Best Colour Blog and Dark Colour Inspiration!

I've been reading the best blog by Maria Killam called Color Me Happy. She's over at http://www.mariakillam.com/blog. I liken her to being a savant about interior colour as Paul Grilley is to Yoga. Knowing about 2 people know Paul Grilley, let's just say  he coined the term Yin Yoga and is basically the only person in the world who knows that bone structure is indicative of your potential physically, while everyone else is telling you to just work harder/wait longer and you'll touch your nose to your knees, etc. You won't. Well, I won't. Anyways, this is about a house right?

I'm going to spend the cash and hire Miss Maria for our new house so we don't hate our walls. I've painted before, and inevitably I blame Justin for EVERY mistake I make. He is no good at the stuff, and obviously I'm not, but it's a huge deal. We're going to have to paint our new *fab* cupboards in this post and I don't want to end up with purple white instead of white white, etc. (did it before, yup).

I'm loving this kitchen as inspiration

I'm also totally engrossed with using dark navy in the new house as per Leah Moss from apartment therapy's style here  http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/leah-richs-evolving-patina-house-tour-167165 and here is the room that inspires me the most.

The cool thing is we have a similar print to the one in the photo, by Charles Russel below.

                                        

I hated it forever, but after having it in our bathroom (I actually thought it would get ruined in there, but instead I ended up loving it!), I'm ready to take the step and upgrade it to a non-poop room! And now that I've learned from Maria that rooms with less windows, like our new home, actually do better with dark colours, I'm excited to go navy!! Here is our new house bathroom that is burgundy and thus proving Maria right! It's gorgeous, esp with the white wainscotting to offset it.

Ripping off a Country Kitchen Essence

Moving into an old home should come with a certain amount of moral responsiblity in my opinion. The responsibility should be to preserve some of the essence of that home's spirit when customizing it to be your own. I can't come up with a snigle reason why I feel this way, considering I was raised helping my parents move from house to house, building all new, adding on to an old house, and generally poo-pooing things of old due to their poor "R-values".
Either way, I love this kitchen, which others have posted as being the only good kitchen to have if you happen to inherit this moral responsibility with your circa 1900 house.

I love the hardwood floors in the kitchen, even though my new floors will look like this (exact depiction):

We are going to have to test for asbestos and the estimate I got from a removal expert was "worst case scenario is $9000 for a typical 150 sq ft kitchen with the maximum asbestos of 43% in your vinyl". EEK! So we might be doing the 70s vinyl style for a while.



I also love that they have changed the flooring around the cool old stove (background of above photo). And the white subway tile as the backsplash really works to keep the wood as the focal point. I have no idea where you get a white crazy hood fan, or the stove for that matter, but still, it's lovely.

I also love these sinks, but they can be so over-powering in a space, especially without the high-end faucets seen here (above) for contrast. And when we  paint our cupboards (below) white, they won't look anything like these pretty cupboards, so this is truly just inspiration at this point.