as this mood board suggests.

Here are the product links for you guys, as promised:

Mudroom floor in pink, white, and taupe

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

Kitchen backsplash 

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Kallarp

Interior doors: SW White Truffle in semi-gloss

Interior walls: SW Spare White in eggshell (both sides)

Interior trim: SW Extra White in semi-gloss (both sides)

Kitchen backsplash

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Askersund

Interior doors:  SW Oyster Bay in semi-gloss

Mudroom floor

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

The wood tone on both sides is just to represent the wood floors, which are oak hardwoods that we plan to sand down and stain with Minwax Provincial (the same stain we used for our own floors in Richmond).

You can hear more about how we chose the kitchen cabinetry in this week’s podcast, but we knew we wanted to do non-white cabinets on the lowers to keep things a little more unexpected and playful (if you can’t take a few fun risks at a beach house where people will only stay for a week, where can you?!). To stick to our tight kitchen budget, which is around 4-5K for each fully finished kitchen (including appliances), we wanted to work with the stock options at Ikea since we have been really happy with their cabinetry at the pink house. And we were psyched to find both a wood toned cabinet and a painted cabinet option that we loved. In one duplex kitchen we’re pairing this pink tile with these gray-turquoise flat front cabinets. We will probably do a few white uppers on each side too – maybe with some open shelving.

On the other side of the duplex in the other kitchen, instead of colorful cabinets, we’re pairing these beachy wood flat front cabinets with a similar tile, but in a blue colorway. We bought both tile choices from The Tile Bar and they look like cement tile, but they’re porcelain! Three cheers for easier maintenance and added durability.

Here’s a look at some of the other tiles that we purchased. Three of these are from Wayfair (top right, bottom right, and bottom left), since we had such good luck ordering tile from them for the pink house, and the one in the top left is from Home Depot. Both Home Depot and Lowe’s seem to be upping their tile game lately, so it was fun to find an option like this there! And all of this tile is porcelain – again: super durable – and it’s all specifically made for floors, since we don’t want to get anything too slick that’s not meant for that surface.

I know it all looks a little chaotic put together like that, but keep in mind that these are all going in separate rooms with a lot of “supporting players” – like white subway tile, very light gray walls, fluffy white towels, white vanities, and wood/neutral touches. So in the end they should add some fun and interest to each bathroom, but not be too overwhelming since they’re all going to be tempered by everything else in the room. Here’s hoping, anyway!

P.S. If you missed last week’s duplex video tour, go watch that because Sherry talks about a lot of plans we haven’t covered here – like the window we’re adding to each of the hall bathrooms – and the shelves we’re adding to each side of the master bedroom in front of the exposed brick chimneys. And just for comparison’s sake, you can check out how the pink house turned out. It feels a little more old/historic since there was more original stuff that we could save in that house. Sherry keeps saying that she thinks the duplex will feel like its playful younger sister with a beachier and slightly more colorful wardrobe. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”) appeared first on Young House Love.

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Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”)

I’m not gonna lie. Simultaneously choosing a bunch of finishes – like paint colors for walls and ceilings and trim and doors, cabinets for two kitchens, and tile for six bathrooms (plus two mudroom/laundry rooms along with two kitchen backsplashes) has felt overwhelming at times. Heck, planning just one room, like a bathroom renovation on its own, can feel overwhelming… and here we are planning six different bathrooms, two different kitchens, and 10 other rooms simultaneously! But we’ve managed to keep our heads on straight (so far) and even have some advice to offer through it all.

So whether you’re working on a new construction and have to make a lot of decisions like this all at once, or just trying to systematically renovate your home while keeping each room in mind so it all ends up feeling cohesive without being boring or too repetitive, this post is for you. We actually talked a little bit in this week’s podcast about how we chose each side of the duplex’s (not white!) kitchen cabinets and tile, but we knew that collectively showing you a bunch of our selections all in one post – and breaking down our process for picking them – might help other people out there who have burning questions like these ringing in their ears:

“Is this tile/paint color/cabinetry the right choice?”

“Am I going to regret this?!”

“How is this all going to look together?”

“Am I being too safe and boring? Too out there and crazy?”

“I keep going round and round – how can I actually make a decision?!”

Basically, this is the stage where you’re past all of your inspiration gathering and general planning (we shared our duplex style planning with you here) and you’re trying to take those images you saw on Pinterest or in a magazine (or just that dream room that lives in your head) and make it a real room in your real home. How do you do that? You have to find actual products that you can buy and paint colors that will tie it all together (and did I mention there’s a budget that you have to work with too)?

So here’s what we do to keep things feeling organized and to help focus ourselves and visualize things a lot better – you know so it feels less like throwing darts at a board while blindfolded – and more like following a streamlined process of steps to narrow things down and picture them before you make any final decisions.

First, Make A List

Before you start attempting to making finish selections, you need to know what decisions need to be made. And what helps us to to keep things feel more manageable is to arrange that in the order that each selection needs to be made (with the most urgent ones up top). For example, with so many decisions ahead of us – rugs, furniture, art, bedding, the list goes on and on –  we’ve chosen to focus on just the most urgent things that we need to select before any of that: paint, tile, cabinetry, plumbing, and lighting. These are the things that will go into each of the duplex’s freshly drywalled rooms to make them feel like actual rooms instead of white boxes (if you haven’t seen the most recent video tour, watch that and then come back to this post since it’ll make a lot more sense).

However you make and organize your list is up to you. For us, what starts off as a paper list often ends up as a spreadsheet once we start ordering. Here’s an example of one we used when ordered lighting for the pink house. Those first two columns (item & quantity) are the list we’re talking about. We took inventory of exactly what each space was wired for (did we need a pendant? a can light? a wall sconce? a chandelier? a fan?). It usually helps to walk through your space in person or look at a floor plan (or both!) to make sure you’re not missing anything.

The chart above is incomplete because at some point we typically move over to a more visual list, like a mood board, so we can better see how everything is coming together. Here’s one we’re in the process of making for the duplex, but more on that  – and the actual items in it – in a minute.

Then, Pick Your Star(s)

We learned long ago that a room where too many things scream for your attention can get chaotic. Plus, choosing which pieces will be the focal point relieves the pressure to make every single item in a room “interesting” which can be a tiresome, budget busting, and sometimes impossible goal. So we often break design choices loosely into two categories: stars and supporting players. The stars are the items you want people to notice when they first walk in – like the bold wallpaper, colorful rug, large chandelier, or dramatic paint on the walls.

Some rooms have only one star, others may have several – that’s up to you. But pretty much everything else functions to support those items – like the neutral couch that falls into the background or the white wall that helps your starring artwork or chandelier stand out. For example, readers of our email newsletter know that we’ve been hung up on the idea of colorful doors in the duplex. In fact, we’re using one of the exact colors we saw in this showhouse that we worked on earlier this year (Sherwin William’s Oyster Bay), which is pictured below, for all of the interior doors on one side of the duplex.

We knew if the doors were going to be “stars” then the wall paint around them probably shouldn’t compete for attention. So all of the walls are going to be a very light warm gray (SW Spare White). The interior doors, all of which are solid wood five-paneled doors, are actually going up in the duplex this week and we snapped some in-progress photos over the weekend. They haven’t been painted yet, but I photoshopped the image below to give you an idea of what the other side of the duplex might look like. For that side we picked a muted pink tone (SW White Truffle) which should pair nicely against the same very light warm gray walls on that side (they’ll also be SW Spare White).

We also picked our stars for the bathrooms to help focus our tile shopping. We learned from doing the pink house that we prefer a fun tile floor versus a fun tile shower wall in a bathroom (we can enjoy our cool patterned hex tile floor in the master bath from any vantage point nearby, but the pretty accent tile that we used on the back wall of the hall bathroom’s shower is often hidden by the bathroom door swinging in front of it and the shower curtain itself. Choosing to focus on some playful and beachy floor tile greatly simplified the process of tile shopping because we could focus our efforts on finding interesting things for just that area, knowing that almost anything would work with some incarnation of white subway-esque tile on the walls of the shower.

Next, Give Yourself Limiting Parameters

Having a million ideas and possibilities is exciting at the start of a design project, but at some point you have to face reality and actually order something. So I know limits don’t sound fun, but they ARE YOUR FRIEND at this stage. Some parameters may be out of your control – like your budget, which clearly puts a cap on your tile’s price per square foot. Or your contractor’s requirement that you order lights from certain vendors or something like that. Plus, you may already know that you want only a certain color, or finish, or size.

Whatever parameters you’ve established, it’s helpful to use those to filter results when you’re searching online. Sites like Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Wayfair are becoming better and better about their search filters. USE THEM. This will save you time and keep you from going crazy.

One parameter we set for ourselves when shopping for floor tile was “no super small tiles like the patterned hex we laid in the master bathroom at the beach house.” As much as we love how that floor turned out – it was very, very, VERY time consuming to install compared to the other spaces where we used larger tiles.

Choosing larger tiles with interesting patterns instead of relying on smaller tiles isn’t a parameter that makes sense for everyone or every tile project – but it really helped our decision-making process when we imposed that limit on ourselves. And the good news is that we were still able to have some fun within that guideline. For instance, we discovered that The Tile Shop sells these long 4″ x 24″ porcelain tile planks in several hues (their display shows all one color being used together) but we realized it would be fun to use all three tones together. So we bought an equal amount of pink, white, and taupe tiles to create our own large-scale herringbone for one of the mudroom floors. This was us mocking it up on the store’s floor:

We also wanted extremely durable tile materials – porcelain and ceramic only. They’re both hardworking non-porous surfaces that are typically much easier to maintain than marble and cement tile (both of which are porous, so they can get stained and you need to worry more about sealing them, etc). So that material parameter immediately cut out a ton of higher maintenance (and higher budget) choices for us. So again, it really helped us focus on the best options for this project.

Lastly, Visualize Before You Finalize

By this point we often still have 10 million tabs open in our web browser with potential options. So after a couple of passes of nixing things we don’t feel strongly about, we usually find it helpful to visualize all of the pieces together. Believe me, you can go round and round liking 20 things and not knowing how they’ll fit together or how you’ll narrow it down for hours, clicking from browser screen to browser screen – and then you finally visually group them so you can see things together AND IT MAKES THE DECISION 100% EASIER!

The actual way that you choose to visualize them will vary – it may be a mood board of some sort (we use Photoshop) or you can just pin everything to a Pinterest folder to see them all together as a group. Heck, you can even print things out to make a collage and swap things in and out to see what combos you like most. However you approach it, just the exercise of viewing your top contenders together, and moving one thing in and pulling another thing out will help you see what works well together.

For instance, while we were sifting through tile options we kept a Photoshop file like this open – and we kept dragging different contenders in and out (this isn’t the final version below, btw – it’s what it looked like in the middle of the process). It was a quick way to evaluate what looked good together and what didn’t – and much easier than clicking from tab to tab in our browser, which can make your head spin and leave you feeling like you might never make a decision.

*Note: most of these tile choices will be linked for you later in the post*

As we got clearer and clearer on what we liked together, we moved on to creating the floor plan images that you saw earlier, where we just dragged selections into actual rooms on each side of the duplex. Not only can we see everything in one place, but we can also stay organized as to what is going where.

With two identical-but-mirrored floor plans, sometimes it’s hard to keep things straight, so this definitely helps us stay on top of where each tile or cabinet color (or door color) will go. Plus we have the added benefit of getting to see how everything will look all together on each side of the house.

So now that we’ve shared a little bit about our process for selecting items, we’ll tell you about the items we chose themselves!

Duplex Tile, Cabinetry, & Paint

We didn’t set out to create a “pink side” and a “blue side” but once we chose the two interior door colors, it started to naturally lean that way. But we still plan to inject both colors – along with mint and various neutrals and wood tones – throughout each side as we furnish and decorate. So, in the end, it won’t feel as monochromatic as this mood board suggests.

Here are the product links for you guys, as promised:

Mudroom floor in pink, white, and taupe

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

Kitchen backsplash 

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Kallarp

Interior doors: SW White Truffle in semi-gloss

Interior walls: SW Spare White in eggshell (both sides)

Interior trim: SW Extra White in semi-gloss (both sides)

Kitchen backsplash

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Askersund

Interior doors:  SW Oyster Bay in semi-gloss

Mudroom floor

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

The wood tone on both sides is just to represent the wood floors, which are oak hardwoods that we plan to sand down and stain with Minwax Provincial (the same stain we used for our own floors in Richmond).

You can hear more about how we chose the kitchen cabinetry in this week’s podcast, but we knew we wanted to do non-white cabinets on the lowers to keep things a little more unexpected and playful (if you can’t take a few fun risks at a beach house where people will only stay for a week, where can you?!). To stick to our tight kitchen budget, which is around 4-5K for each fully finished kitchen (including appliances), we wanted to work with the stock options at Ikea since we have been really happy with their cabinetry at the pink house. And we were psyched to find both a wood toned cabinet and a painted cabinet option that we loved. In one duplex kitchen we’re pairing this pink tile with these gray-turquoise flat front cabinets. We will probably do a few white uppers on each side too – maybe with some open shelving.

On the other side of the duplex in the other kitchen, instead of colorful cabinets, we’re pairing these beachy wood flat front cabinets with a similar tile, but in a blue colorway. We bought both tile choices from The Tile Bar and they look like cement tile, but they’re porcelain! Three cheers for easier maintenance and added durability.

Here’s a look at some of the other tiles that we purchased. Three of these are from Wayfair (top right, bottom right, and bottom left), since we had such good luck ordering tile from them for the pink house, and the one in the top left is from Home Depot. Both Home Depot and Lowe’s seem to be upping their tile game lately, so it was fun to find an option like this there! And all of this tile is porcelain – again: super durable – and it’s all specifically made for floors, since we don’t want to get anything too slick that’s not meant for that surface.

I know it all looks a little chaotic put together like that, but keep in mind that these are all going in separate rooms with a lot of “supporting players” – like white subway tile, very light gray walls, fluffy white towels, white vanities, and wood/neutral touches. So in the end they should add some fun and interest to each bathroom, but not be too overwhelming since they’re all going to be tempered by everything else in the room. Here’s hoping, anyway!

P.S. If you missed last week’s duplex video tour, go watch that because Sherry talks about a lot of plans we haven’t covered here – like the window we’re adding to each of the hall bathrooms – and the shelves we’re adding to each side of the master bedroom in front of the exposed brick chimneys. And just for comparison’s sake, you can check out how the pink house turned out. It feels a little more old/historic since there was more original stuff that we could save in that house. Sherry keeps saying that she thinks the duplex will feel like its playful younger sister with a beachier and slightly more colorful wardrobe. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”) appeared first on Young House Love.

Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”) published first on https://aireloomreview.tumblr.com/

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Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”)

I’m not gonna lie. Simultaneously choosing a bunch of finishes – like paint colors for walls and ceilings and trim and doors, cabinets for two kitchens, and tile for six bathrooms (plus two mudroom/laundry rooms along with two kitchen backsplashes) has felt overwhelming at times. Heck, planning just one room, like a bathroom renovation on its own, can feel overwhelming… and here we are planning six different bathrooms, two different kitchens, and 10 other rooms simultaneously! But we’ve managed to keep our heads on straight (so far) and even have some advice to offer through it all.

So whether you’re working on a new construction and have to make a lot of decisions like this all at once, or just trying to systematically renovate your home while keeping each room in mind so it all ends up feeling cohesive without being boring or too repetitive, this post is for you. We actually talked a little bit in this week’s podcast about how we chose each side of the duplex’s (not white!) kitchen cabinets and tile, but we knew that collectively showing you a bunch of our selections all in one post – and breaking down our process for picking them – might help other people out there who have burning questions like these ringing in their ears:

“Is this tile/paint color/cabinetry the right choice?”

“Am I going to regret this?!”

“How is this all going to look together?”

“Am I being too safe and boring? Too out there and crazy?”

“I keep going round and round – how can I actually make a decision?!”

Basically, this is the stage where you’re past all of your inspiration gathering and general planning (we shared our duplex style planning with you here) and you’re trying to take those images you saw on Pinterest or in a magazine (or just that dream room that lives in your head) and make it a real room in your real home. How do you do that? You have to find actual products that you can buy and paint colors that will tie it all together (and did I mention there’s a budget that you have to work with too)?

So here’s what we do to keep things feeling organized and to help focus ourselves and visualize things a lot better – you know so it feels less like throwing darts at a board while blindfolded – and more like following a streamlined process of steps to narrow things down and picture them before you make any final decisions.

First, Make A List

Before you start attempting to making finish selections, you need to know what decisions need to be made. And what helps us to to keep things feel more manageable is to arrange that in the order that each selection needs to be made (with the most urgent ones up top). For example, with so many decisions ahead of us – rugs, furniture, art, bedding, the list goes on and on –  we’ve chosen to focus on just the most urgent things that we need to select before any of that: paint, tile, cabinetry, plumbing, and lighting. These are the things that will go into each of the duplex’s freshly drywalled rooms to make them feel like actual rooms instead of white boxes (if you haven’t seen the most recent video tour, watch that and then come back to this post since it’ll make a lot more sense).

However you make and organize your list is up to you. For us, what starts off as a paper list often ends up as a spreadsheet once we start ordering. Here’s an example of one we used when ordered lighting for the pink house. Those first two columns (item & quantity) are the list we’re talking about. We took inventory of exactly what each space was wired for (did we need a pendant? a can light? a wall sconce? a chandelier? a fan?). It usually helps to walk through your space in person or look at a floor plan (or both!) to make sure you’re not missing anything.

The chart above is incomplete because at some point we typically move over to a more visual list, like a mood board, so we can better see how everything is coming together. Here’s one we’re in the process of making for the duplex, but more on that  – and the actual items in it – in a minute.

Then, Pick Your Star(s)

We learned long ago that a room where too many things scream for your attention can get chaotic. Plus, choosing which pieces will be the focal point relieves the pressure to make every single item in a room “interesting” which can be a tiresome, budget busting, and sometimes impossible goal. So we often break design choices loosely into two categories: stars and supporting players. The stars are the items you want people to notice when they first walk in – like the bold wallpaper, colorful rug, large chandelier, or dramatic paint on the walls.

Some rooms have only one star, others may have several – that’s up to you. But pretty much everything else functions to support those items – like the neutral couch that falls into the background or the white wall that helps your starring artwork or chandelier stand out. For example, readers of our email newsletter know that we’ve been hung up on the idea of colorful doors in the duplex. In fact, we’re using one of the exact colors we saw in this showhouse that we worked on earlier this year (Sherwin William’s Oyster Bay), which is pictured below, for all of the interior doors on one side of the duplex.

We knew if the doors were going to be “stars” then the wall paint around them probably shouldn’t compete for attention. So all of the walls are going to be a very light warm gray (SW Spare White). The interior doors, all of which are solid wood five-paneled doors, are actually going up in the duplex this week and we snapped some in-progress photos over the weekend. They haven’t been painted yet, but I photoshopped the image below to give you an idea of what the other side of the duplex might look like. For that side we picked a muted pink tone (SW White Truffle) which should pair nicely against the same very light warm gray walls on that side (they’ll also be SW Spare White).

We also picked our stars for the bathrooms to help focus our tile shopping. We learned from doing the pink house that we prefer a fun tile floor versus a fun tile shower wall in a bathroom (we can enjoy our cool patterned hex tile floor in the master bath from any vantage point nearby, but the pretty accent tile that we used on the back wall of the hall bathroom’s shower is often hidden by the bathroom door swinging in front of it and the shower curtain itself. Choosing to focus on some playful and beachy floor tile greatly simplified the process of tile shopping because we could focus our efforts on finding interesting things for just that area, knowing that almost anything would work with some incarnation of white subway-esque tile on the walls of the shower.

Next, Give Yourself Limiting Parameters

Having a million ideas and possibilities is exciting at the start of a design project, but at some point you have to face reality and actually order something. So I know limits don’t sound fun, but they ARE YOUR FRIEND at this stage. Some parameters may be out of your control – like your budget, which clearly puts a cap on your tile’s price per square foot. Or your contractor’s requirement that you order lights from certain vendors or something like that. Plus, you may already know that you want only a certain color, or finish, or size.

Whatever parameters you’ve established, it’s helpful to use those to filter results when you’re searching online. Sites like Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Wayfair are becoming better and better about their search filters. USE THEM. This will save you time and keep you from going crazy.

One parameter we set for ourselves when shopping for floor tile was “no super small tiles like the patterned hex we laid in the master bathroom at the beach house.” As much as we love how that floor turned out – it was very, very, VERY time consuming to install compared to the other spaces where we used larger tiles.

Choosing larger tiles with interesting patterns instead of relying on smaller tiles isn’t a parameter that makes sense for everyone or every tile project – but it really helped our decision-making process when we imposed that limit on ourselves. And the good news is that we were still able to have some fun within that guideline. For instance, we discovered that The Tile Shop sells these long 4″ x 24″ porcelain tile planks in several hues (their display shows all one color being used together) but we realized it would be fun to use all three tones together. So we bought an equal amount of pink, white, and taupe tiles to create our own large-scale herringbone for one of the mudroom floors. This was us mocking it up on the store’s floor:

We also wanted extremely durable tile materials – porcelain and ceramic only. They’re both hardworking non-porous surfaces that are typically much easier to maintain than marble and cement tile (both of which are porous, so they can get stained and you need to worry more about sealing them, etc). So that material parameter immediately cut out a ton of higher maintenance (and higher budget) choices for us. So again, it really helped us focus on the best options for this project.

Lastly, Visualize Before You Finalize

By this point we often still have 10 million tabs open in our web browser with potential options. So after a couple of passes of nixing things we don’t feel strongly about, we usually find it helpful to visualize all of the pieces together. Believe me, you can go round and round liking 20 things and not knowing how they’ll fit together or how you’ll narrow it down for hours, clicking from browser screen to browser screen – and then you finally visually group them so you can see things together AND IT MAKES THE DECISION 100% EASIER!

The actual way that you choose to visualize them will vary – it may be a mood board of some sort (we use Photoshop) or you can just pin everything to a Pinterest folder to see them all together as a group. Heck, you can even print things out to make a collage and swap things in and out to see what combos you like most. However you approach it, just the exercise of viewing your top contenders together, and moving one thing in and pulling another thing out will help you see what works well together.

For instance, while we were sifting through tile options we kept a Photoshop file like this open – and we kept dragging different contenders in and out (this isn’t the final version below, btw – it’s what it looked like in the middle of the process). It was a quick way to evaluate what looked good together and what didn’t – and much easier than clicking from tab to tab in our browser, which can make your head spin and leave you feeling like you might never make a decision.

*Note: most of these tile choices will be linked for you later in the post*

As we got clearer and clearer on what we liked together, we moved on to creating the floor plan images that you saw earlier, where we just dragged selections into actual rooms on each side of the duplex. Not only can we see everything in one place, but we can also stay organized as to what is going where.

With two identical-but-mirrored floor plans, sometimes it’s hard to keep things straight, so this definitely helps us stay on top of where each tile or cabinet color (or door color) will go. Plus we have the added benefit of getting to see how everything will look all together on each side of the house.

So now that we’ve shared a little bit about our process for selecting items, we’ll tell you about the items we chose themselves!

Duplex Tile, Cabinetry, & Paint

We didn’t set out to create a “pink side” and a “blue side” but once we chose the two interior door colors, it started to naturally lean that way. But we still plan to inject both colors – along with mint and various neutrals and wood tones – throughout each side as we furnish and decorate. So, in the end, it won’t feel as monochromatic as this mood board suggests.

Here are the product links for you guys, as promised:

Mudroom floor in pink, white, and taupe

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

Kitchen backsplash 

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Kallarp

Interior doors: SW White Truffle in semi-gloss

Interior walls: SW Spare White in eggshell (both sides)

Interior trim: SW Extra White in semi-gloss (both sides)

Kitchen backsplash

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Askersund

Interior doors:  SW Oyster Bay in semi-gloss

Mudroom floor

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

The wood tone on both sides is just to represent the wood floors, which are oak hardwoods that we plan to sand down and stain with Minwax Provincial (the same stain we used for our own floors in Richmond).

You can hear more about how we chose the kitchen cabinetry in this week’s podcast, but we knew we wanted to do non-white cabinets on the lowers to keep things a little more unexpected and playful (if you can’t take a few fun risks at a beach house where people will only stay for a week, where can you?!). To stick to our tight kitchen budget, which is around 4-5K for each fully finished kitchen (including appliances), we wanted to work with the stock options at Ikea since we have been really happy with their cabinetry at the pink house. And we were psyched to find both a wood toned cabinet and a painted cabinet option that we loved. In one duplex kitchen we’re pairing this pink tile with these gray-turquoise flat front cabinets. We will probably do a few white uppers on each side too – maybe with some open shelving.

On the other side of the duplex in the other kitchen, instead of colorful cabinets, we’re pairing these beachy wood flat front cabinets with a similar tile, but in a blue colorway. We bought both tile choices from The Tile Bar and they look like cement tile, but they’re porcelain! Three cheers for easier maintenance and added durability.

Here’s a look at some of the other tiles that we purchased. Three of these are from Wayfair (top right, bottom right, and bottom left), since we had such good luck ordering tile from them for the pink house, and the one in the top left is from Home Depot. Both Home Depot and Lowe’s seem to be upping their tile game lately, so it was fun to find an option like this there! And all of this tile is porcelain – again: super durable – and it’s all specifically made for floors, since we don’t want to get anything too slick that’s not meant for that surface.

I know it all looks a little chaotic put together like that, but keep in mind that these are all going in separate rooms with a lot of “supporting players” – like white subway tile, very light gray walls, fluffy white towels, white vanities, and wood/neutral touches. So in the end they should add some fun and interest to each bathroom, but not be too overwhelming since they’re all going to be tempered by everything else in the room. Here’s hoping, anyway!

P.S. If you missed last week’s duplex video tour, go watch that because Sherry talks about a lot of plans we haven’t covered here – like the window we’re adding to each of the hall bathrooms – and the shelves we’re adding to each side of the master bedroom in front of the exposed brick chimneys. And just for comparison’s sake, you can check out how the pink house turned out. It feels a little more old/historic since there was more original stuff that we could save in that house. Sherry keeps saying that she thinks the duplex will feel like its playful younger sister with a beachier and slightly more colorful wardrobe. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”) appeared first on Young House Love.

Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”) published first on https://ssmattress.tumblr.com/

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Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”)

I’m not gonna lie. Simultaneously choosing a bunch of finishes – like paint colors for walls and ceilings and trim and doors, cabinets for two kitchens, and tile for six bathrooms (plus two mudroom/laundry rooms along with two kitchen backsplashes) has felt overwhelming at times. Heck, planning just one room, like a bathroom renovation on its own, can feel overwhelming… and here we are planning six different bathrooms, two different kitchens, and 10 other rooms simultaneously! But we’ve managed to keep our heads on straight (so far) and even have some advice to offer through it all.

So whether you’re working on a new construction and have to make a lot of decisions like this all at once, or just trying to systematically renovate your home while keeping each room in mind so it all ends up feeling cohesive without being boring or too repetitive, this post is for you. We actually talked a little bit in this week’s podcast about how we chose each side of the duplex’s (not white!) kitchen cabinets and tile, but we knew that collectively showing you a bunch of our selections all in one post – and breaking down our process for picking them – might help other people out there who have burning questions like these ringing in their ears:

“Is this tile/paint color/cabinetry the right choice?”

“Am I going to regret this?!”

“How is this all going to look together?”

“Am I being too safe and boring? Too out there and crazy?”

“I keep going round and round – how can I actually make a decision?!”

Basically, this is the stage where you’re past all of your inspiration gathering and general planning (we shared our duplex style planning with you here) and you’re trying to take those images you saw on Pinterest or in a magazine (or just that dream room that lives in your head) and make it a real room in your real home. How do you do that? You have to find actual products that you can buy and paint colors that will tie it all together (and did I mention there’s a budget that you have to work with too)?

So here’s what we do to keep things feeling organized and to help focus ourselves and visualize things a lot better – you know so it feels less like throwing darts at a board while blindfolded – and more like following a streamlined process of steps to narrow things down and picture them before you make any final decisions.

First, Make A List

Before you start attempting to making finish selections, you need to know what decisions need to be made. And what helps us to to keep things feel more manageable is to arrange that in the order that each selection needs to be made (with the most urgent ones up top). For example, with so many decisions ahead of us – rugs, furniture, art, bedding, the list goes on and on –  we’ve chosen to focus on just the most urgent things that we need to select before any of that: paint, tile, cabinetry, plumbing, and lighting. These are the things that will go into each of the duplex’s freshly drywalled rooms to make them feel like actual rooms instead of white boxes (if you haven’t seen the most recent video tour, watch that and then come back to this post since it’ll make a lot more sense).

However you make and organize your list is up to you. For us, what starts off as a paper list often ends up as a spreadsheet once we start ordering. Here’s an example of one we used when ordered lighting for the pink house. Those first two columns (item & quantity) are the list we’re talking about. We took inventory of exactly what each space was wired for (did we need a pendant? a can light? a wall sconce? a chandelier? a fan?). It usually helps to walk through your space in person or look at a floor plan (or both!) to make sure you’re not missing anything.

The chart above is incomplete because at some point we typically move over to a more visual list, like a mood board, so we can better see how everything is coming together. Here’s one we’re in the process of making for the duplex, but more on that  – and the actual items in it – in a minute.

Then, Pick Your Star(s)

We learned long ago that a room where too many things scream for your attention can get chaotic. Plus, choosing which pieces will be the focal point relieves the pressure to make every single item in a room “interesting” which can be a tiresome, budget busting, and sometimes impossible goal. So we often break design choices loosely into two categories: stars and supporting players. The stars are the items you want people to notice when they first walk in – like the bold wallpaper, colorful rug, large chandelier, or dramatic paint on the walls.

Some rooms have only one star, others may have several – that’s up to you. But pretty much everything else functions to support those items – like the neutral couch that falls into the background or the white wall that helps your starring artwork or chandelier stand out. For example, readers of our email newsletter know that we’ve been hung up on the idea of colorful doors in the duplex. In fact, we’re using one of the exact colors we saw in this showhouse that we worked on earlier this year (Sherwin William’s Oyster Bay), which is pictured below, for all of the interior doors on one side of the duplex.

We knew if the doors were going to be “stars” then the wall paint around them probably shouldn’t compete for attention. So all of the walls are going to be a very light warm gray (SW Spare White). The interior doors, all of which are solid wood five-paneled doors, are actually going up in the duplex this week and we snapped some in-progress photos over the weekend. They haven’t been painted yet, but I photoshopped the image below to give you an idea of what the other side of the duplex might look like. For that side we picked a muted pink tone (SW White Truffle) which should pair nicely against the same very light warm gray walls on that side (they’ll also be SW Spare White).

We also picked our stars for the bathrooms to help focus our tile shopping. We learned from doing the pink house that we prefer a fun tile floor versus a fun tile shower wall in a bathroom (we can enjoy our cool patterned hex tile floor in the master bath from any vantage point nearby, but the pretty accent tile that we used on the back wall of the hall bathroom’s shower is often hidden by the bathroom door swinging in front of it and the shower curtain itself. Choosing to focus on some playful and beachy floor tile greatly simplified the process of tile shopping because we could focus our efforts on finding interesting things for just that area, knowing that almost anything would work with some incarnation of white subway-esque tile on the walls of the shower.

Next, Give Yourself Limiting Parameters

Having a million ideas and possibilities is exciting at the start of a design project, but at some point you have to face reality and actually order something. So I know limits don’t sound fun, but they ARE YOUR FRIEND at this stage. Some parameters may be out of your control – like your budget, which clearly puts a cap on your tile’s price per square foot. Or your contractor’s requirement that you order lights from certain vendors or something like that. Plus, you may already know that you want only a certain color, or finish, or size.

Whatever parameters you’ve established, it’s helpful to use those to filter results when you’re searching online. Sites like Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Wayfair are becoming better and better about their search filters. USE THEM. This will save you time and keep you from going crazy.

One parameter we set for ourselves when shopping for floor tile was “no super small tiles like the patterned hex we laid in the master bathroom at the beach house.” As much as we love how that floor turned out – it was very, very, VERY time consuming to install compared to the other spaces where we used larger tiles.

Choosing larger tiles with interesting patterns instead of relying on smaller tiles isn’t a parameter that makes sense for everyone or every tile project – but it really helped our decision-making process when we imposed that limit on ourselves. And the good news is that we were still able to have some fun within that guideline. For instance, we discovered that The Tile Shop sells these long 4″ x 24″ porcelain tile planks in several hues (their display shows all one color being used together) but we realized it would be fun to use all three tones together. So we bought an equal amount of pink, white, and taupe tiles to create our own large-scale herringbone for one of the mudroom floors. This was us mocking it up on the store’s floor:

We also wanted extremely durable tile materials – porcelain and ceramic only. They’re both hardworking non-porous surfaces that are typically much easier to maintain than marble and cement tile (both of which are porous, so they can get stained and you need to worry more about sealing them, etc). So that material parameter immediately cut out a ton of higher maintenance (and higher budget) choices for us. So again, it really helped us focus on the best options for this project.

Lastly, Visualize Before You Finalize

By this point we often still have 10 million tabs open in our web browser with potential options. So after a couple of passes of nixing things we don’t feel strongly about, we usually find it helpful to visualize all of the pieces together. Believe me, you can go round and round liking 20 things and not knowing how they’ll fit together or how you’ll narrow it down for hours, clicking from browser screen to browser screen – and then you finally visually group them so you can see things together AND IT MAKES THE DECISION 100% EASIER!

The actual way that you choose to visualize them will vary – it may be a mood board of some sort (we use Photoshop) or you can just pin everything to a Pinterest folder to see them all together as a group. Heck, you can even print things out to make a collage and swap things in and out to see what combos you like most. However you approach it, just the exercise of viewing your top contenders together, and moving one thing in and pulling another thing out will help you see what works well together.

For instance, while we were sifting through tile options we kept a Photoshop file like this open – and we kept dragging different contenders in and out (this isn’t the final version below, btw – it’s what it looked like in the middle of the process). It was a quick way to evaluate what looked good together and what didn’t – and much easier than clicking from tab to tab in our browser, which can make your head spin and leave you feeling like you might never make a decision.

*Note: most of these tile choices will be linked for you later in the post*

As we got clearer and clearer on what we liked together, we moved on to creating the floor plan images that you saw earlier, where we just dragged selections into actual rooms on each side of the duplex. Not only can we see everything in one place, but we can also stay organized as to what is going where.

With two identical-but-mirrored floor plans, sometimes it’s hard to keep things straight, so this definitely helps us stay on top of where each tile or cabinet color (or door color) will go. Plus we have the added benefit of getting to see how everything will look all together on each side of the house.

So now that we’ve shared a little bit about our process for selecting items, we’ll tell you about the items we chose themselves!

Duplex Tile, Cabinetry, & Paint

We didn’t set out to create a “pink side” and a “blue side” but once we chose the two interior door colors, it started to naturally lean that way. But we still plan to inject both colors – along with mint and various neutrals and wood tones – throughout each side as we furnish and decorate. So, in the end, it won’t feel as monochromatic as this mood board suggests.

Here are the product links for you guys, as promised:

Mudroom floor in pink, white, and taupe

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

Kitchen backsplash 

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Kallarp

Interior doors: SW White Truffle in semi-gloss

Interior walls: SW Spare White in eggshell (both sides)

Interior trim: SW Extra White in semi-gloss (both sides)

Kitchen backsplash

Kitchen lower cabinets: Ikea Askersund

Interior doors:  SW Oyster Bay in semi-gloss

Mudroom floor

Master bathroom floor

Hall bathroom floor

The wood tone on both sides is just to represent the wood floors, which are oak hardwoods that we plan to sand down and stain with Minwax Provincial (the same stain we used for our own floors in Richmond).

You can hear more about how we chose the kitchen cabinetry in this week’s podcast, but we knew we wanted to do non-white cabinets on the lowers to keep things a little more unexpected and playful (if you can’t take a few fun risks at a beach house where people will only stay for a week, where can you?!). To stick to our tight kitchen budget, which is around 4-5K for each fully finished kitchen (including appliances), we wanted to work with the stock options at Ikea since we have been really happy with their cabinetry at the pink house. And we were psyched to find both a wood toned cabinet and a painted cabinet option that we loved. In one duplex kitchen we’re pairing this pink tile with these gray-turquoise flat front cabinets. We will probably do a few white uppers on each side too – maybe with some open shelving.

On the other side of the duplex in the other kitchen, instead of colorful cabinets, we’re pairing these beachy wood flat front cabinets with a similar tile, but in a blue colorway. We bought both tile choices from The Tile Bar and they look like cement tile, but they’re porcelain! Three cheers for easier maintenance and added durability.

Here’s a look at some of the other tiles that we purchased. Three of these are from Wayfair (top right, bottom right, and bottom left), since we had such good luck ordering tile from them for the pink house, and the one in the top left is from Home Depot. Both Home Depot and Lowe’s seem to be upping their tile game lately, so it was fun to find an option like this there! And all of this tile is porcelain – again: super durable – and it’s all specifically made for floors, since we don’t want to get anything too slick that’s not meant for that surface.

I know it all looks a little chaotic put together like that, but keep in mind that these are all going in separate rooms with a lot of “supporting players” – like white subway tile, very light gray walls, fluffy white towels, white vanities, and wood/neutral touches. So in the end they should add some fun and interest to each bathroom, but not be too overwhelming since they’re all going to be tempered by everything else in the room. Here’s hoping, anyway!

P.S. If you missed last week’s duplex video tour, go watch that because Sherry talks about a lot of plans we haven’t covered here – like the window we’re adding to each of the hall bathrooms – and the shelves we’re adding to each side of the master bedroom in front of the exposed brick chimneys. And just for comparison’s sake, you can check out how the pink house turned out. It feels a little more old/historic since there was more original stuff that we could save in that house. Sherry keeps saying that she thinks the duplex will feel like its playful younger sister with a beachier and slightly more colorful wardrobe. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”) appeared first on Young House Love.

Our Duplex Paint, Cabinetry, & Tile Choices (Let’s Just Say They’re Not “Safe”) published first on https://ssmattress.tumblr.com/