A Few New Things

This past weekend we may have gone on a bit of a shopping spree.  Among lots of goodies from the likes of Home Depot (you'll be seeing some of those fun things soon) we got a few beautiful additions to our home that we wanted to share.

First of all, we were tipped off that Pottery Barn gives out free color sample wheels each season.  The samples are all of the Benjamin Moore colors that Pottery Barn uses in their displays throughout the season.  Unfortunately they were out of their happy spring and summer colors, but were were able to pick up their new fall and winter colors.  We hope they will provide some inspiration in the months of decorating ahead of us and like we said, they were free!

Our trip to Pottery Barn was followed by a quick stop at Restoration Hardware.  We had no plans to buy anything, but it is just such a fun place to look around.  And dream.  But alas, we couldn't resist when we saw that they had cast metal letters on sale.  We splurged on this nine inch bronze finish "H" for $30 (originally $39).  It is a beautiful addition to our home and something we will have for a very long time.

How about that fan, huh?  That was the last fun thing that we picked up.  We weren't looking for one, but when we saw that Target had all of their fans on sale we thought it might be handy to have for next year.  We initially picked up your standard cheapo plastic fan for about $13, but on the way out we just happened to cross paths with a stack of these amazing Hunter fans!  This one was a full 50% off at just $25!  What a steal. We haven't even used it yet but we are loving the addition to our home!

We have a little decorating philosophy that in a house full of sensible (even if beautiful) wares, it is good to have just a couple of really interesting, high quality, luxurious items.  Its fun to own even just one thing from a place like Restoration Hardware or another store or designer that you really love, even if you can't afford to (or don't choose to) shop there regularly.  It's fun to have something that we feel is worthy of staying in our home for years and maybe even be passed down to our future children and grandchildren.

By the way, what do think of the photos?  They are kind of making us want to go back and redo all of the photos on all of our previous posts.  We've been using Google's Picassa photo editing software (you can get it for free here) but we just recently discovered all the fun things you can do with Picassa's free linkup to Picnik (you can also use Picnik for free here).  We might just have to do a post about editing pictures sometime soon!