Soft Furnishings and Hard Decisions

So we thought that we had the colour scheme sorted for the outside of the house. It turned out that we didn't.

The original fibrolite and concrete block was painted a lovely green-brown which blended with the surrounding land. We wanted to recreate that with the weatherboards but found out rather late that the warranty on the weatherboards would be invalidated if we chose a paint with a light reflective value (LRV) below 45.

We went back to the drawing board and eventually selected Resene Half Hillary, with an LRV just over 45. Apparently it's "a genteel well mannered ochre, a green and beige blend".

It seems apt given that Sir Edmund Hillary's house looked rather like ours anyway and I think we'll get used to it being so light.


The next hard decision was the curtains. We started looking at curtains only for the bedrooms where we'll need to block out the light when we move back in. We quickly realised that we needed to look at the other rooms too in order to develop a consistent theme. So we added in the living rooms in the main house and the granny flat.

The first fabrics that I picked out were all far too expensive and all of them needed to be imported from Europe with a delay of several months. I have a taste for the finer things in life obviously.

I started again and this is what we came up with - Free Range for Lark's bedroom and the other children's room (looking ahead), Urbis in Lime and Natural for the granny flat (one granny vetoed some more eccentric fabrics!) and Gloria and Fragrance respectively for the master bedroom and living room upstairs.



The bold patterns should give a hint of 1960s design without being overbearing. I still have the windows in the rumpus room and on the stairs to play with and might look for even more of a statement there.

And we need to decide whether to put blinds or curtains or nothing at all in the bathrooms. It all depends on how well our new neighbours can see the house...