You go too far, Mindy.
I agree... beige BAD
At least with beige you can do anything you want with the soft decorations and it is pretty much not going to go wrong. However I do agree too much of it is a very bad idea.
Mal and I have also been having the house decoration thing trouble. We just got to the tiles. Floors were OK but now they want us to choose colours for the walls and do we want patterns and things that go around the wall and at what height and do we want the same in both bathrooms and then what about the kitchen and the questions just keep coming. I am getting exhausted just thinking about it!
Sometimes I just want to crawl into my sons bed and pretend that I am back in primary school or thereabouts!
Build your houseplan in The Sims before committing to anything in reality.
Also, seconding the BEIGE BAD! wisdom of Meg.
The bathroom floor here is white tiles, which is the stupidest colour ever, especially if you have any hair colour other than blonde.
Yeah we have the white tile thing in the bathroom at the moment too. It's terrible in the mornings, ahh bright light look down at the floor ahh bright light reflecting off the freaking tiles.
For the second house in a row.. I have WHITE benchtops in the kitchen. Now what brainiac thought that rental properties should have white benchtops hmmm? You only have to *think* about putting something down on them and they stain. It's almost enough to put a girl off her coffee and red wine.. almost.
Seriously. White benchtops BAD BAD BAD
Hey Meg - I'll see your white and I raise you some orange laminex. With lovely wood grain laminex cupboards.
lovely!
Zoe my MIL would think your kitchen is perfection in itself. She wanted to have bright orange corian benchtops, but the sales person saw the pleading looks on our faces and lied for us and told her that they were out of stock, but they had a lovely white one. Some people are just wasted in customer service.
I'm hoping that by blogging our building experience I can break the Johnson building curse. My MIL went into labour with TJ (BIL) on the day that they laid the first slab for their house. He is now 33. The house is still not finished. The kitchen is still not finished. We have only just convinced them that orange is not the new beige. I want my house to be finished in 6 months or so.
I have beige right through the house, front to back, back to front. above the picture rails and the ceiling is white. all woodwork re-japanned oregon (ie dark). it looks crisp, neutral, and any style or scheme you could possibly think of goes with it.
mind you, it took a long time to choose The Perfect Beige(TM). all beige is not created equal. there is beige and then there is beige.
beige & white on walls: perfect foil
beige & white in any other aspect (eg carpet, kitchen surfaces, furniture): looks cheap and/or flaccid
ah... actually I confess a lot of blues can look very wrong with beige. but then I also think blue can be a very wrong colour in interior decorating. blue is about oceans and skies and nature, and bringing it into a house usually looks really *un*natural.
I did some decorating on the weekend. Pinned up some funky print red thingo to replace the horrid bone and brown curtains. Covered yellow door with red cloth. Put a burgundy hanging over the doorway of the cellar. It looks cool. Particularly with the six eight-foot-tall stems of some plant that looks like a cross between bamboo and rattan.
The Stairs-of-Death are gonna be covered with funky green print thingo and fairy lights.
Dunno what to do about the Library though.
the Stairs-Of-Death(tm) should really have a lever, which when pulled, level the stairs into an unclimbable, desperation-filled slippery slope leading to a Horde-infested Pit Of Doom(tm) below...
hmmm.
so there already *is* a lever...
I did descend the Stairs-of-Death in the big pastic bag that contained Matt's new queen sized mattress, thus alowing him to become Lord MattressHammer once more.
It was quite painful and the Union Jack on the Receiving wall offered not cushioning at all.
We renamed the Pit-of-Doom the library. But it is mostly infested with Matt and whatever hangover is visiting him for the day.
I don't know if having half a bottle of Champagne for dinner last night was such a good idea, but the ONE glass of whatever crap red Matt had gave me a horrible hangover. It was almost as if someone perfected the art of bottling the hangover.
I was reminded of a homebrew Dave and the guys made once which gave an instant hangover no matter what volume was imbibed.
I asked Matt about it this morning.
h: What was that beer?
M: Satan's Horrible Beer of Death? It was a light ginger beer.
Just about to start a lager, so I might inadvertently redecorate the house with exploding bottles.
Mindy,
What's the name of your property again?
It's Craicenowen or something, right?
Well I was completely sans hangover today. But on the weekend..... you know it's good when it takes more than one drink to clear the hangover.. 3 days in a row!
Ms Speedy... what you can glimpse of your house through the blankets looks damn fine. But it suits the period. I approve.
How ever, I still vote against beige. How about a nice shade of black?
missmeg - black can be good but must be balanced out with another colour or some good furniture to break up the block of colour in some way, or it makes a room look bloody small! and somewhat intense. I mean, really intense, and sometimes you're not in the mood for it.
Aveline's loungeroom was black enamel with a red enamel ceiling dripping down the walls. sometimes it looked like a gothic bondage-mistress statement (surprise). sometimes it looked like student tryhard. it really depended on how grotty it was at the time, and how much of the bondage accoutrement was visible 
also, frankly, it's a bitch to keep clean.
ps - meg - did the hangovers from the weekend involve that FOUL Sunnyvale that Topsy bought?
you know, he's bought it before, and we've told him it's horrible. considering you can buy decent cask wine at the moment for about 3c (rounded up to 5c) these days because of the the wine glut, I have NO idea why he came out of the bottlo with that godforsaken crappe.
hey, harry, your redecorating wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that A Date has been formally arranged with The Lizard Girl?
Calm yourself Zoe.
The redecorating has been on the cards for freaking ages and I got around and did it finally last week end, ie pre-Lizard Woman.
The first place I planned to decorate back in January was of course my bedroom. It is still in a deplorably messy and plain way. It is a fair way yet from being a boudoir of any sort. It is a place where I sleep and for saying 'Christ I own a lot of crap!'
grrroan. I still haven't fixed my computer and it's guts are everywhere.
harry
you is a sooky la la
"you is a sooky la la"
Yes.
And then with the candles, fairy lights, pounding music and drunk of choice I become a "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR FUCKEN YEAH!!!"
I don't quite know what that is, but it's pretty loud.
Is that also by Ashlee Simpson?
"and drunk of choice"
Is there a mailing list you get these from? or is there enough choice on King Street?
my drunk of choice would have to be Bernard Black.
"Is that also by Ashlee Simpson?"
Nah. If it's by anyone it's by The Prodigy.
"and drunk of choice"
Proofreading is for cowards.
harry it's Craggaunowen. Easy to spell, easy to remember.
Please don't set up a whole other blog Mindy. I love perving on other people's house building epics, and anyway, not much would put me off the Theatre of Cruelty that is forbattle. I love this blog. It is beautiful.
Theatre of Cruelty?
wow, laura, and I thought we were playing nice!
You are! I meant it in a good way, that is, as a compliment.
How many of you are there anyway? Do you all know each other in real life? Or should I not be asking. It might ruin the ambience, mightn't it, might destroy the mystery and glamour...
that's it!
I knew there was a word which encapsulates forbattle...
glamour...
meg, we probably need t-shirts.
Proofreading is for cowards.
I'm glad you didn't say anything like that face to face with me. I would have been compelled to pour my shandy on your lap.
Tough words, eh? I bet you're scared.
"Tough words, eh? I bet you're scared."
Bring it on, home slice.
"I love perving on other people's house building epics,"
Laura, You might like the previous Mindy and D renovation story that involved a house they bought in Canberra.
The previous owners had a smokehouse in the backyard - a brick blockhouse type thing. Obviously it had to go.
Matt and I travelled down for a special demolition weekend. What's that game Jenga?, where you pull out the rods and the person who makes it fall over loses? We did that with sledgehammers and bricks. It was cool. When the final wall came down, nearly taking D and Matt's shins with it, our triumph of manliness was complete. If you were there you would have grown a beard, there was that much testosterone in the air. There was a Soviet era 'Worker's Paradise - Onward to the future' photo taken atop the rubble involving shirtless men and some tools.
Okay, so there were just a bunch of tools really.
The next demolition weekend was far less fun and involved us working like dogs. But that's okay because this was the house that D and mindy were going to live forever and raise their prodgeny in, that they sold a year later for a vast profit of which we saw a nice dinner of.
Not that I'm bitter.
But it was typical exploitation of the idealistic workers that is characteristic of the oppressive capitalist system.
The walls of the house that they build in Yass will be bathed in their blood, not mine, this time.
harry, how could you? How about Dave and I take you to lunch at Marigold when we are in town? Will that make it better.
Besides you had fun digging on your knees SAS style. Go on admit it.
Our latest disagreement is the colour of the kitchen. I have exercised my right as a woman to change my mind completely and now he wants some really crap two tone kitchen thing which is so not going to happen.
"Marigold"
Oh, okay. That sounds great.
"Besides you had fun digging on your knees SAS style. Go on admit it. "
Sure did! And I'm looking forward to this winter getting clolder so I can round around the backstreets with my pants wrapped around my head to ward off hypothermia.
Laura - we do know each other. Some more intimately than others, ahem. But they can reveal that at their leisure, or not.
Laura,
worldpeace is a truly wonderful woman but might accidently give you 37 times as much drugs as you probably should have. Then she will lunge at you, eyes blazing, thrust a seashell into your hand and pronouce "Here take this! IT WILL MAKE YOU MAD!". Which it promptly does. Then you turn into you best friend and/or gay and/or a person-just-about-to-die for a few hours.
You will then spend three hours looking at photos as friends try to get you to remember who you are. You will get this consistently wrong for the whole three hours much to the hilarity of those trying to help.
However, if you happen to fall into a big hole in your head by yourself and you call her, she will come round and make sure you don't eat the baygon.
Heart the size of a house, that worldpeace.
Strangely, the first memory I have of her is lungeing (again with the lungeing!) at me with a cry of "NIPPLE RINGS!" and twisting savagely. One of only 16 times I have squealed like a girl. We must have been at least on nodding terms for several months before this.
I recommend her. Ten out of ten.
thank you both for clearing that up.
(gentle reader, I shared a house with harry for a few years)
harry talks first impressions. WELL. The first time I met Harry (there was a room going in his house, we have mutual friends) he poured beer on me. yes. what a hoodlum.
Not as painful as nipple rings.. but waaaaaaay stickier. Good for your hair though.
Meg that is soooooooooooooo the edited version. Heh heh.
That's right, Mindy.
I *spilled* beer on her.
And it was in the 'Duck and Swan' down the road.
oh come on... maybe 29 times too much acid but 37, you're exaggerating...
aside from that, it's all true, I lunge at people - but it's a sign of affection, I'll have you know!
I would have to say it's a quality friend that one would hang out with in cyberspace as well as RL. I'm horribly fond of the lot of you, wee hordlings, she said with a patronising but mostly affectionate note in her voice.
that was so sappy, I'm going to have to plan my next attack now.
it's almost snowing out here in TMFP(tm) land. is anyone you know of deserving of snowballs down the underpants a la Snerg?
beware the lunge.
speedy... it's been sunny and warmish here (although a little windy) mwahahahaha
And this place means we all get to hang out even though you are in TMFP(tm) land and Mindy is in far-off lands. ahhh the magic of teh interweb
Mindy
we had our kitchen done over at the end of last year and we managed to do it in a style which is warm and a bit funky, but masculine enough to not make BB look like a knobhead when he spends a lot of time in it ( he's fond of making jam and preserves).
We used recycled wood and steel for the cupboard doors -- the wood makes a frame, and the steel is that slubbed stuff that they use for truck ramps, oiled so that it looks dark. It actually looks like black cast glass. The benchtops are a flecked grey laminatey stuff with an edging of wood, and there are feature bits, like the splashback, that are a dark red colourbond steel. There's other featured bits in mini-orb colourbond (ie the mini corrugated iron) of the same red. The walls are a light grey, the floorboards are sanded and then roughly painted grey with acrylic then varnished. It's all hard-wearing and childfriendly. Our builder managed to make a great space out of not much room at all. If you're interested , I'll blog some photos.
Ms Duck that would be fabbo. I'm fresh out of ideas.
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