local find

Although I haven't had very good luck this summer with flea markets, I am still finding great stuff on Ebay and in local shops. Like this cute little table/shelf—not sure what to call it—that I found for $28 at an antique store in Milford, Pennsylvania.



It has shelves but it also has handles on top like a bed tray. It came with a simple coat of white and I'm using the leftover paint from my armoire repainting project earlier this year—a light green, a little yellowish but definitely not minty—what's called celery green, I think. It was the perfect color for the armoire as it picked up one of the secondary colors in the vintage fabric I used in the room. But, it also happens to pick up one of the stripe colors in the upstairs hallway runner. So, I'm going to use the piece right outside the bathroom to hold towels. The bathroom itself is too small to hold anything; it barely holds one person at a time :)



The color thing is a little interior design trick. Bring a secondary color from one room into the next room, even if the primary colors are very different, and everything flows together. Not in a formal decorated way but in a casual, unstudied way. For example, one of our bedrooms is mostly turquoise and lavender with the green armoire. That same green, picked up again in the hallway rug (and now in my new table), ties together the two spaces, even though the hallway is painted yellow. The room next door is painted a deep red called henna and it all works because of the striped rug that contains all those colors. I just bought a new shower curtain for the bathroom that also opens into this hallway and it has some yellow among the other colors. So, even though the walls are painted a light blue (called sea glass), the yellow picks up the yellow from the hallway. Easy peasy. And you thought you couldn't decorate without professional help!