I Will Plan My Life Around a Teapot

I believe your home is your haven.

Except I hate the word haven because it rhymes with maven and maven is absolutely ridiculous and is overused and is right up there with a myriad of other cliched terms that I hate hate hate and people keep using them anyway.

Your home is a quasi-reflection of you – not the full picture, mind you, but a piece of it. My home is a mixture of my sense of style, mixed with my paltry budget, mixed with hand-me-down pieces from family and friends. It doesn’t reflect my tastes, necessarily, but it kind of does. I mean, we do what we can with what we have, right? We can’t all live in showplace homes.

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I am very focused on the spaces around me. I want them to feel peaceful and I want my spaces to feel like mine. Perhaps that’s why one of the first things I did after the separation was to paint my living room. It’d been so long since I’d gotten to make a decision like that without having to consult anyone else in the process. It was tremendously liberating to browse paint chips and select a color – and with every inch of wall covered by a paint -laden roller, my home became more and more mine. This is a good thing because the house payment? Mine. Might as well like what I’m paying for, yes?

A fresh coat of paint is a great way to make an impact on the appearance of your home without too much of a monetary investment. And, unlike knocking out a wall, changing fixtures, etc., if you decide after painting that you’re just not in love with the new color, it’s fairly easy to remedy.

Those are my main criteria for home projects these days:

1) It can’t cost a fortune

2) It can’t be that difficult to do

So. You can see why I’m itching to paint something again. But what? I love my entry way color. My bedroom color. My laundry room. I could paint the girls’ rooms, but I want something in a shared space versus bedrooms.

My kitchen/dining room (they kinda blur together – they share a wall so if you paint one, you probably have to paint both) seemed the most logical answer.

And I’ve been stumped on the color.

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And then I bought this teapot.

I’m not saying I want a turquoise kitchen, but somehow? I want to complement this teapot and the other turquoise things I’m now convinced I need. Someday. When I’m less broke.

Why the beige?

That drove me to get this handy dandy iPhone app that picks complementary colors.

Whoa there, iPhone. That’s a whole lotta beige.

YUCK.

400+ words later, I get to the core of it: I need help picking a paint color for my kitchen.

Something bright. Something that will look nice with my teapot.

Lay it on me, HGTV watchers and would-be designers. Ideas…go.