Jason's room. Both paint colours could be called sky blue; the walls are darker, and the ceiling's lighter. Dry, the colours don't clash as much as they did wet, but they still look weird together to my eye. Frank has painted the huge bricks on the fireplace taupe, but has left the mortar lines unpainted so they're white. The effect is unmistakably cartoonish and looks awful. These bricks are ungainly enough as it is (are they even bricks, or is it just some kind of plaster effect?) and there's no aesthetic value in calling attention to them. I don' t like the blue and the taupe together at all. The black shelves, the ornate supports, and the hood over the fireplace, as well as the bricked-in mouth of the fireplace, are all painted black. The shelves look really clunky and unappealing. Since the fireplace is not functional, Frank's placed three rounded rocks in front of the mouth, and a curving line of tea candles on the floor in front of it. On the wall beside the fireplace, there are three badly shaped white clouds, which I think (hope) are cut out of paper and stuck on the wall. In case you needed help placing this as sky blue, I guess. Or maybe they're sheep -- er, without heads, feet, or any identifying characteristics. I think they're clouds. So why aren't they on the ceiling? Beats me. The new white sofa (I believe it's IKEA's Klippan) is in the same place as the old one and has one grey, one black, and one sky blue pillow on it. The TV is on the new low entertainment centre, opposite. I like this one a lot better than the one Gen designed for her room. This one has two rows of open shelves, which offer a lot more storage, and control the clutter much better. The low entertainment centre is necessary to keep from blocking the windows, too. In front of the entertainment centre is a pair of black butterfly chairs with metal frames. Those might be from IKEA, too, but they're not in my catalogue. The new coffee table is a set of interlocking white and grey triangular plastic tables. I think I've seen these at IKEA, but I can't find them in the catalogue either. They're like the LACK tables cut in half diagonally.

The windows all have very thin white cotton curtains on them. There's a light-coloured area rug underneath the seating area. On the wall between the two windows opposite the fireplace is the framed black and white string art picture -- which, admittedly, looks better framed than I would have expected, but still annoys me because they ignored Jason's stuff to do it. Still, it's better than anything Laurie's come up with lately. In the far corner is the Arco-style floor lamp. There's a small table and a new table lamp beside the end of the sofa. In the dining area, the bar is placed in front of the window. In front of it is a little cluster of four black IKEA Förby stools, with a white one at the centre, acting as a table of sorts. Above the bar is a pendant fixture with the folding drum-shaped paper shade, suspended with a cord that runs messily from the ceiling down to the corner, behind the bar. Somewhere (we never get a distant enough look to tell which wall this is -- I think it must be the wall opposite the bar), they've hung six black and white photos in black frames. But they're hung in two columns of three, with the pictures in the right-hand column hung lower than the ones in the left for a staggered effect. I really dislike the way this looks. The pictures are also too far apart.