citrus splash!

Let's play "free association."  Orangina--quick, what comes to mind?  For me, it's Daphne from "Frasier."  Or it was.  Now it's this poster, which came home with us a few months ago:

Tired of a wall of too-small photos in our old apartment's entryway, we opted to seek one big, bold piece to replace them.  After flipping numbly through lots of "Keep Calm and Carry On" and dentist's-office-appropriate scenes of the tropics, we found this and made a unanimous decision to give it a home.

Its appeal, aside from the cheerful color and quirky orange-peel umbrella, is that we knew its twin in college.  In my husband's beloved dorm hung a poster exactly like this one.  (Okay, for you literalists: it was made of different atoms; I know).  So when we found this copy, we knew it was a winner.  Simple, graphic art for me; memory-maker for him.

By the time of our move, our living room was in serious need of an edit, and this poster factors in.  First, let me show you why an edit was in order:

Whatever was going on here, it was too much.  Colors were out of sync with each other and, with the dining area in overblown art gallery mode (not happening again!), things were feeling chaotic.  There had been better days, as evidenced by this older shot:

I wanted, perhaps even needed, to return to a look that was less everywhere-at-once.  Thus, the Orangina poster became the basis for a new color scheme.  I started piling up every item I owned that corresponded to one of the colors in the poster.  Before long I had quite a pile--enough to "redo" my living room without buying anything!

The new look lived briefly at the old place, but here it's in full effect.  While the bookshelves (whose ROYGBIV arrangement got this blog started in the first place) used to be rainbowed...

...now they're showing their true new colors.  I didn't have many yellow books--though you gotta love the vintage Nancy Drew, right?--so I just flipped over some Folger Library editions of Shakespeare plays.  It's on my bucket list to read all of these.  So far I've read maybe five. 

The changes I've made haven't been drastic in terms of labor or cost.  Even so, the more controlled color scheme and the effort to eliminate distracting clutter have resulted in a room that feels nicer to live in.  I still have lots of things I want to do in here, and some things I've done already are bound to change, but I think this is a start in the right direction.