A family room/kitchen that I love – simple and gorgeous
Maybe you’re not living in your dream house. Maybe your dreams of moving up, up, up have been halted by the crazy insane real estate market. One thing I learned from The Houseover was how little the actual house means to creating a welcoming, livable home, and how much your own creativity is worth. Here are six things you can do right now to love the house you’re in:
1. Rearrange your furniture. When my brother and I were kids, my mom used to help us rearrange our bedrooms every once in a while. Did anyone else do that, or was that our own crazy thing? We’d drag the bed to a new location, shift the bookshelf over, put the desk under a new window. I’d lay in bed that night, marveling at the new sensation of staring up at a new section of the ceiling. I felt like I had a new bedroom. It’s the illusion of new!
2. Go to IKEA and get some inexpensive textiles. I don’t love IKEA for furniture, especially anything with moving parts, but I love their decorative items and textiles. Get some sheers. Buy a few orchids (theirs are much less expensive than our local garden center’s orchids, and in my experience, IKEA’s live longer). IKEA has some cool patterned fabric panels that you can hang over a window. For $9.99, you get a curtain and modern art. Pillows, rugs — IKEA is the master of cheap and cheerful.
3. Declutter a bookshelf. Pass some books along to your library’s book sale section. Use the wide open spaces to add brightly colored vases, geodes, music boxes — whatever you have sitting in a cardboard box in the basement. Decluttering is good for the soul and the bookshelf.
4. Buy some inexpensive shelves and hang them, and then start a collection. One of my boys is launching a marble collection, and the other, a collection of signed baseballs. What do you love? One of my happiest moments upon moving into Rental House was discovering a large, built in glass cabinet in the dining room. Finally, I could display my pottery collection!
5. As a mom, back to school means back to backpacks, reams of papers — and before you know it, hats, gloves and scarves. Get ahead of the game by organizing your entry. Buy some hooks and drill them into the wall, or go to Home Goods and buy a coat rack. Kids are more likely to hang up stuff if it means throwing a coat on a hook rather than a hangar. Figure out a mail and homework sorting system. Maybe you need to buy a clear table protector for your dining room table so you can sort mail there, and the kids can do homework without you fearing for your expensive table’s life.
And now, The Houseover blog is taking a two-week vacation. I love, love, love blogging and thank you all for tuning in. When The Houseover blog returns, I’ll be finding ways to warm up the blog visually, make it more personal, add video and attract more readers. Until then, happy last weeks of summer.
I loved rearranging my furniture in my room as kid. It was such an easy way to re-invent my life! We still do it now, in our living room. Cheaper than moving, for sure.
Have a great vacation!
My brother and I used to do it frequently- and, every so often, we’d actually SWITCH rooms to mix it up. (that usually meant swapping furniture, though, as opposed to taking down beds to try to move them across the hall.) My parents encouraged it- because it usually meant our bedrooms were cleaner than usual (my “clean up” method was always under the bed!)
Happy Vacation!