At my house, books are important, but I hide the books that don’t match my house. I have closets, boxes, shelves, and steamer trunks full of brightly colored volumes. (If a book is white, black, silver, gold, gray, leopard-print or ivory, it is allowed to come out to play.) This is absolutely odd, I realize.  So imagine my delight to discover one weekend, while playing around with metallic spray paint, that hardback books can be sprayed silver, too.

I was inspired by my $$$ gold dictionary.

And by some paint and beloved volumes I had hanging around:

(The Rust-oleum is the chrome paint to end all others, but I wanted the books to look collected, not uniform, so I went with a few varying silver shades.)

I am so pleased that the titles show through.

I taped off the sides with blue painter’s tape so as to keep the pages paint-free. The entire project took 30 minutes, and I am so pleased.

Now, if your preferred decor is yellow, or blue, or hot pink, or red, and you have books that don’t match hiding in the closets, I urge you to grab a can of paint and set them free.

To me, books make a house feel like home. They help you tell your story.

Clearly, my story will require this line: she was a little nuts.

And don’t you LOVE that enormous leaf in the vase on my buffet? I hauled it home from the beach, inspired by my friend Mark Karp‘s amazing summer display, seen above in his Coronado condo. He is a trained professional, but this trick was easy to copy. The leaves are split-leaf philodendrons. In California, they’re enormous. In Arizona, they survive in shade, but not quite to this massive effect.

P.S. Do you like my greek key dresser? I made it myself one weekend. Here are my instructions and tricks.