A Beach Cottage Exclusive! A Visitor from California

 

  

 Howdy Beach Cottage Readers!  

You may be wondering if your internet cable hooked up with the Lucky Country Australia and the Beach Cottage today? 

 Well you have but there's a bit of a twist, a cowgirl one! 

 

 I am Maria, from Dreamy Whites and I am guest posting over here at ABeachCottage today while Sarah get's those eyes of hers rested and her little 350 butt into that white vintagey bed of hers.

I came across Sarah a while ago after stumbling upon her blog one day, loving just about everything about it…the white, the vintage things, the thrifting, the moving Down Under from England story, the old laid-back cottage on the beaches… oh and boy the way she writes..

As I read all about her it seems we had a lot in common…we both have more than a couple of kids, we both love to decorate with white, we both have travelled with our families and lived away from home, we both love the beach and we've both lived by the beach, we both live with white with stinky boys around and survive and we both love a mix of different styles…vintage beach, French, country farmhouse and shabby…and we mix that up with real living in a real working home, with a budget and all that family life stuff going on all the time

 

 

So anyway, one of the reasons I like visiting Sarah is the whole beach vintage coastal vibe going on… so I thought I'd show you some recent fluffing in my home to add a coastal breeze, to beach it up a little bit for this exclusive! 

 Yes my ranch is white too, with pops of colour and I love how a few shells work alongside the color from the lovely spring flowers, the brights from the old glass bottles and most importantly who wouldn't love seashells and cowboy boots, huh?

 

 

So seeing as white is pretty big for both of us lol, Sarah thought you all might like us all to have a little chat about living with white and how that works.

So here goes… I've been living with it since the 90's and love everything about it, taking the lead from Rachel Ashwell, I loved using an all white palette to brighten up my home just like Sarah has done in her little cottage…but when I moved to a modular house with tall ceilings, open plan and lots of light (a bit different from an old cottage!) something was missing and it seemed things were getting lost in an all-white space, I was having a very hard time pulling off the white, all the other houses I had lived in needed white for light but this so wasn't the case here, light was flooding in all over the place and what we needed was some color!

 

 

And then I read an article about Yasmine McGgrane owner of Maison Reve in Country Home and I was so inspired by her home and gained a tonne of inspiration from that article…so much so that I took her lead and decided what my place needed with all the white was some pops of colour and over time gradually added to the all-white scheme.  

And it surely did the trick.

 

 

But what about keeping it all clean, the kids, the animals…cowboy husbands?  

Well, to be honest, I love having 5 kids and  living with white and wouldn't have it any other way.  My kids do all the same things every other kid does…there's nothing I've found that Oxiclean won't budge lol!  Ok so we have a few house rules…we eat at the table, the kids help with chores, oh and there's a no cowboy boot policy in the house…but that's about it, living with white is a whole lot easier than you might think!

 

 

So I'm hoping you enjoyed having me here as a guest today at A Beach Cottage, I sure had a good time!  

A little birdie told me that Sarah's coming to California soon so maybe a Dreamy Whites Beach Cottage Conference is not so far off the cards…

Thanks for having me…

Maria

 

 { from Sarah : and girls if you're anything near as nosy as me you can see more of the stuff I have been stalking talking to Maria about behind the scenes right here and yep there is more eye candy to faint over! and yep during the course of this escapade I have thrown everything in my home out for Council Clean Up and am starting again ;-) }