A few weekends ago, I was getting the house ready for a little party I was having.  As I was rushing around trying to put away the kids’ toys and my power tools (isn’t that what you have to clean up before a party?), my husband pointed to one of our walls and said, “Should we deal with that?”

Um, yeah.  We had screwed some large eye bolts into the wall of our living room so that we could put up a makeshift safety gate when Emma began to be mobile.  We’ve since removed the gate and bolts and filled the holes.  Our wall paint had been in the hot garage for a few years and was no longer good, so I needed to go to a paint store across town to pick up an exact match.  I had been lazy and jut not gotten around to it, and then I became blind to the fact that I even needed to touch up the paint.

Luckily, my party was the next day, so I had time to run to the paint store and grab some paint.  Once I was back home, the problem wall was back under control in three minutes.

There are many things in my own home that I’ve turned I blind eye to, simply because I couldn’t immediately deal with them and then just got used to them being that way.  In our kitchen, there is an odd wattage light bulb that’s burned out, and I can’t decide if I should order that bulb from somewhere online or just replace them all with easier to find bulbs.  We replaced the light fixture on our front porch, and now we need to put new Hardy Board over the too big hole since our new fixture had a smaller footprint than the old one.  I need to spray a rust-proof sealer on my husband’s night stand (the old, metal typing cart), but I need to buy the spray sealer and keep forgetting to do so.

So, I’m making a list.  I need to go around room by room and look at things with a fresh perspective.  I don’t have to get all of these little things finished today, but I do need to have them written down so I don’t forget again.  Plus, I like crossing things off of lists, so when I do get around to fixing an issue, I’ll feel all accomplished and brilliant.

Have you turned a blind eye to little things in your house that need to be repaired or dealt with?  What are they?  Take a look around your house, and let us know what things should be on your list.  You are among “family” here, so don’t be shy!

One of my favorite new ways to draw color inspiration is to upload a gorgeous photo to the My Image Inspiration tool on the My Colortopia site.  Some sort of computer magic pulls a sample color palette from that photo, and you have a great place to start designing your room.

But what if you don’t even have an image from which to draw information?  What if you want to just see some color scheme ideas and see what moves you?

Enter Design Seeds, a beautiful website curated by designer and color forecaster Jessica Colaluca.  Each day, Jessica fills Design Seeds with gorgeous color palettes selected from photos that inspire her.  In return, we get to pour over beautiful color combinations that are relevant and foretasted as emerging color trends.  In other words, these are the colors that are going to be “in” for fashion, graphic and interior design.

Petaled Hues via Design Seeds

I was clued in to Design Seeds by Cindy of Blessed Design Studio, the great designer who was working on new graphics for my business card.  She asked me to take a browse around the site and see if I found any palettes that I loved.  The one I was immediately drawn to was Color Opera -it’s no secret that I like vivid hues.

Color Opera via Design Seeds

So, how do you apply this inspiration to interior design projects?  It’s easy to see how graphic artists could use these color schemes for their work, but it takes a little more digging on the site to find out a good way for we decor-obsessed people to use these color trends.

When browsing the site for color inspiration, you will see a section to the right of each palette that says “See Similar Colors.”  You can click on any one of these colors to see every other palette Jessica has put together using that particular color.  For example, if you’d love the darker teal in the below screen grab in your bedroom, you can select that color and see some other color scheme options using colors similar to that teal.

Have a color that you love and want to figure out what other colors would look great with it?  You can use Design Seeds for that, too. Click on “palette search” at the top of the page and you will come to a color value slider.  Move the Red, Green, and Blue sliders from side to side until you find your perfect color.  Click “Go get it!” and color palettes using that or a similar color will be displayed.

I think having a personal color expert at our finger tips is going to be very rewarding when looking for a color palette for a room.  There have been many times that I wanted a fresh perspective on color schemes using particular colors, and I am excited to have the opportunity to further explore the trends.

Have you been inspired by Design Seeds yet?