Author Archives: HomeToCottage.com
Shades of Orange
Yesterday, we experienced the first day, in several days, where the outdoor temperature got above 30 degrees!
Whoo hoo! After a week of the temperature hovering around 0, (yep, that’s ZERO for you southern readers) 30 feels balmy! So I celebrated by bundling up and going for a walk around the neighborhood. It felt so good.
Feeling inspired by the fresh air and the color orange, I snapped a few pictures to share with you.
I think I’m inspired by the color orange today, because yesterday I watched a P. Allen Smith’s Garden Home episode where he showed his painted cheery orange furniture on the porch of his beautiful house he built in Arkansas. (he was showing how he planted the tulips in shades of orange to coordinate with the porch furniture in front of his house he calls Mossy Mountain Farm… so beautiful)
Well you can hardly just call it a house, it’s much more than that. And the attention to detail to the house, interiors, land, gardens, gates… oh my the list goes on… amazing. Anyway, he had the porch furniture painted a cheery orange color, and that has been bouncing around in my head for the last day. Read the rest of this entry
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January is a Great Time to Plant Here!
Aha! Gotcha, right?
No, I didn’t move to the south… Yup, I’m still up here in the frigid, snow covered tundra of the Midwest. Ok, so maybe not exactly tundra… we have lots of beautiful hills, trees, rivers and lakes, but we did get our first snowfall back in November, before Thanksgiving. I do actually love how it looks outside. The beautiful white snow blanketing the landscape is gorgeous. But it is cold. You people in the south don’t even understand how cold it can be. I guarantee there will be no planting outside up here for several months. The ground is totally frozen and hard as a piece of granite. And right about now I think most of us up here are craving a little warmth.
Try to picture this with me right now…
Imagine yourself sitting in the garden on a balmy Spring day. The sun’s rays warming you… Can you feel it, can you almost smell the sweet soil beneath your feet? No? It is a little hard to remember right now, as the thermometer plummets below zero, that it can, and will one day again, be warm outside… Read the rest of this entry
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Breakfast Room Before and After, Part 1
We recently sold our former house, and moved into a 100 year old home.
Parts of this antique house ‘looked’ pretty decent when we bought it, (did your mother ever tell you ‘looks can be deceiving’?) Read the rest of this entry
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What Do You Know (and Think) About the 2015 Pantone Color of the Year?
You’ve probably already seen the Pantone color of the year.
Maybe you’ve also heard some of the hoopla about that color choice.
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Here’s the #1 Tip to Making an Arrangement Look Great
The key to make a great looking sideboard arrangement, or any arrangement for that matter, I think, is balance. There are tons of other rules of arranging to be observed… and broken, but balance is really key.
Let’s run through the steps to make an arrangement on this sideboard and see just what balance does to make it look visually appealing:
Here is the built-in sideboard, original to our newly renovated 100 year old house. (In a future post, I’ll show you all the details about it’s transformation with the before and after pics, but for now, this is about the ‘how-to’ on arranging)
First thing I start with, Read the rest of this entry
