Eating speculaas in February

What a title! And then you see that this blog entry is about the work I have been doing in my bedroom decorating and that title seems to make no sense. Right? Well, it will as I tell you a funny story...


I started working on an idea for our bedroom back in September of 2007. You can see the start of it here. It started with me making a patchwork quilt. I found one online that was rather expensive and realized I had similar fabrics in my quilt stash cupboard. It was so simple as it was just a block pattern of squares so I made one myself. One thing leads to another...

The above photo shows the nightstands which Jos sanded and I drybrushed as I had done with my chest of drawers. But I still felt it just did not look right. The iron headboard Jos made for us and my lamps just look too cold against the oatmeal colored walls.


I bought some linden green chalk paint to paint the wall behind the headboard but it turned out the old saying "You get what you pay for" is true. The paint was cheap and was awful. It left the wall looking stained and not giving the chalk look whatsoever. I was going to run over to the paint shop and buy a pot of Farrow and Ball to use then realized I still did have a liter of paint left from a terrible mistake made by a shop when we were painting our walls in the entrance hall and laundry room.


I wanted to use a color called Speculaas which is a type of Dutch cookie. I collect speculaas cookie molds and loved this warm dark beige color which is the color of the old molds. Jos thought it would be too dark and talked me into going one step lighter to a color called Februari. So I comprised and we went to a DIY store that had a sale on this paint. A very young girl mixed two paint colors for us as we used a warm white together with it and we came home and got started. We loved the color Februari so much we decided to paint a second wall in the hall the same color but did not have enough paint. There was another DIY store starting a sale and we thought just pop there for the extra liter of paint as we could use the coupon for it there.


Jos got home and immediately started to paint the second wall but to our shock, it was not the same color. He went back and they checked and told him it WAS the color Februari but what he got from the first shop was Speculaas. The man was really nice and said he could try remixing that liter for us at our own risk. He could not get it close enough he felt in the end so we just bought a new liter and also brought home this remixed version.


The remixed version has now been used in our bedroom. It is a combination of the two colors so I call it 'eating speculaas in February'. *grins* It has worked really well to bring out the beiges in the patchwork quilt.

I enjoyed spending time this week changing all the little items around until I had this room looking just as I want it. I only wish I could convince Jos to replace that old digital alarm clock. It is left from his bachelor days but it gets him to work on time so we can buy more paint. *grins*