Colour me crazy.......

Earlier this week I wrote about my autumn project list, which includes a few areas of the house which could do with cosmetic makeovers.

Highest on the list is the dining room, which is sadly lacklustre and uninspiring.  It was last decorated *mumble mumble*  years ago.  It doesn't help that it's often the dumping ground for extraneous stuff as we only really use it when we have people come to dinner, so it's a bit wasted as a full-time dining room but that's what happens when you have too much space.

I was aiming for a gothicky look which didn't really come off, apart from the chandelier, of which more anon.

So I've been Pinteresting dining room ideas and had more or less settled on a classy, understated, monochrome colour scheme featuring a palette of greys. 

So far so boring.

But then.... serendipity.

A FB friend posted the link to a house currently for sale in Hastings and its interiors gave me pause for thought.....

It was clearly created by someone with real artistic flair, who isn't afraid of colour!  These days we're constantly exhorted to keep to neutrals to give our homes 'buyer appeal' but the more I thought about my safe colour choice for the dining room, the more I didn't like it.

I showed the colourful house to PP, and we 'oohed' and 'aahed' as successive fun, quirky rooms appeared... no two the same but all sharing an eclectic mix of colours which somehow worked together.  I'd already mentioned my grey idea to PP and she'd agreed, but now we were having second thoughts.  You could have knocked me down with a feather when PP advised me to throw caution to the winds and go for something less 'safe' and more fun.  After all... it's a room which is only used occasionally, so we could afford to do something rather more outré with it.

As a result, my Pinteresting has taken a different turn, down a more colourful scenic route and I already have already pinned a few 'off the wall' ideas.  Also, as it will have to be done on a budget, I've been Googling how to do stuff, like changing this....

To this......

Without going to the vast expense of replacing it.

Apparently it's doable... but tricky.  It will have to be 'upcycled' in situ, which means standing up a ladder for long periods of time, doing fiddly stuff.

And maths.

Lots of adding and taking away and times-ing and the thing with the tens and units.

Our chandelier has 56 prisms (those dangly teardrop things) and a grand total of 512 crystals (those things strung together)  Extensive Googling has revealed that I can buy the individual crystals, and the connecting rings, and make bespoke, multicolour strands in the exact configuration I need.

That's making 24 individual strands in three different lengths, using 512 crystals in a range of 8 different colours.

However, this sort of thing is right up my street.  My idea of heaven is to spend several hours sorting through my boxes of dozens of colours of silk ribbon, categorising them by shade and organising them into gripseal bags.  In my defence, at least my OCD has a creative bent.

So I'm totally up for the whole mulitcoloured crystal stringing thing, which I'm hoping will be the equivalent of adult colouring in terms of soothing and calming a troubled mind.

The bit I'm not so keen on is transforming the black glass 'skeleton' of the chandelier, into a thing of beauty and delight, with the use of gesso and acrylic paints.

Anyway....what could possibly go wrong?