My favorite seat in the house

We brought home some cut flowers from the Dahlia Festival so I took a few photos of the bouquets I made. This is my favorite seat in the house.
 
It is in our parlor with a view out the picture window. I hate pink, yet somehow all the Victorian things I have end up being pink due to previous owners. One day I can afford new wallpaper and upholstery fabric, but for now I'll suffer through the pepto in my wonderful new house where my Eastlake chair that I have had nearly 15 years is finally at home.  I bought it when I was renting a bungalow in Sellwood, took it across country with me to NY where it lived in a 4th story Brownstone stripped of nearly all decoration, next a postwar studio in Spanish Harlem, then back to Portland where it lived in a corner of the Living Room of The Laburnum Bungalow.

It looks so happy here. I have been waiting all this time to reupholster it because my cat Mortimer likes to scale the back of it and pulls the gimp out.  You'll notice the Eastlake side chair opposite my arm chair.  I found it on craigslist for $50 shortly after we moved in and had to have it.  Why am I not surprised that it is also pink?  I'll eventually reupholster them in like fabrics, unless I come across a suite fo Eastlake parlor furniture in my price range.  In that case these two non-matching chairs may be divided up among other rooms in the house.
Dahlias are one of my new favorite flowers!

 Iplaced another bouquet of dahlias in the adjoining Drawing Room.  This room has become a home for most of the art deco furniture we have.  Look at all that space for our davenport! It's no longer squished up between a colonnade and a fireplace.

 A better view of this arrangement.  That vase is a celery vase which was a wedding gift for my great, great grandparents married in the late 1800s (the letter with the exact date is surely packed away in a box right now.)

 A view of the stairwell.   

You can see that I moved the copper cache pots with rubber plants from the front parlor window pack along the paneled wall. I don't think rubber plants need that much light and they were looking a little weird.  I'd like to find a console table to put there.  I'm having a hard find time finding something perfect though because 1) We're kinda broke 2) I want something that can pop on that wall while at the same time not cover up that gorgeous paneling. I think something with a metal base and a marble top would be a nice juxtaposition.  At the very least it needs to be a painted wood.  I just found this table in a catalog today which might work.
 
I put some masking tape on the floor to mark how big it would be and see how that feels. Well, that and save up some money.

I also recently arranged the upper half of my grandma's secretary.  In the old house I kept my Nancy Drews in here, but decided to change it up in the new Parlor.  To start off with I decided to line the back of the bookshelves with a decorative paper. After lots of searching the best paper I could find for now was a pretty Florentine paper in blue. Blue was my grandma's favorite color and I'm anticipating doing this room in turquoise (drawing from the Povey window in the entry) and peacock blues.
So here it is before:

And here it is after. All these books are tea related (I have visions of tea parties in my new Parlor.) The collection of Mexican, hand painted, ceramic animals I inherited from my grandma. A few photos of her, including one with her and me with the secretary in the background, and a doll my uncle made for me when I was a child.I can't decided if I should have the paper extend all the way to the corners or not.  I bought enough sheets of paper to do that, I just didn't want to fuss with lining them up perfectly.  Right now this is attached with scotch tape and the seam hits right at the middle shelf.

The Dia de Los Muertos couple  and the folk art painting of a mission are souvenirs of mine which I thought compliment her collection.