winter blues

The dark days of winter has cast it's sleepy spell on me but there's a hint of spring in the air and I feel myself coming back to life again! Stay tuned. I see more posts on the horizon!

i'm so blue-hoo-hoo

It's mid-winter and most of us are housebound and feeling a bit cabin-feverish. One coping mechanism is to take advantage of those great post-holiday sales at the mall. Even better, after your little rascals are tucked in to bed, sit down with a glass of wine in front of the old computer screen and on-line shop until you drop off to sleep at your desk (or right there in your bed if you've taken your laptop with you).

Of course, I'm (half) joking here. Anyone who knows me understands that I enjoy procurement as much, or more, as the next person and I HAVE actually made a few such purchases in the last few weeks. (Let the records show that I was definitely NOT under the influence of any mind-altering substance when I did it.)

However, like one of my favorite Veggietales characters, Madame Blueberry, I understand that a trip to the Stuffmart doesn't produce a heart of real contentment and certainly isn't the real cure for wintertime blues. 

Right now I am working with a client who has hired me to finish decorating her house, after several stops and starts over the last few years. She's unhappy that not a single room is complete, so she feels unsettled and unhappy there. But before we can add, we must subtract, organize and take inventory of what she truly loves that should be kept. Like some of you, perhaps, my client is discouraged and overwhelmed by the many piles that have taken up residence in her home. Therefore, she is frozen, with no idea where to start. It's a little like sitting on the front row at the movies. The picture is SO huge and out of focus that it's impossible to take it all in without getting a headache.

Maybe you don't have the need, desire and/or the resources to tackle a "whole house" project like this. But I feel certain that everyone has SOMETHING that's bugging them at home and these dark and dreary days of winter provide us with a perfect opportunity to make some progress. So, here are some ideas to get you started on some bite-sized projects of your own. Little "wins" are empowering and can often spur you on to bigger things. Maybe start with something from my list and then add your own items.

• Magazines and catalogs - Gather up every single one of them from every part of your house and put them into one ginormous pile. (My client had accumulated 200-300 of them over the last 5 years. Don't judge. It could happen to you, I promise......) IMMEDIATELY get rid of the catalogs, unless you know there's something you want to buy from a current issue. I do occasionally save pictures from catalogs for inspiration but there is rarely any good reason to save an entire catalog for more than a month. With the magazines, force yourself to go through very quickly and reduce them by at least 50%. Then commit to making your way through the rest of the pile over the next week or two. Flip through quickly, maybe tear out a few pages that you want to keep, and then get them OUT of your house. I try to find someone who wants them before I recycle, but that's just me.
• Your closet - If the whole thing is just too much to handle, then tackle it one element at a time. Take an hour to go through your shoes, for example. Force yourself to purge what you haven't worn and will likely never wear. If they're out of style or they hurt your feet, get RID of them. Now is not the time to wallow in the guilt of buyer's remorse. Find a friend who can wear them, donate them or, if they're high-end and in great shape, and you're really ambitious you can try to consign them. Set a goal to reduce the total number by maybe 30%. Then come back a day or two later and do it again.
• The dreaded family photos - When we moved here to the condo, I brought all our photos thinking that this would be a great project to tackle and, believe it or not, I have made huge progress. I have sorted through 1,000+ and have them organized in 3 Tupperware photo tubs by date, or at least as close to that as I can get. I purchased a Groupon for one of the "scan your photos" places and got 500 of them put on a CD. Some of you may want to take it a step further but for me at this point, and after so many years, I say forget the romantic notion of photo albums!! Who really looks at them anyway? Now, if I want to find an old picture from a particular event, it's pretty easy because I at least have them fairly ordered.
• The dreaded digital photos - Yeah, now that I rarely print a photo, I just stick them into iPhoto and forget about it. And the grand total over the last few years comes in at almost 10,000. TEN FREAKIN' THOUSAND!!! That's messed up. So for the last couple of months I've taken 30 minutes here and there to wade through that disaster. At last count, I had it whittled down to about 8,000. Still embarrassing so I will continue my efforts. And now I'm committed to to process of editing each time I download a new batch of photos. 
• If you have 15-20 minutes of dead time in your day, open up a drawer or a cupboard in any room and get rid of something. Commit to reducing first and then go back and organize later.
• Alterations - I have a stack of clothes that need some sort of adjustment. A few items have been in that pile for a year or more. I'm fortunate enough to know how to sew and can do much of it myself but the the bad news is that I really don't LIKE to do it! But recently, I made myself drag out the old sewing machine and my goal is to finish them all by the end of February or to take what I realistically cannot do myself to my alterations guy, Mike. Or, get rid of it and forget about it.

So, go forth and conquer!

change is gonna do you good

Once I overcame my holiday decorating ambivalence and put up the tree, I managed to drain every drop of pleasure from it's fake plastic branches. Each morning I looked forward with great anticipation to the ceremonial re-lighting and kept it lit untiI I stumbled into the bed at night. My face lit up brighter than the tree itself when it greeted me with a sparkly "welcome home" every time I walked through the front door and, for the first time since moving, I felt literally drawn in to that room by the tree's magnetic force.

I grew so attached to it's magical presence that I couldn't bring myself to take it down, and I was beginning to wonder if I might become one of those eccentric old ladies who mixes gaudy tinsel and garland with the sound of summer cicadas? (I have cats in multiples, so it's already a short walk to Crazytown, according to the general population.)

On January 5th, the day before I summoned the emotional fortitude to finally pull the plug and say my goodbyes, I had my own mini-epiphany. It was about familiarity and change. HUH?

In some ways, I'm piggy-backing on my last post about tradition and such. The sight of our own pretty ornaments nestled in the branches of that familiar fake tree gave me such comfort and connection to a real sense of home there in that beautiful room filled with someone else's furniture. And, while familiarity can sometimes breed contempt, boredom or laziness, in this case it was calming to me and actually became fertile soil for hope. 

And that same room with someone else's furniture became my creative playground. My inner-decorator doesn't get to come out and play much right now, so tweaking the tree to make it fit with the style and color scheme (see my last post) was enough to scratch my itch without spending a penny.

January can create the perfect storm, if you're bored with your present surroundings but your post-Christmas pocketbook won't allow you to tackle a total "torch-it-and-transform-it" makeover. A couple gallons of paint or a couple of new throw pillows can sometimes get you past this winter slump. Or how about simply removing everything in a room that you don't really like (as long as it doesn't actually serve any real function)? 

I think I'm on to something. Maybe in my next post I'll throw out some simple transformation ideas to get you blooming from the inside out. Then before you know it, all of creation will follow your lead and you'll be surrounded by the sweet smell of spring.

to tree or not to tree

That IS the question around our house this time of year. A bit surprising for someone who seems to be so all about home decor, isn't it? For most of us, it's a given. Go buy the tree and put it up. After all, we're Americans and that's what we do here. 

Also, as I grow older, I realize that there is something very comfortable and comforting about tradition, especially in a world that moves at warp speed, often slipping from our grasp before we can even decide where we want to hang on. So perhaps when we pull those decorations down out of the attic, the flood gates of memories from holidays past come gushing out when we open up the boxes. And somehow the ground upon which we stand feels a little more firm.

But still....At some point I came to the realization that, frankly, I DON'T feel the urge every year. I could probably trace it back to my childhood, void of tradition for the most part. Like my mother, I often tend to be driven by the high value of practicality, so some years the thought of expending all that time and effort to "deck them halls and all that stuff" seems like an utterly ridiculous notion. I mean, really. Or maybe some years our busyness places holiday decorating as just one more "to-do" on a list that is already impossible to conquer. Besides, there are no children to delight (or disappoint) so perhaps it's easier to simply wallow in my holiday blues.

Several years ago I made another important connection: I HATE stringing the lights on the Christmas tree!!! Maybe that's the root of this issue. And besides, the hubs is allergic so the month of December became a miserable sneezefest for him. I found a way to nip the mold issue in the bud but those LIGHTS!! Ugh. They continued to plague me. So one year after Christmas in a moment of post-holiday-discount weakness, I proposed that we (gasp) buy a pre-lit fake and forget about it. You can't have it all so there are things I miss about the real deal but for ME at least, the plus column has the most entries. Best decision EVER!!!! Now, the darn thing comes out of the box in 3 easy pieces, "plug 'n play" ready to decorate in 5 minutes. Voila!!

This year presented some interesting extenuating circumstances. If you've been reading, you know we're in a temporary living situation with mostly furniture that is not our own. Therefore, my modern-ish Christmas decor from last year simply doesn't work in this setting. So, do we bag it completely or try to find some middle ground? My original vote was to "ignore and look forward" but in the end I opted for some simple adaptation of our ghosts of Christmas past. I look at is as yet another opportunity for another creative decorating"mash-up" (see my 9.18.11 post).

Last year looked like this:

And below is how I changed it up. Over the years, I have accumulated more ornaments than I need for the tree so I often find other ways (see above) to display the ones that don't make it to the tree. Or maybe I give some of them a year off. This year I decided to keep it simple. Nothing but the tree and, instead of last year's bright mod color palette of red/turquoise/orange/pink, I used only white/silver/gold/pink to go with the soft neutral colors of the room.

So there you have it. That's how it all went up over here on Fenton Place. In a couple of weeks, I'll likely by annoyed at the thought of having to pack it all up again. But years from now I'll look back on this holiday season with gratitude, remembering what a blessing it was to be given such a lovely transitional space to call home and how we chose to make it our own.

jungle boogie

I'm a sucker for animal prints and had already decided talk about them when I recently heard a fashion expert on TV confirm what I already knew: They're always in fashion. Everyone can wear them. Treat them like a neutral.

There are a couple of rules, or guidelines if you may, that you should keep in mind before slipping into them, lest you come off LOOKING like a total cougar. And yes, I mean that in the worst possible middle-aged-trolling-for-younger-guys way. You know the type. And hopefully, you do not resemble that remark. So stick to one(ish) animal print at a time for cryin' out loud! My personal collection pictured above provides many opportunities to pile it on but I resist the urge and choose instead to spread the love. A little goes a long way.


And when it comes to spreading the love, please JUST SAY NO to any animal print/spandex combo. Leopard spots dancing across your nether regions is, well, rather unseemly. And I don't care how lovely your backside looks. Don't stretch it across your booty. 'Nuff said. 

When you're using animal prints in your home decor, remember they're NEUTRALS, so they basically go with anything! 

Let's look at some pretty pictures: 

Source: lookbook.nu via Kathi on Pinterest

                                             

Source: lookbook.nu via Kathi on Pinterest
 

 

And if a little doesn't go far enough to satisfy your animal instincts, then layer it on, baby! It takes some courage but again, if animal prints are NEUTRALS, then you have room in your room for more than one at a time!

                         Source: thedecorista.com via Kathi on Pinterest

 Don't be a cowardly lion. Take a walk on the wild side! And then, tell me your story.....

the freeze(r) stands alone

Ever since we moved over here to the condo on Fenton PL, I've been buzzing like a fridge about the need for an additional freezer. I've wanted one for years but my desire has intensified since we now have a smaller (yet lovely) fridge with a baby freezer on the bottom. Back on Westbury, we had a side-by-side and now the freezer is what lies beneath. And that's pretty scary to me. Scratch that. It doesn't really scare me at all. But it annoys the heck out of me and THAT probably scares my husband. 

Speaking of the devil, it's my husband's fault that we have never purchased that standalone objet du désir. When he reads this he will likely say that he never realized how important it was to me or he would've told me years ago to just go ahead and get the thing. True statement, because he pretty much gives me what I want. But my version just makes for a better blog post and sometimes it's all about the ratings, you know? And besides, not only is he generous, he also rarely holds a grudge. Therefore, I'm willing to take the risk here and make him the fall guy for the sake of a laugh or two.

Back to the story at hand. In reality, we BOTH have been annoyed with our situation but it was the fries that sent me "over the precipice and into the abyss," to quote my college economics professor. We're not talkin' just any old run-of-the-mill frozen fry. These are sent-straight-down-from-heaven SPECIAL. We (loosely) follow the Paleo way of eating, so we don't often eat those Idaho spuds. It's the Alexia sweet potato fries that have recently grabbed our attention and captured the affection of our primal taste buds. And when my grocery store recently offered them for $1.60 off the normal price of $4.59, I heard the heavenly hosts singing on the soundtrack of my life. Then came the scraping sound of the record player needle (a la Ally McBeal). jerking me back to my reality. SNAP! I only had room for three bags at a time in my dinky freezer. Three measly bags = a mere $4.80 of potential savings for me. And I wanted more.

I researched and I took the plunge. I would've been happy with the smallest el cheapo chest type but the husband convinced me that an upright was the way to go here. There was a big difference in the price but when we look at long term purchases, we also take other things into consideration. The higher price for the Maytag model we bought also gave us about 10 cu.ft. more space, Energy Star rating and no manual defrosting (YAY). It's much easier to organize than the deep dark hole of the chest style so (hopefully) we won't be throwing old freezer-burned food away because we can't SEE it. Sound familiar...;-)

I managed to save almost 30% off the full retail price by spending some extra time to sniff out some great online discounts. To begin with, it was on sale at Home Depot for $96 off. I made my purchase through Ebates, which gave me an additional 3% cash back (hey, it ALL counts) and used a discounted Home Depot gift card I bought through Cardpool to save me another 8.2%. Free shipping and delivery saved us the time and hassle of having to haul it home in the truck. And, of course, before I made my final decision I checked product ratings and customer reviews.

Honestly, I'm in this for more than the fries. Eating well DOES require some extra effort, unless you have the kind of budget that allows you to hire a personal chef. I don't. Sometimes cooking is a joy but many nights it's more of a chore and, as my husband says, "It's the clean up that'll kill you." True that. My response is to cook in big batches. Any time I can, I double the recipe because nothing makes me happier than to open that freezer and be greeted by the sight of what I made two weeks ago or a month ago. I can HAVE it again without having to COOK it again! Or what about all those amazing summer fruits that you can buy in season when it's fresh and cheap? How fun is it to pull them out of the freezer in November? Or February?

Are you beginning to see things my way? I thought so.

Time to load it up! According to my calculations, we should break even on the 225th bag of sale-priced sweet potato fries. Hmmm....I DID mention we were looking at this for the LONG term value, right?? I see lots of fries in my future.

the lynette effect | part 1

Ever had a friend who has influenced you to purchase something you never expected to buy or even knew you wanted? For example, in the midst of a joint shopping excursion with said friend, she spies something that you completely overlooked. And because she has convinced you that it's a "must have," it has now somehow made it's way into your shopping cart. Unless, of course, there was only ONE left or it was a one-of-a-kind treasure, in which case it has made it's way into HER shopping cart because it was her keen eye who saw it first, after all.

Well, that friend for me is Lynette. We've been friends for longer than some of you have been on the planet, so let's just say we've got a pretty good handle on what makes the other one tick. We have years of epic shopping experiences under our (animal print) belts and the stories to go with them have far out-lived many of the actual items that were purchased. We are different. 

While I might  favor a more relaxed, modern, whimsical and slightly bo-ho flavor, Lynette is drawn to high-fashion and design with lots of flair like a moth to a darn flame. I lean toward minimalism and she, the consummate maximalista without being overdone. However, there's this huge overlap in our individual personal style circles. It's where we operate and it's where the MAGIC happens.

Recently, a diverted flight due to engine trouble unexpectedly landed Lynette (safely) right here in MY town and the 20-hour delay gave us time for a little shopping joy ride. I mean, when the situation presents itself, you put the pedal to the metal and floor it. Right? A round of Missoni-for-Target madness and a short romp through West Elm proved to be quite productive, shall we say. I'll save the Missoni tales for another post but the West Elm excursion netted me an awesome pillow cover that I'm sure I would never have noticed, had I not been with...(insert "Lynette effect" sound effects here) Lynette. I had already perused that shelf in the clearance corner nothing appeared interesting to me but when I heard her utter that oh-so familiar phrase, "these are cool," my head snapped back around so fast I nearly cracked a vertebrae. "What????" I said, afraid I might be missing out and, frankly, afraid she had found the only one of whatever it was.

In the end, she decided against it but we both agreed it would be the perfect finishing touch in the "Hollywood glam" room back at the condo, with a bit of a  Kelly Wearstler flavor. She was completely convinced but, because there were 10 of them left and it wasn't returnable, I decided to think about it for a few days. I did, I still wanted it, and when I went back it had been marked down even further. SCORE! 

So what is the point of this story and really, do I need to even have one? It's just a silly blog post, for crying out loud. Truth of the matter is that I could take this in any number of directions. It could serve as a warning, as in "don't try to be someone you're not" or "don't waste your money on things you never really wanted anyway." Agreed and agreed. But it can also be said that the way we influence each other can challenge and stretch us, taking us to places we couldn't quite muster up the courage to go. That little extra nudge from someone we love and trust often makes all the difference. Where it might serve some of us well to edit (Remember Coco Chanel's advice to look in the mirror and take one thing off before we leave the house?), others of us tend to quit a little too soon so we miss that finishing touch that completes the room or outfit. For me, Lynette is the friend who encourages me to put a cherry on the top. Voila!

Who is your Lynette and, more importantly, will you choose to be generous with your own wisdom and advice? Don't hide it under a bushel and keep it all to yourself. That being said, YOU can also enjoy the "Lynette effect" right here. She deserves to be shared.

But I made sure I got MY pillow first...;-)