FRIDAY FINDS

If you're hear to read about the garage pergola (like I promised you would in this space last Friday), I'm sorry. It's been a crazy week at work and it just didn't happen. But it will. Next week. I promise.

We're hosting Easter at our house. I like having Easter because it's a low-pressure holiday. (Edited: Previously I launched into gripe session about a company's screw up here, but they fixed it and made it right so I thought it was only fair to remove that bit.)

I'll make these scalloped potatoes again. They were fantastic last year and I'm so glad I thought to pin the recipe so I could find it again.

I think I'll try to do some flower arranging myself for table decorations. I'm a pretty sad flower arranger, but there is some great inspiration here.

Once again, the Canadians are kicking some American butt when it comes to design shows. Sarah Richardson's newest show "Sarah's Rental Cottage" airs next week in the great white north. I'm hoping I'll be able to catch it through the Hola IP extension because it could take years to end up on U.S. television. Of everything Sarah has done, I love her cottage the most so I'm very excited about this.

Here's a great guide to finding and surviving plant sales.

And here's a great guide to home essentials from Lauren Liess. Some inexpensive things, some luxury items and a lot of great stuff in between.

And lastly, my beloved Wisconsin Badgers take on the Kentucky whatevers Saturday night in the Final Four. If there was ever a team to love it's this group of fun-loving team players. I hope they can play the game of their lives to get past Kentucky.

Have an excellent weekend everyone!

How to binge-watch Sarah Richardson shows in the U.S. + new paint colors to love

It has been completely cruddy here this week. So much so that I haven't really had the will to go outside and cut flowers for The Garden Appreciation Society, so that will wait for another week. How long do you think we can keep this thing going? It's getting difficult to be creative with fading flowers.

Anyway, I leave you today, with my tip for the day. You probably know that I am a Sarah Richardson addict. I pretty much love everything she does. OK, not everything (I'm still a little flabbergasted by the lavender living room in Sarah's House 4) but damn near everything. She is my win-the-lottery interior designer.

Have you noticed that there are some great Canadian blogs out there? Well, there are. And now I know why a lot of them seem to be a cut above some blogs from the States. Canadians can watch Sarah Richardson whenever they want. There are episodes of almost all her shows on the Canadian HGTV website www.hgtv.ca. And if you are in the United States and you go to that website, you will get a message saying that the content is not available in your area. I mean, really, the nerve.

But alas I have found away around that pesky message. It is an application for your computer called Hola Unblocker. Basically, you install it and, in Google Chrome at least, a little icon shows up in your tool bar. When you go to a site that is blocked, you just go up to that icon and select a different country for your IP address to flow through. It seems to know the best one, so it will likely pick Canada for you, but if not you just pick Canada. The Hola icon will change to the country flag you have selected and
voila! You have Sarah Richardson on your computer.

The quality of the video is lacking a little bit, but who am I to get picky. I've been doing marathon sessions of all things Sarah. One of the best things I've found was a Design Inc. episode when they redid the Design Inc. offices. So fun.

So there's my tip for you. Enjoy a bit of binge watching this weekend!

Oh, and one more tip. Benjamin Moore has a new color collection out called the Williamsburg color collection. I heard that name and immediately thought, oh, that's not for me. I think of Williamsburg and my first thought is a dusty blue found on scratchy couches. But this is thoroughly modern group of colors and there are so many good ones in there. I'm not sure how it's possible that there can be more paint colors invented, but who am I to care when these are so good.

I'm actually already painting something in Cornwallis Red, which is a super orangey red (or reddish-orange, I'm not sure which) that I'm way into right now. I am loving this color. It's a little side table for the living room. You can see it with one coat on in this photo (with the bright orange chairs from the other day).

I'm also loving Galt Blue, which I think is similar but lighter than the ever popular Wythe Blue. I'm actually considering this for the walls in the back room because the test of Wythe Blue seemed very dark.

And check out Parrot Green. I love it because it's not too bright but still fresh without going too avocado.

There are also a whole bunch of great grays. I know, just what we all needed: more grays to further complicate our search for the perfect gray. This one, called Bruton White (why can't we call grays gray instead of blue, white or black?) is a really pretty looking light gray.

So there's one more thing to check out this weekend.

Things I learned from Sarah

It's no secret that I have a massive girl crush on Sarah Richardson. I try not to talk about it too much here because I hate to just show you pretty pictures of rooms that other people have created. There are a lot of blogs that do that very well and this one will never been one of them.

But I have to say that there are very few television designers who I feel like I actually learn something from. Sarah Richardson is an exception. Maybe it's because she works with her "sidekick" (I bet he hates that term) Tommy Smythe and the two of them talk about why they are making the decisions they make, but I always pick up a tip or two when watching one of her shows.

HGTV (which apparently has some kind of issue with Sarah because it takes forever to show her series and then they either play them at odd times or burn them off in a weekend) had a mini Sarah 101 marathon yesterday (starting at 7 a.m. CST) so I was thrilled to come home to a DVR filled with Sarah.

Here are a few of the little tips that I picked up from watching some of the shows.

In a very small condo renovation she bought Ikea stock cabinets (almost every kitchen she does is Ikea and they all look amazing) but dressed them up by putting frame fillets (like you would use when framing art) on shaker cabinets. How sharp does that look? I don't know anyone who would walk into a kitchen that looked like that think those were Ikea cabinets. And you have to love that backsplash.

Sarah does the most amazing bathrooms. I think the quality I appreciate most about her design is her ability to combine high and low in a space. She splurges on some items but saves on something else. I can't tell you how many bathrooms I've seen her create where she uses van ordinaire tile from a big box store and combines it in a way that looks totally high end and so cool. Check out this striped shower. Seriously, who comes up with that? And every bit of tile came from Lowe's. Some day we have to deal with the atrocity that is our pink downstairs bathroom and I aspire to do it on a small budget and try to do something creative like this with tile.

 Sarah and Tommy might have coined the phrase "Jumping-off point." They almost always start with one element in a room and everything else flows from there. That element changes depending on the room, so they never follow other rules that you might have heard such as starting with the rug or the couch or whatever. Often they start with fabric and my favorite scenes are always the ones in the fabric store where they pull out dozens of fabrics and narrow them down. They do an amazing job of combining patterns and colors seemingly effortlessly.

For this bachelor's master bedroom they started with the white colorway of Schumachers Chiang Mai Dragon (a rather unlikely choice for a masculine room but I love it, and as Sarah said, the idea is that he won't be a bachelor forever). Every time I start thinking that that fabric is overdone and just ubiquitous to the point of saturation, I see it and my heart goes pitter patter and I know I must have it. What amazed me about this room is how they combined other fabrics with it. The celtic gear-type fabric on the chair (Schumacher Conundrum) is an obvious fit (and I'd combine it with the dragon fabric in a heartbeat if it weren't $200 a yard!), but never in a million years would I have thought that plaid would go with that fabric. The curtain fabric was $5.99 a yard—that's Canadian dollars though, so that's like $5.87 a yard here ;)—which nicely balanced the cost of the expensive Schumacher fabrics. Of course they needed something like 56 yards of drapery fabric so it better be cheap!

There's no denying, there is a LOT of pattern in this room, but it works for me. One other interesting note: even though there was a large empty wall that the bed could have gone on (to the right of this picture, I think), they put it on a wall with windows, which isn't the obvious choice in my mind. Sarah said that she believes the best place for a bed is on the wall across from where you walk into the room. Interestingly I think that is really bad feng shui, but I'm not positive.

And lastly, she did a contemporary country kitchen for her BFF. Of course, the island is the star here. Putting reclaimed barn wood on an island is hardly a new idea, but I love how she put it in a chevron-type pattern and used the stained boards to break it up (really she did that to keep the raw edges of the barn wood from showing but it's a great effect). I'm not loving a few things in this room including the floor color (she refinished them so I think going a little darker might have been more to my liking), the bathtub curtain rod light fixture on the ceiling and the spacing of the two lanterns over the round dining table. But that barn wood. Ahhhhh.

All photos from HGTV Canada

So what do you think of those rooms? Do you watch any design shows you actually learn something from or is it just about the eye candy?

If you're loving Sarah's take on big-box finds, make sure you check out her web series in which she decorates a house entirely with finds from Lowe's.

OK, enough with the pretty pictures. We'll be back to my regular old house soon!