I recently wrote a post about the possibility of using the rest of the mural at the entrance to the breakfast room. Don’t worry. I have decided not to do it. But in that post, I casually mentioned that I was considering removing tile from the pantry backsplash.
I got some feedback from a few people who were surprised that I considered removing these tiles. After all, I painstakingly made these tiles myself using resin and alcohol inks. It was a painstaking process (but a lot of fun!), so I can understand that the idea of ​​wanting to remove them would be a surprise. I love these mosaics and I love being able to tell people, “I made these mosaics!” while I show you our house. It’s always fun to see people’s reactions.
But I still know that at some point in the future (maybe next year, or even towards the end of this year), I will delete them. And I know that as soon as I start working on our breakfast room, which is on my home goals list for this year, I’ll be even more eager to knock them out. Let me explain why.
We bought this house in August 2013. The first room I remodeled, tearing it down to the studs and rebuilding it, was the kitchen. I finished this room in 2014.
I originally painted the cabinets green (Sherwin Williams Derbyshire). And I did it even though I knew at that moment that green is not my colorbut I was trying to get out of my comfort zone and try something new.
The next room I remodeled was the hall bathroom. This was another major remodel and I finished it in July 2015.
In this room I went back to my favorite color (teal). I really loved this room, but this first version seems very safe to me. While I was very proud of this remodel and it was a huge improvement over the original bathroom, I was still struggling to find the look (or more specifically, the colors) that really caught my attention. I knew that teal was my favorite color, but beyond that, finding those other colors that matched my favorite color in a way that really caught my eye was still an ongoing process, and it was a process that I would struggle with for several years.
I’m skipping a lot of things, but one of the next things I finished was our front living room wall that I refer to as the entryway wall, which I finished in June 2016.
At this point, I was starting to realize that my rooms were lacking warm colors. As long as I stuck to greens and teals, I ended up with rooms that seemed very safe and pleasant to me, but I was starting to realize that they lacked that wow factor. So I started playing around with adding small doses of warm colors starting with these coral dining chairs. I think this was during that wayward year when I foolishly tried to convert our living room into a dining room. That whole experiment was a disaster, but I loved the design of hand-drawn branches and birds I did on the entryway wall.
And then in May 2017, I finished the breakfast nook.
Once again, I played it safe with the teal and green, and this time I tried adding some dark purple. At the time, that was my idea of ​​taking risks and getting out of my comfort zone. And once again, I ended up with a room that was nice, but once again, lacked that “wow” factor. Everything felt very safe.
And around that same time, in June 2017, I also finished repainting my kitchen cabinets in a medium teal color.
By then. At least I had learned my first big lesson in finding my style and my colors. It’s much more important to fill my home with colors I love than to try to force myself out of my comfort zone. You shouldn’t have to force yourself to like anything in your house. Your home should be a reflection of the things you already naturally love and that reflect who you are. And the teal has been my color for approximately two decades. Once I repainted my kitchen cabinets from green to teal, our house started to feel more like a home than a testing lab for decorating ideas.
But even then, he was still struggling to find the rest of my colors. Teal is great. Teal is my favorite color and I love all shades of teal, from medium to dark and everything in between. But I knew I couldn’t decorate an entire house in various shades of teal and be happy with it, even if is my favorite color. So I was still limping around and trying to figure it out.
Again I’m skipping some steps. But I finally went back to the entryway wall and redid it…again. At that point, I had gotten over my ridiculous idea of ​​trying to turn our living room into a dining room and had come to my senses, realizing that this room, this very obvious living room, had to be a living room and not a dining room. So I started with the entryway wall.
And although I was very confident in my decision to paint the wall teal, you can see that I was still trying to find the rest of my colors. I added a little green. I added a little purple. There is no surprise factor yet.
But I think this wall is what planted the idea of ​​pink and coral in me, although I didn’t consciously realize it at the time. I remember finding those bird prints (FREE!), and while deciding the order in which to hang them, I made a very conscious decision that the pinkish red bird had to be top and center. There was something about that pinkish red color with the teal that really caught my eye. At the time I still had no idea how much that small decision would influence my decorating decisions in the future.
I still didn’t understand in my conscious mind that the “wow” factor missing from my rooms was pink and coral, so I went about my business. And the next big project I did was the pantry, which I finished in January 2019.
And while I was building that room, painting the cabinets, and doing the backsplash tiles, the colors had already been decided for me. Obviously it had to be teal, green and purple. After all, those were the perfect complement to the excellent breakfast room he had completed just a couple of years earlier. It was a perfectly pretty pantry that matched my pretty breakfast room, but both lacked any kind of life and vitality.
And then came the decision that started to make things fall into place for me. I gave the hall bathroom a colorful makeover, painted the vanity a warm color and put up a teal shower curtain and some warm colors: pink, coral, orange.
When I finished that room, I finally had a room that seemed to have some life and vibrancy to it. And that’s when everything clicked for me. Yes, teal is my color. But it’s the addition of those warm colors that brings it to life. And those warm colors had to be in much larger doses than a small bird print hanging on the wall.
I finally realized that the colors I had been missing all along… my colors – They were those of the pink family. And once I finally allowed myself to wear pinks, I finally felt like I found my style and my color palette. The addition of pink did something in my mind that no other warm color could do.
So from 2013 to 2021, I struggled. Seven and a half years. But now I know my style. I know my colors. And I feel very confident in my colors. I know they’re not everyone’s cup of tea, but they’re perfect for me. These are the colors that make me feel comfortable and at home. Teal is my color. It has been for 20 years. But pink is also my color. And I love how the two work together. Teal is a safe, dark and fundamental color. Pink adds life and vitality.
If only I had learned what my colors were before remodeling the pantry and doing those tiles, maybe I would have added pink. And maybe now I wouldn’t consider redoing the backsplash there. But that’s often how life goes, right? I had a lot of fun making those tiles and have loved that pantry for the years it looks like now. But when I finally get the chance to redo our breakfast room, I want to have complete freedom to do whatever I want to refresh the pantry a bit too, and I don’t want to be limited by those tiles. Now that I know my colors, I want to be able to imagine both the dining room and the pantry in those colors.
And who knows? You may even decide that your pantry needs to look more like this…
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 upper that my husband Matt and I purchased in 2013. Matt has MS and can’t do physical work, so I do most of the house work myself. You can learn more about me here.
