Rhonda - I need your help! Wait...is there even a Rhonda that reads this blog? Probably not. Maybe I should start over. Readers - I need your help! I have a small sitch I can't decide on and I desperately need your opinions. It's very important. Crucial. A make or break it decision.
I don't know what color the mirror in the beach house dining room should be.
See? I told you this was important.
Lemme break it down for you. Back in June when my alma mater was closing its doors, I spent a weekend with a few friends cleaning out our sorority house. A lot of stuff got thrown away, others got categorized for a yard sale. And since we were doing the hard work, that meant that we got first dibs on everything. That's fair, right? So I swiped a nice big mirror from the living room. I knew it'd come in handy eventually.
The mirrror was originally bright, gaudy gold but at some point, someone (probably a sorority sister of mine) spray painted it black. The black was definitely an improvement to the house's decor, but it was kinda a shoddy paint job. Whoever painted it didn't do a good job giving it an even coat of spray paint, and their tape job must not have been very good because there is still lots of gold peaking out around the edges. I took the mirror anyway because I knew I could give it my own paint job and it would look just fine.
My dad taped off the mirror this weekend (I've gotten pretty bad at handing out orders in the shop lately - I can't do it all myself!) and so it's all set and ready to be painted. Going into it, I assumed I'd just give it another coat of black. But then I thought, since I'm re-painting the whole thing anyway (as opposed to just doing touch-ups), I'm not limited to stick with black. That just opens this project up to a whole new world of possibilities.
Before you start throwing out color options, let's look at everything else that will be near the mirror. We decided on the dining room in the beach house. Here's how it looked the last time I saw it.
The walls are Tony Taupe by Sherwin Williams. When we picked the color, we were looking for something in the greige family (grey + beige = greige). Admittedly, this looks more straight up khaki than I thought it would. There's not much grey in it at all. In the picture above, it's the wall on the far left (just past the stairs) where the mirror will hang. That wall also has the horizontal paneling.
The mirror will hang over this red buffet that I refinished.
The mirror is rectangle in shape, and the long side is slightly longer than the buffet is wide. That means we'll probably hang it vertically, so it will be taller than it is wide (portrait orientation, if you will). Oh, and the mirror is not super fancy and overly ornate, but its not just plain straight lines either. It has just a bit of detail on it, but not enough to make it look out of place in our casual beach house. (I forgot to take a pic of the mirror.)
There's a good chance we'll put this lamp (from this old post) on the buffet.
On the hardwood floors will be this rug. It's red with both grey and cream stripes. It's no longer online so this is just a picture I took with my phone when we bought it. (Side note - see that clearance tag? Yea, that's how we roll.)
And on that rug will be this table from World Market, except ours will have benches on both sides and the chairs at just the two ends of the table. It's a pretty neutral color in person, kind of a natural wood color.
I really wanted a long light fixture (something like this, or this) that would mimic the length of the table, but alas, those light fixtures do not come in our budget. So instead, we'll have this light fixture from Home Depot hanging above the table.
I really hope it ends up looking ok. I didn't get to see it in person because they didn't have it in the store, just online. Fingers crossed it works with the room!
The window treatments will be made out of a linen-y pillow ticking fabric. The background is almost the exact same shade as the walls and the stripes are a light black. It looks similar to this, except black instead of blue. The curtains will be plain drapes and will hopefully blend in with the wall more than standing out.
The only other thing that I know for sure will be in this room is the chocolate cake painting that Beth did.
So that's the room. Not much black in it (really there's none since the stripe in the fabric is kinda muted) which is why I'm second guessing painting the mirror that color. But what color do I go with? I could do red like the buffet, but I think that will be too much. White will stand out and possibly clash with the cream in the rug, chandelier, and painting. Right now I'm kinda leaning towards trying out a grey color, but will that look weird on the wall color? I could rub on some black glaze to accent the details in the mirror frame. Any other suggestions? I'll probably try to get this done over the upcoming weekend, so speak up now!