It’s a Christmas miracle! I finally took some photos of our new house this weekend. By “house” I mean the only room that is worthy of sharing on the internets. And by “new” I mean the house we moved into 9 months ago, which means that it really isn’t all that “new” anymore but calling it so excuses the fact that it’s still almost completely unfurnished.

Before you scroll further, you should take a peek at the before pics found here and here. Eh hem. So, yeah. This was one of the bigger parts of our remodel. We combined an ugly purple room with an ugly yellow room with an ugly yellow hallway to make one big master suite which now consists of a bedroom, walk-in closet and this here bathroom. I am very proud of this space as Jack and I designed it from scratch. Everything from the floorplan to the toilet handle to the tile grout was chosen by us. Big shout out to Dahlmeier Construction Services for their work on this room and our entire house.

Wanna take a lil’ tour with me?

Here is a photo I took from inside the shower. Those blue and white stripes reflected on the front of the tub are my shirt. This cute little tub was on the main floor bath when we bought the joint and may very well have been original from the 1920s. We had it refinished (sans the adorable little black feet) and moved it upstairs. One of my favorite things to do is take a bath, look out at the snowy woods, and read my mags.

Another tub shot. This window looks out into our backyard. The window treatments were custom made with fabric from a great site called Stone Textiles. The reclaimed wood tray along with all the wood shelving is also custom from a shop I found on ebay.

As you can see, this is our shower. No real commentary here other than 5% of my waking life is spent squeegeeing that glass. Rugs are from Burke Decor.

I’ll take credit for installing that walnut toilet seat, thank you very much! It has magic powers and closes very very slowly so you never have to hear the toilet seat slam shut. The print is by Sarah Intemann, vintage candle sticks from here and we don’t know who that young boy is but he watches us pee.

Here’s a lil’ shelving vignette to the side of our sink. It’s where I keep my makeup brushes, my foo foo juice (as my dad calls it) and our pet gator.

Awwwe shit. Here’s the custom basin/vanity that Jack and I designed! We used a chest from Crate and Barrel combined with a tile top, vessel sink and wall mount faucet. There are a lot of cheesy-ass vanities out there and this was the way to go fo’ shizzle. Lighting is from Schoolhouse Electric. I found the vintage toothbrush holder here which is perfect since it’s from the ’20s (when our house was built).

Here’s a shot from when you enter our room at the top of the steps. If/when I ever share pics of the rest of our house you will see that another major part of our remodel was replacing all doors and windows and adding all new trim/base/crown.

My back still hurts from lifting them in there so I hope you enjoy this photo thoroughly.

Well there you have it! One room down, twelve to go.

It’s Wednesday, homeslice. And that means we are one day closer to CHRISTMAS VACAY! Jack and I both have almost a full two weeks off for the holidizzles and I am pumped as hell.

Next Friday night we’re gonna kick off the break by hosting Jack’s fam at our pad for Christmas dinner and prezzies. Then we will head up to my parents’ cabin in ‘Sconie for a few days. And THEN we will be back home for a week.

One of the great things about living where we live is that every weekend feels like a cabin getaway. Over the four day Thanksgiving break, I left the house/yard ONCE to see a movie with my kid sis. The rest of the time was spent in my leggings by the fire or out in the yard with Fern and Rosy. This is the plan for Christmas as well. With the exception of hitting up the townie bar for pizza and running to the neighborhood Lunds, I plan to read mags in the bath, watch Homeland by the fire and just spend some quality ass time with Jack and the pups.

I’ve been seeing a lot of cabiny interiors and hippie homes on Pinterest lately and rounded up some of my faves. Some of these are a wee bit out there but they’re also a wee bit sweet as hell.

How awesome would it be to spend a weekend playing Banagrams and eating s’mores in this treehouse!?

via magical mystery tour bus

via tumblr

via lose ourselves to lose our minds 

via tara like

via black workshop

via from moon to moon

via design sponge

via themetapicture

Do you ever go to a drag queen Christmas cabaret on a Monday night and drink one too many vodka sodas and feel like you’d rather snooze away in a cozy corner all day instead of drag yourself outta bed and face the hustle and bustle of Manhattan? Me too!

I have had googley eyes over this first image below for months. It’s cozy and luxe and vintagey and modern and just all around wonderful. Thanks to Fern and Rosy we will never be able to have classic crisp white sheets in our master bedroom, but maybe we’ll incorporate some of those bad boys into the guest room.

There are so many great things going on in these spaces: the fur pillows, the wallpaper, the quilt, the headboards… it makes me wanna screw our decorating priorities and get to work on the bedrooms. But alas, our mudroom and family room are on the top of our list right now so I’ll just have to stash these purdy pics away and wait. And yes. Mudrooms deserve to be decorated in my book.

via coco + kelley

via markham roberts inc

via randomitus

via handcrafted in virginia

via selvedge

How was the weekend, party people? Mine gets a gold star DESPITE the fact that I spent 6 hours at the airport last night waiting for my delayed flight to NYC.

We had the most awesome-ist snow storm yesterday and spent the morning romping and sledding in our yard with the pups and our niece and nephew. It was hard to pack up and head to the airport, but here I am… last photoshoot of the year!

I know I have mentioned plenty-o-times the big beautiful Tom Dixon pendants we have in our (otherwise empty) living room. It is the perfect touch of glam for what will eventually be a mostly neutral, cozy room. I love the idea of adding a few fancy pieces here and there amidst an otherwise rustic, casual space. Below are some perfect pops of shine that would be easy to incorporate into your maxi pad.

Happy Monday – enjoy the snooooow!

eclectic candle, triple tiered pendant, french press, gold scale tumbler, copper sauce pan, gold coffee spoons

Awe yeeeah. Who doesn’t want a Father Rabbit? The kind that not only likes to cuddle up with you under pretty floral bedding but actually has a garden stocked with pretty floral bedding!

There are some websites that I like right off the bat. If I randomly land on a home page with nice clean photography, a good logo and a slew of well designed products… BAM! I start to sweat because I know I’m in for a solid ten minutes of happy internet perusing. Father Rabbit is one of those sites.

Below are all things I’d like Father Rabbit to pluck out of his garden and hop on over to our house with:

1) Acorn Doorstop: We need one of these bad boys for Jack’s office door as it always creepily closes on its own. And this one has an acorn on it which is perfect for us since throughout the entire Fall we had acorns landing on our house, driveway and heads.

2) Brown Vases: These would be perfect to deck out the small wood shelving in our guest bath with. Also perfect for mixing magical potions in that would bring us unlimited decorating funds.

3) Poppy Comforter: My Wish List for guest room bedding is like a mile long but this floral number is getting added anyway.

4) Kitchen Twine: It woulda been nice to have this on Thanksgiving so Jack didn’t need to tie up the turkey with my colorful craft string. Plus we have loads of empty shelving around our kitchen island and we need cute things to fill it with.

5) Fog Linen Cotton Blanket: Perfect to stack among other soft spare blankies at the end of our bed since we have a couple of pups that tend to hog all the covers.

6) Cleaning Products: In a perfect world, our mudroom would have a neat little box of glass polish and surface spray like this. But that’s probably a stretch even for an OCD perfectionist like myself. Plus, Windex is one of my all-time favorite things (our wood knife block thingy is stained blue around the bottom due to the amount of Windex I use on our kitchen counters).

There you have it folks! Father Rabbit is in New Zealand but DOES ship to the U.S., so you can buy all of your loved ones (eh hem, ME) some purdy goodies for Christmas!

Have a great weekend poptarts!

Hi. I’m up early. At about 5:30am I awoke with a jolt as I sensed that I had just slept through the entire night with my Merona mens sweatshirt on backwards! I then pried my tingling legs out from under a 70 lb goldendoodle (ROSY!) and rolled over to spoon my husband. Well guess what… in his place was yet another goldendoodle (FERN!)! After realizing Jack was still not home from work (SERIOUSLY) and frantically checking my phone to make sure he was OK, I was wide awake.

So what better way to spend my extra morning time than hollering at you all! Who’s ready to hear about some stuff I have my eye on for our new house!?

Over the past few weeks we have slowly been adding things to the pad. I am proud to say that once our vintage wall-mount toothbrush holder arrives, our master bath will be D-O-N-E!

The next room we’re gonna tackle is the fireplace/tv room. Our custom black and white tweed sectional finally arrived after 8 weeks, so the four of us now have somewhere to lay in a real pile and watch Tim and Eric. The plan is to get two smaller stool thingys (below) instead of a big ottoman (the room is small) to put our feets on. Also on the list are some stylish trays to eat Ortega tacos off of (below), some custom white shelving to surround the wall-mounted TV and a slew of random pillows, blankies and other doo-dads to style that shit up.

Other random things shown below include a killer table lamp for our living room, bedding for the guest room, checked towels for our kitchen and a cute soap dish for the guest bath (Santa, are you listening?).

Well, time to sign off and get my booty to werk. Have yerselves a good Thursday.

Oh and hey… To whomever is responsible for my husband having to pull an actual all-nighter: your ass best hope our paths don’t cross in a dark alley.

1) seville ottoman 2) fog linen tray 3) embroidered bed linens 4) table lamp 5) apothecary soap dish 6) checked woven towels

Wazzup homies. Looking for an alarm clock that gets you out of bed no matter what? Try a goldendoodle! I recommend the “Rosy” model if you like having four paws dig into your back and literally push you off the side of the bed. No need for a snooze button, you’ll be wide awake when it goes off.

Today we’re going to play a little game called “Carla Tells Us About Stuff She Wants and We Mail Her Money To Buy It”. Ready?

1  ) At some point, we are going to get a hanging chair. There’s just no question about it. We have the perfect corner in our 3 season porch to hang it from. Picture this rattan charmer with a sheepskin throw and a graphic pillow… fab-o, right? I could spend an entire breezy summer day dangling from that bitch reading magazines. Plus, my niece and nephew would go apeshit over it which would give me a good 20 minute break from playing “SURGERY!” (a very fun game, no doubt, where Jack and I operate on their bellies to remove bears, snakes, monkeys and other totally normal beings that would live inside a child’s body).

2 ) Well, we already have three of these amazeballs that hang in our living room. But because we have no damn furniture in that room, we never get to enjoy them. I included them because they add the perfect modern touch to the otherwise kinda rustic/farm house-y type look we’re going for.

3 ) I am a sucker for anything animal-y. This cutie is no longer for sale on OKL, but I wanna find something similar for our master bath. I found someone to make us some reclaimed wood shelving for our bathroom and wanna deck each shelf out with purdy candles + soaps (see below), plants and a deer like this one. Speaking of the master bath, you can expect to see pics of it somewhat soon. Everyone keeps asking to see pics, but you don’t wanna see pics of empty rooms, do you? Anyhoo stuff is slowly starting to arrive (wood toilet seat came yesterday!), so hopefully we will have at least one room finished and I can show you pics. I wish I had a nickel for every time I said ‘pics’.

4 ) Um, OK. Where do I start. It’s wallpaper. It has horses on it. It’s blue. I am sweating just typing about it. The plan is for this to go in our bedroom. And yes, I will name every horse on it.

5 ) We need like 67 blankies… for the leather chair in our entry, for our soon-to-arrive sectional, for the guest room, for our goldendoodle infested bed, etc. You can’t go wrong with windowpane plaid and anything that comes in navy blue is a winner in my book.

6 ) Since you guys are paying, I threw in a ridiculously overpriced side table just to see how much you love me. I love that this one is rustic and burly yet has clean modern lines.

7 ) Candles, candles everywhere! This particular one will go in our bathroom, but we need tons. I love having one lit in the guest bath when we have company over. And after we clean up dog barf on our newly refinished wood floors.

8 ) Last but not least, I love the sweet packaging of this bath soap. I LOVE BATHS. We refinished an old claw-foot tub that The Doughy Tards (previous owners) had neglected. It’s the perfect size for me and I love taking a soak and reading my mags. I wanna load up the shelf by the tub with lots of pretty soaps and candles which I already said.

If you’re still reading this, give yourself a gold star. And have a good Thirsty Thursday, yo!

1) hanging rattan chair 2) tom dixon copper shade lights 3) porcelain buck 4) collette wallpaper! 5) wool blanket 6) walnut stool 7) lucia candle 8) coconut milk oatmeal bath soak  

Awwwwe sheeeeet. Today we’re here to talk about our boy Granty Pants. Jack and Grant have been friends since kindergarten. Depending on which one you ask, one of them was sitting in the corner all alone on the first day of school (prolly Grant) and the other one went and offered to play building blocks (or something). Now I have the pleasure of werking with Grant on a daily basis at KNOCK. Granty Pants is the shit.

So lemme break it down for you. Grant just moved into his very own bachelor pad in the North Loop (look out, ladaaays!) and is in need of some furniture. Jack and I went and saw his place last weekend and it has lots-o-potential. It’s a great loft space with an industrial feel but aside from his ginormous Coca Cola jug full of change… it’s kinda empty.

He asked for my help finding a dining table. He likes mid-century modern (what guy doesn’t?) and wants the table to hold 4-6 people for a “dinner party” (code: poker night with my husband). I looked around a little this morning and found lots of great, affordable pieces on V&M. I love mixing old pieces (table, chairs, bar cart) with newer modern things (rug, bar glass). Throw in an industrial yet retro light fixture and a cute little gnome bottle opener and BAM! you got yerself a dining space for Granty Pants!

Have a good weekend, Poptarts!

mini chandelier, zebra british flag, little bottle opener, brass bar cart, rod iron dining chairs,  dining table, bar glass

Success, bitches! Up early twice in one week! Thursdays we always get woken up earlz by the garbage man. When you live out in the boondocks, you pay for private garbage pick up. We have a real long gravel driveway (which I’m sure I’ve mentioned before because I’m obsessed with it) so we can’t see or hear the road from our house (seriously, the tits). Therefore anytime a car/truck comes near, Fern goes apeshit and … there you go, we wake up early on Thursdays.

Last night I got drinkie poos with some coworkers. We were gabbing about Nate Berkus for a while because our company recently did a photoshoot with him for his line at Target (check it!). His approach to style and decorating is a good one. Only buy things that have meaning to you. Don’t just copy what you see in photos, or buy crap because it’s on clearance… tisk tisk. Buy it because YOU like it.

Relatedly, I realized not too long ago that the spaces I gravitate towards are always ones that look real. They don’t look like they could ever live in a catalogue and they don’t look like something you could replicate even if you tried your damnedest. Screw matching throw pillows and the on-trend paint colors… if you like a creepy clown cookie jar that you see at a garage sale, buy that shit and own it! Look at the gaudy angel painting in pic #2 below… I’d never buy something like that but it totally works in that room because it’s unique and probably means something to that family.

Here are some purdy places that really look one of a kind to me. The last photo makes me wanna take up sewing, so cute!

images via batixa

Good grief, I nearly forgot my WordPress login, it’s been so long. If I’m actually still on your radar and you’re reading this, bless your heart. If you’ve given up on Color Me Carla, SHAME SHAME I KNOW YOUR NAME! Er, actually I just know who your internet provider is.

So I blame my absence 100% on our Coyuchi bedding that I purchased a couple of months ago. It is the cat’s ass and Jack and I have found it nearly impossible to peel ourselves off those comfy sheets in the morning. But I really do miss putting together my little mood boards and writing to a collection of randoms every morning, so I’m gonna try to get better at the ol’ blog thang.

Last weekend, I finally made it down to the Junk Bonanza that happens twice a year south of the Cities. I took a day off werk, rented a U-Haul all by myself and hit that shit up with a wad of cash. Now I’ll admit, the place was absolutely loaded with lots of junk (hence the name), but after spending a good 6 hours circling each booth over and over, I was able to find a few gems. It’s definitely daunting to make bigger furniture purchases that you’re unable to try out at home and return if needed. It’s also a struggle having to text photos to yer hubby and check through your binder of measurements in the middle of a sea of people. But gimme a gold star, damnit, because I did it! I made out with several large pieces of furniture that Jack and I both love. We need to modify a few of them, but one of the 100% perfect pieces is a SICK ASS big farm table for our dining room. It is rustic and dramatic and just seriously exactly what Jack and I had been picturing for that cozy space.

We are hosting our first din din party in a couple of weeks and I’m so excited to mix up some fall cocktails and spend hours eating good food and shooting the shit with friends around our new table. We are also hosting Turkey Day and I’m super pumped to have a space that actually fits my family. No more bumping butts in a teeny kitchen and dining space like the last few years.

So we already bought the chandelier pictured below and have the table. Other than that, we have a ways to go but I can’t wait to slowly fill the space and make it cozy and inviting. Here’s my inspo board and hey! … here’s to me blogging again!

Oh – pillows in a dining room? Yes. They are for the two upholstered end chairs that me and the Man of the House will sit in.

1) william morris wallpaper 2) chandelier 3) greek key lumbar pillow 4) victorian love pillow 5) tulip dining chair 6) just an image i found and modified to look like our table 7) kosher salt 8) napkins