This month is all about gratitude and I must say I’ve been feeling very grateful even though my house is in total chaos. Even though business is really busy. Even though I have a lot going on. I’ve definitely been finding a lot of peace living in the woods and a lot of space mentally, not just physically, but mentally, to have new feelings of appreciation move in on me, especially in this month of Thanksgiving and lots of reminders to be thankful.
I must say living in the country has been so freeing in a way. My mind is not so busy. I’m not always caught up in things and I can really take a second to step back and say, Wow, that’s cool. Wow, this is nice, It’s not just giving thanks for my surroundings. It’s also about giving thanks and having space to remember the people who support me and of course, my family.
Today I want to specifically shout out to the people who make this podcast a reality. We are a very small team. But I must say they are integral to me being successful for the past seven years in this medium. I just show up, record this stuff and send it off. Sometimes with very little notice. Sometimes with less than perfect audio. And my team makes me sound so good and makes me look so good. It’s the behind the scenes actually putting this up and giving me the strategy by telling me what I need to do.
I started this podcast journey as a big fan of Katherine Heller’s, who is currently my Podcast Producer and has been ever since the start. She’s so amazing. She runs the Podcast Shop and not only is she a dear friend, but she’s an amazing podcaster. Listening to her shows inspired me to want to do my own show so I hired her to produce my podcast so that all I had to do was talk about my favorite things.
And then in the past few years, I’ve had another helper come onto my team. So I hired the Savvy Podcast Agency, Jenny Suneson and her team are the ones who helped to grow us on YouTube, the ones who help us with our social media, the ones who put the shownotes out, because that was way too much for me. Jenny came into my life and has taken over all of that, and has given you guys those additional resources that you told me that you love each and every week.
I wanted to show them the gratitude I truly feel every week when I record this podcast, but I don’t always say it because saying it every week would get pretty redundant but I do want to let you guys know that this takes a team. It’s not a one woman show even though you guys are hearing one woman. There’s other brilliant women behind the scenes powering this little engine that could.
Without further ado, let me get to the questions that are in my mailbag.
This episode, we discuss…
[7:50] Do you have alternate ideas for kitchen flooring? (Annette)
Question:
Betsy, I was so happy to hear about your adventurous paint plan for your new home. Last year we had our central hallway painted in Benjamin Moore Wisteria, powder room in Benjamin Moore Summer Plum—we have loved and continue to love it every minute. My photos don’t do it justice. This year there will be some Benjamin Moore Exotic Purple coming to another room. PS–thank you for saving me–we repainted our great room in a white and you persuaded me to not make the ceiling a contrasting color/finish. Absolutely correct. We have our original one piece vinyl floor in a 10×12 kitchen with a FLOR rug I designed over it. We may replace the floor but we think tile is a hard surface underfoot for a kitchen. Do you have alternate ideas for kitchen flooring? We have white cabinets and black granite with a lot of other colors/texture in it.
Answer:
So you know typically I don’t handle renovation so I don’t typically pull out anybody’s flooring or change it or anything like that. Typically we’re working with what is there. So you know it sounds like you are set on pulling out the flooring versus just covering it with an additional covering. I love tile in the kitchen right now. I have hardwood in the kitchen and it is so frustrating because it gets wet quite a bit. Even if you weren’t worried about say the fridge leaking or the dishwasher leaking. My kids constantly like washing their hands, not using a towel and just shaking it and there’s water droplets everywhere. Somebody must have dropped something hot because there’s like a burn mark on the wood. So I love tile because these kinds of things won’t create imperfections, right. It’s kind of more durable and just looks better over time, in my opinion.
I know that hardwood is very popular. Now you could do something like a luxury vinyl plank. That appears to be hardwood but it’s much more durable. Well, I mean, I did vinyl in my basement, it didn’t look very expensive. But the flooring was uneven. And I wasn’t going to be able to use anything that wasn’t pliable. So it couldn’t be tile, it couldn’t be the luxury vinyl plank because it didn’t have any give. So we wound up putting it like this laminate type sheeting. But there’s not an endless variety of options. I always think tile is classic, I might go with larger format tiles than you have here, which do make it look a little bit dated, because you have the small four inch by four inch squares.
Right now, it seems like the floor rug is kind of meant to cover up the flooring, you’re kind of using such a huge rug for the space that it looks more like wall to wall carpeting than actually an area rug for this small circular pub table. So I would challenge that, it looks like you’re ashamed of something and trying to cover it up. And I’m glad to hear that you’re going to rip it out, if you feel that way. You just want to be mindful that I wouldn’t do anything white again, because the white with the white cabinets just looks off or a little bit dirty. And that’s how I feel about all white on white on white kitchens.
One of the whites is never going to look like a pure white because they’re never going to exactly match. And even if they do exactly match on the day that you install them, the sun is going to fade them in a different way. And typically the wood is going to yellow just a little bit meaning that they’re always going to look cream and the floor is going to look white and the marble countertops are going to be stark and it’s just never going to look clean and fresh. It’s going to look like you shopped at the white store. And they all kind of go together but are kind of different. I just hate white on white and white kitchens.
So I love that you have kind of this taupe countertop, it looks like a granite with a bullnose that’s a little bit brown and a little bit gray. So I feel like you could go in the direction of gray, or of brown for the flooring. Like I said, I don’t have a strong aversion to tile like you do. And I think you’ll find that the selection is limited. Especially because in some of your pictures, I can glimpse the other room and see that you do have wood floors. I don’t love wood floors touching other wood floors when they don’t match. And I really hate tile wood, you know tile that’s meant to look like wood. Those faux wood tiles touching real wood floors. I think it looks very mismatched. Very weird. Like you’re trying to be the same. But of course you’re not even the same in color, texture or material. There’s just a lot of misses for me.
[14:06] How do I select the right bedskirt? (Sue)
Question:
Hi! I’ve been looking for a velvet bed, and they all seem to be low profile like this one from Wayfair. While I like the look, I like to use the under bed space for storage. If I find a higher bed, are bed skirts out of style? I see these two kinds the most, from Pottery Barn, but will I look out of touch?
Answer:
All right. So yes, bed skirts are not ideal bed skirts do look dated. Bed skirts are problematic because they’re a little schlumpy, dumpy. They’re just not contemporary. And so in a contemporary space, I don’t tend to use them. Now if I’m designing in a traditional space or even a transitional space, they could work with that style quite well. But with this kind of contemporary bed that you’re showing me that has clean lines, it does have the tufting but it’s very linear, very sleek, I just worried that a bed skirt is going to look weird.
Now of course you understand that a low profile bed does not take a bed skirt. If you need a bed skirt, and I do think you absolutely need a bed skirt if you’ve got a metal bed frame, and I’ve just attached a headboard to it but don’t have anything like the actual base of the bed, right. So if you have a metal bed frame, you absolutely need a bed skirt. And if you do like to store a lot of junk under there, then you need a bed skirt, but it only works with certain types of beds, surrounds or bases. When selecting a bed skirt, you want to go with something that’s very minimal. I like them to be sleek. They have ones called Box pleat, you want to look for ones that are called tailored. You want to find ones that like to have maybe a simple break in the middle but otherwise are very flat.
I don’t like any bed skirts that have puckering, ruffles, ridges, anything that has any movement. Well I love grandma as much as the next gal. In fact, there’s a grandma in the room next to me who’s about to enjoy a Thanksgiving meal, but they can take their bed skirts with them when they leave because I hate the ruffle bed skirts, I don’t care what style you’re designing in, they are not okay. So as long as you leave the ruffles alone, as long as you pick a bed that requires a bed skirt, or are using a metal bed frame, which makes it very affordable. And with the metal bed frame, you can heighten the bed with the risers, you just want to make sure to get a longer bed skirt and they do have longer bed skirts, but you want to look for that in the description and the dimensions.
So that way it completely goes to the floor and covers all your storage bins and boxes. And let me just remind you Sue, even though I’m sure you remember, when we put storage under our bed according to feng shui the energy from what’s under our bed comes up through the mattress and impacts our sleep. So you want to make sure that the things that you’re storing under the bed have restful connotations, no back taxes, no high school homework. This is the perfect place for off-season clothes, or for skis, things that have either restful or positive connotations for you, rather than things that maybe are stressful or chaotic.
Speaking of chaotic, you want to make sure if you do have clothes under there that they’re folded nicely that if you are using those underbed shoe storage boxes that the shoes are partnered nicely because that chaos from just shoving stuff under there will also percolate and come up and disturb your sleep according to Feng Shui.
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