"A House is Not a Home"

I am not (nor have ever been) a professional decorator, but over the years many people have told me that I have good taste and that our home looks lovely!  That's always so nice to hear.  Frequently friends or relatives would jokingly ask if I would come and decorate their home.   I helped Ratchlet decorate parts of her home and gave her input when she recently re-did their kitchen and baths.  Now I have no credentials for doing such a thing, but I do enjoy putting a room together or updating as time goes by.  It's fun and it doesn't always cost a fortune either. 
Recently, I was contacted by T.A.'s mother.  She also lives here in Austin.  She is a widow and has been living in a rather large, very spread-out house on a huge plot of land for the last 8 years.  The size of both the house and the yard have gotten to be too much work for her and she decided she wanted to downsize.  A very logical decision.  She's very active, loves to travel and does a lot of it, and she'd rather do that than spend her time taking care of the garden and the house.  (I wouldn't mind doing that myself some days!)

TA's mom has never been one to spend a lot of time and effort on "decorating".  She freely admits she knows nothing about decorating.  This is mainly due to the fact that she and her husband spent nearly all of the married life serving in the  US Foreign Service.  He was an agricultural advisor and she was a public health nurse.  They have lived in many different countries, mostly in South America, Central American, and Africa. usually in the poorer countries where help is needed the most.  They always lived in Government owned housing, and had very little funds or need for decorating!

So when she decided to put her house on the market, she asked Ratchlet to help her "stage" the house for the listing pictures and for showings, but Ratchlet said "My mom is a lot better at that sort of thing than I am!!"  (Isn't she a sweet girl??)  So then TA's mom asked me if I would be interested, and I agreed to try and help.

T.A.'s mom and I spent a rather intense afternoon in talking about possibilities, making decisions and choices.  We rearranged rooms, moved accessories to different places, re-oriented the focus of some rooms.  After we did as much as we could with what she had, we decided to go shopping for a few things to help update the house.  We didn't spend a lot, but we did buy a couple of lamps, some colorful new towels, a coffee table to replace a wicker piece that wasn't working and so on.  There had been a small extra refrigerator sitting in the laundry room, but it wasn't really very workable in the space and it didn't provide very much extra cooling space, so it went out into the garage.

To fill the resulting empty spot in the laundry room, we bought some very pretty hanging hooks mounted on a decorative plaque.  The best thing we found was a small white bench (complete with seat pad) and three cubical sized openings below, suitable for baskets, or just open storage for gardening shoes, rainboots, etc.  It fit the open space perfectly and easily transformed the laundry room into a small "mud room" as well! 

All of our purchases were at Target.  I just love Target....they never let me down!  We were able to get everything we wanted to help warm up the space.

I had a creamy white Flotaki rug that had never been put back in place after its last cleaning, so I lent the rug to TA's mom, to put under the table in her breakfast area.  It really warmed up the space and made the space functional, attractive, and more than just an after thought.  I arranged her displays on the mantel, a baker's rack, and some small shelves.  All in all, we made no big changes, we just made a lot of little changes that brought the rooms into a more focused and usable arrangement. 

When we were finished, there were several additional things that needed to be finished, but TA's mom had house guests coming for three days and the rest of the staging work would be completed after the guests left.  I would go back one day this week to help if she needed it.  Evidently she was able to get the rest of it done on her own, because she sent me the pictures taken for the listing and it shows nearly everything finished just the way we discussed and agreed to. 

She seemed very pleased with the result and the house looks good in the photos.  (I'm not sharing the photos because they are not mine to share.)   I was so pleased to be able to help make her house feel more like a warm and inviting home!  

With the housing market and economy being what they are, it's impossible to predict how long it will take to actually sell the house, but she was being realistic though hopeful  that it wouldn't take too long. 

Well, it didn't take long!  Nope, not long at all!  She put the house on the market on Sunday (2/4), had several people come through, and received THREE bids on Monday, plus one MORE bid expected, but not yet received.  We got a call from Ratchlet today telling us that one of the bids had been accepted!!   In two days!!  For significantly over her asking price!!  WOW!  How amazing!!  I'm so happy for her!

Now I am NOT saying that my staging efforts really had anything to do with the quick sale, but on the other hand......I guess it didn't hurt either!  lol!  Maybe I should start a new career!  "Staging for a Speedy Sale!"     :)

"Oh Christmas Tree"

Our family (well, at least the Big Guy, my daughter, and me) are staunch traditionalists when it comes to Christmas.   Green tree, white lights, every ornament we own, 3 different garlands in gold and red.  Our tree has essentially looked the same every year since 1967 with just minor tweaks (mostly the tree got bigger!)   If I remember correctly we only had a "real" tree once in all that time.  We decided on artificial mainly because of safety concerns (my mom passed her concern on to me!)  But I just didn't want to deal with tree needles embedding themselves in our carpet, never to be seen again until March or April when they would suddenly reappear, poking themselves into the foot of any hapless family member who might like to walk around barefoot when Spring and Summer arrive!! 

We have gone through several trees over the years.  They generally are not known for their longevity!  Evidently the life span of an artificial tree tops out at about 10 years (if you have been very careful!).  At that point they look pretty bedraggled and small little accidents over the years have left some limbs broken, the stand somehow won't hold the tree straight anymore, and all those needles that were supposed to stay on the tree still end up in the carpet waiting to sabotage us in the Spring just like a real tree.

We bought our most recent tree about six years ago or so, I think.  This one was a major step up for us.  The lights were already attached to the tree.  In our family the worst part of Christmas was always the same....Mikey putting on the lights!  Awful process!!  There is a recording that came out a few years ago that reminds me of our former misery with lights so well. The guy who sings about putting up the lights, is spot on!  Of course, I can't remember the actual name of the song or who recorded it, but it is a parody of The 12 Days of Christmas .  It is very funny!  But I digress....

Getting the pre-lit tree has made Christmas a gazillion times better.  For us the shape is the most important thing.  With all the different types of fir trees there are, that gives tree makers a lot of options of what tree to imitate....Douglas fir, Nobel fir, Frasier Fir, Austrian Pine, Blue Spruce, and the others.  But the tree that we like the best is whatever one is constructed in such a way that the boughs and needles sort of sag downward in a graceful fashion.  Just like you might see in a snow covered tree in the forest.  Obviously that is not the actual name of the tree.  No one would name anything  "The Boughs-and-Needles-Sort-of-Sag-Downward-Gracefully-Just-Like-a-Snow-Covered-Tree-in-the-Forest Tree" for obvious reasons!  (What that means is I don't know the name of that kind of fir!)

Well, our current tree is beginning to show its age.  It loses needles and pieces of the boughs, one of the light sections won't light, and we have all but run out of room for all the ornaments we have.  So I imagine we will need to buy another tree in a year or two. 

However, I have been inspired to do something a bit different this year.  I'm going to take our very old tabletop size Christmas tree that we bought decades ago and could never bring ourselves to discard and if I can convince the Big Guy, I am going to spray paint it white and move all of our white, cream, ivory, and gold ornaments over to that tree which will fit very nicely on the round wood antique table we inherited from my mom's cousin which currently lives in our Family Room. That will also help solve the overcrowding ornaments on the main tree!   (Surprise Mikey!  What do you think of my latest brainstorm, Bunky??)

If he says yes, (not necessarily a given), and if  all goes the way it should, and the way I want it to, we will end up with a second tree that looks a lot like the one below  that made me want one too!  Isn't it delightful?

http://ashtreecottage.blogspot.com/2011/12/christmas-in-moms-solarium.html?showComment=1323417120373#c4491435746232471206

Thanks to Susan (and Bentley) at Ash Tree Cottage, "Christmas in Mom's Solarium." Go visit her blog, she has a few more photos!

I think it would look great!  Don't you?  Then every year we could sing, "Oh, Christmas Tree-s!"

"Bits and Pieces"

There are some loose ends to clear up.  So here are some little bits of this and a few pieces of that.


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You may recall I was in an accident about a week ago.  Just thought I would let you know that my wrist is fine.  It never did develop much more than a twinge now and then.  That's the good news.  There really isn't any bad news except that I miss my own car!  Driving a rental gets old real fast!  There isn't anything wrong with the rental exactly.  Just a few things that are annoying.  Like the car is a good two feet longer than my car.  It just barely fits in our garage!  No joke!  The car is black for another.  In Texas in the fall, it still gets pretty warm and the sun just keeps on shining.  A black car is not a good choice.  I can't even use my window shade thingy because...you guessed it....it's in my car which is having an extended vacation at the auto repair shop.  Sigh.  No idea what the repairs will finally cost nor how much longer it will be till it comes home.  It can't be soon enough!  I want my car!!


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We still have had no appreciable amounts of rain.  We got about 2" a week or so ago, but nothing since.  They keep saying it might rain, but the chance is only around 30%.  Well, at least the 100+F days are gone.

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The Big Guy and I finally put out our Halloween decorations on Sunday.  I was going to have M-t-G help me on Saturday but she ended up not staying over after all, so my waiting had been pointless.  It kind of funny though, we had all our trees and bushes trimmed a couple of weeks ago and now the same things that I put out last year, look a little puny because there is so much more open space now!
So off to Hobby Lobby, Big Lots, Dollar Tree, and Walgreen's, I went.  It's still six days before Halloween and the stores' Halloween things are totally picked over and skimpy.  The stores have moved on to Thanksgiving and, yes, to Christmas.  It's getting as bad as buying clothes!  You have to get your stuff weeks and weeks before you actually need it.  That's a problem for me.  I don't get into the holiday mood weeks and weeks before!  Besides, you can usually get some great sales closer to the holiday.  The few things they had were 40-50% off, but there wasn't anything worth buying.

Never fear, the intrepid last minute shopper did what all good bargain hunters do.  I went to Goodwill!   I found two cute little ghost-y brooms, a totem pole-like stack of pumpkins that light up, and three cute little signs that say BOO!   They will help fill up the empty!   And it only cost me $8.00!  Don'tcha just love it?

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It has occurred to me that buying books on the Kindle may just send me to the poor house!  (I don't think they have those anymore, come to think of it.)  Ok, so the Kindle may send me into bankruptcy a few dollars at a time!  It adds up, you know?  I looked at our Library's on-line section on downloadable books.  No relief there.  The didn't have more than about 50 books and most of those were travel guides!  Considering I'm not going anywhere anytime soon.  That's pretty useless.  For the few other books, they include several old books no longer under copyright, but I've either read them or don't want to!  For the few books I might be interested in reading there are waiting lists.  Maybe it will improve over time, but as it stands now I won't be downloading anything from the Library any time soon.

I'll just have to try harder to find free books from Kindle and other sources.

Oh by the way, here in Austin, Goodwill has several free-standing book stores where they sell soft covers for $2.00 and most hardcovers for $4.00. That's a lot better than even Half-Priced Books!  (They also sell books in their regular stores too.)  Do their book stores exist in other parts of the country too?  If so, its a great resource for big (or even small)  readers....lol!  They have fiction, non-fiction, kids books, DVDs and some reference books.  The turnover seems good and while small little storefronts, they can have a lot of books in a small space!  There is one located right next to the entrance to our neighborhood!  I can grab a quick book either coming or going!  Cool!

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That's it for now.  Have a good Wednesday!

"This Old House"

Wallpaper is a home fashion that comes and goes.  Right now I think it is out of favor, which is too bad.  There are some beautiful papers out there that can give a room real warmth and character.  Nevertheless, putting up new wallpaper is not easy, especially if you have to remove the old stuff first.  Some people don't even attempt to do it themselves because of the difficulties they have heard about.   Luckily for me, the times that I have chosen wallpaper for a room, the Big Guy has always been up to the challenge.

I was reading a blog the other day about the horrors of removing old wallpaper from walls.  Anyone who has ever done it knows that it can be tedious at best and impossible at worst.   Although many people don't do it, removing the old paper is really necessary, even if you're just going to paint a room.  Otherwise the wall will be bumpy and a mess.

The saga detailing the other blogger's experience reminded me of the last home we bought in Chicago.  It was an older house that had great bones but it was definitely a fixer-upper decor-wise! 

It wasn't a wreck, but it had been "decorated" in a manner that was more suited to a bordello than a nice family home!  Very dramatic window treatments and wallpapers were in the living room, dining room, bathrooms, and one of the bedrooms.  None of it was to our taste, and it all had to go!  We began doing our re-dos in stages. 

One of the bedrooms had obviously been occupied by a teen aged boy.  It wasn't as bad as the other rooms, but it definitely had it's own problems.  Two walls of the room were covered in an okay wallpaper that was white with evenly spaced dark blue stripes.  The stripes were only about 1/4 in. wide.   There were several pennants from various major league and NFL teams.  Those two walls didn't look bad, it was kind of reminiscent of a baseball uniform.

The other two walls, however, were covered from floor to ceiling with sports posters of various kinds.  Not a wallpaper of posters, you understand, they were the actual individual posters in a kind of collage effect.  It was great if you were a 14 year old sports nut, but not so great for my 22 year old grad student daughter who would call that room home!!    We moved into the  house in early Fall while she was away at school, but she would be home in just a few weeks.  And she wasn't coming alone!  She was bringing her boyfriend whom we had never met!!We had to fix it asap!  We promised her it would be presentable by the time they got home for Thanksgiving.

I really hoped those posters would just peel off easily.  They didn't!  We tried all sorts of  things. Ultimately the Big Guy did practically all the work himself.  It took him days and a huge amount of scraping and steaming and chemicals and more scraping to get them off.  The posters came off in little bits only a couple of inches square.  It was an enormous mess! 

I don't know what kind of adhesive they used to stick those posters to the wall, but getting them off the wall was one of the worst jobs the Big Guy had ever undertaken.  Quite a lot of cussing and yelling went on and he almost threw in the towel several times....but eventually my guy finally managed to get all traces of those posters off the wall.  The walls below ended up in horrid condition (with gouges and lumps and unfinished drywall beneath the posters), but that was a project we could put on hold for a few weeks. 

In the interim, he just painted those two walls and called it done.  When Ratchlet made it home with her beau, she was grateful to no longer have all those athletes surrounding her as she slept, and she wasn't embarrassed to have a guest see her room.  The Big Guy was grateful the job was finished for now and that the former owners lived far, far away; that way he didn't have to track them down and knock some heads together for leaving such a horrible job for us to do!  And me, I knew when we bought "This Old House", that we had a lot of work ahead of us.

Mostly though I was just so grateful that it hadn't been worse; after all, their son could have been older and decorated his room with posters of nudes!

"Oh, Christmas Tree"

There are times when I feel like I know every Christmas song ever written....well, at least the old ones.  When you start singing Christmas carols in grade school.....and singing Christmas songs with your mom every night of the season while you do the dishes.....and singing classical Christmas music in H.S. and College choirs.....and singing Christmas ditties along with all your favorite singers on the CDs they produce each year that you simply must have.....and singing Christmas songs along with the radio as you drive around town for the entire month before Christmas, you learn a lot of songs!  A whole lot of songs!!  Everything from "Jolly Old St. Nicholas" to "Oh Holy Night" to Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus".

When my mom was the leader of the Girl Scout Troop I was in, we sang every year at the only Christmas Tree lot in town (it was a very small town!)  I don't remember any more how many years we actually did this, but it seems like it was a lot.  Mom loved to sing, so she was in her element.  We had song books from somewhere and we sang every verse of every song in it.  Some of those songs had three or four verses!  Most of those verses stuck with you after a couple of years singing them. We sang it all a capella too!  Eventually everybody in town came by to get a tree (the idea of an artificial tree would have shocked us all!), and small crowds of people would stop to listen and sometimes even sing along! Of course, we sang "Oh Christmas Tree" more than once.  It was fun and we all had a good time.

This was while we lived in Florida, so although some of those evenings were a little nippy, I don't ever remember getting really cold.  In fact there was one year that I remember, it was summer-like....no jackets for us.  We wore our scout uniforms, otherwise we would have worn shorts that year!  It was warm!

One advantage of being at the tree lot early in the season was that we had early access to getting a great tree, because we sang a couple of times each year (it was a VERY small town with only a few Girl Scout Troops.  Boy Scouts helped the customers carry and load trees....they did NOT sing!)

The year that it was so warm, mom didn't let that deter her from getting that perfect tree.  We found one we liked, carted it home and stuck in on the back porch for a few days till it was time to put it up.  We were still in the midst of the heat wave.   The day came and we all went out on the back porch to bring the tree inside.  I was the door-holder-opener, Little Sis was not in the picture yet, Dad was the tree carrier-inner, and Mom was the Superintendent in charge of fluffing (a very important job, best not left to amateurs!).  While we waited and watched, mom reached into the middle to grab the trunk of our perfect tree, she pulled it upright and lifted it off the floor by a few inches.  She then bounced in up and down, knocking it solidly on the floor.  As Dad and I watched in horror EVERY single needle fell off the tree!  It was almost like a waterfall, all shimmery and beautiful!  When the needles stopped falling, we had a completely and totally naked Christmas Tree.  Seriously, not a needle on it!  All the needles were in a circle around the base of the tree while the three of us just stood there and stared. 

Dad and I wanted to laugh, but one quick look at Mom stopped that urge instantly.  Mom was not happy.  She had always kept the tree outside for a few days when we lived in Chicago!  Nothing like this had ever happened there!!  They must get inferior trees in Florida!  She was fuming!  She went inside, grabbed her purse, and my father's car keys, and said, "Let's go!"  We meekly followed her to the car, and headed back to the tree lot.  She was going to complain about the inferior tree.  When we arrived and walked into the lot, we saw bunches of nice green, healthy looking trees waiting to go home with some happy little family.  It was right about then that Mom noticed that all the trees were sitting in big tubs of water.  You could almost see the lightbulb go on above her head.  She looked at us and sort of muttered, "Don't say anything.  Just don't say anything at all!" 

We picked out another tree, took it home, somewhere on the way home we began to laugh and we laughed and laughed, especially mom.  We put it up that night.  We put it into the tree stand we had used for years....the one that had a little reservoir that held a couple of cups of water....the one that mom had always tested every day and refilled the water every day....both in Chicago and in Florida. 

In Chicago it was ok to let a tree stand outside in the snow for a couple of days of frigid weather.  In Florida there was no snow and the temperature had been lingering in the 80s for days!  But that perfect tree had no moisture to absorb to keep it fresh and green! (It's amazing how we all act from habit at times and don't always realize that the situation is different!)

There hasn't been a Christmas that went by without somebody bringing up the naked Christmas Tree.  Mom always laughed the hardest. 

I could be wrong, but I think she was one of the very first people to purchase an artificial tree.

"It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas"

"♪♪....everywhere you go. ♪"  Well, everywhere but at my house! I have lots of boxes in the hallway, and a couple of things put out, but it's only about 1/2 of 1% of what we have!

 Before I can really get started there are a couple of things I need. Some pretty wired-ribbon to make a new bow for the mantle wreath, some long tapers, and pears. Pears? Not the eating kind, the decorating kind. Why? It’s a long story (all my stories are LONG!)

 Some years ago at a Christmas Bazaar, I bought a black wrought iron Christmas tree. I just fell in love with it. It's about 3' tall and has four tiers of "limbs" each ending with a small candle holder, spikey-thing to hold a candle. There are about 6 holders per tier.


When M-t-G was a toddler, I didn't want to put real candles on it because she was mobile and curious and into everything (I think she was 2-3).  So in a flash of inspiration, I decided this would be my Pear Tree (you know, the one with the Partridge in it!)  I found some wonderful sparkly pear ornaments but could only get ten, so I used little copper bows on the remaining holders.  The first year, I used a little miscellaneous bird (that I usually had on the big tree) for the partridge.  Anyone who knew anything about birds, knew it wasn't anywhere close to a partridge, so I went on a hunt to find a partridge that wasn't breakable or too big or garish or "cutesy". I wanted the perfect one! It took a while but I finally found one I liked.


And the Pear Tree has been a part of Christmas ever since.

I took this photo last year just before we were taking everything down for the year, that's why there are various odd colored bits on the table below. If you look really closely at the lower left corner you can see the front part of the sparkly Partridge that I found.

The color in the photo isn't quite true, the bows are more of a burnished copper color, very rich-looking, and the pears are more green. It is really pretty, especially with the softer lights in the evening.


Now if you zero in on the pears you can see that the glittery stuff is coming off...in large clumps! They look like they're molting or something.  I suppose that's understandable.  They are coming up on 10 years old.  It's too bad because the whole thing worked pretty well and I really liked my tree.  So I want to replace them.


Thus, after lunch today, I thought I'd pop into Michael's to see what I could find. Well, the short answer to what I found is Absolutely Nothing!  Michael's stock had been depleted, picked over, broken, and a mess! I walked all over that store, looking under, behind, and between all sorts of stuff I didn’t want.

After much looking all I could find was one bag of tiny (1 ½”) green pears….too small; a bag of 5 life-sized Red pears….too big and too bright…and a centerpiece with a few pretty medium-sized, green glittery pears….on sale for only $15 each, of which they had 3. The problem was that I would have needed 5 of them to harvest enough pears!  No way was I going to chase all around town to the other Michael’s and then spend over $75 to buy centerpieces I was going to dismantle just to get the pears that should have cost about $10 tops!!


Now the thing that irritates me most is that today, well yesterday now, was only Nov 30! The store looked more like the day after Christmas sale than just after Thanksgiving. Stores are continuing to push us into the season earlier and earlier. In order for crafty folks to be able to get the supplies they need for their Christmas projects, they must have to buy the stuff in September!  And for procrastinators, like me, by the time we decide to make something, all that’s left is the dregs! That makes me crazy! I purposely don’t do anything about Christmas until after T-Day! Now, with the practices of the stores I am being pressured to yield to someone else’s timetable that's really just a marketing ploy! Arrgghhh!


Don't you think those pears will hold together for another year? They don’t look TOO bad, right?  Especially if I keep the lights down really really low…. Maybe. Possibly. (Sigh!)


Awww, rot! I’ll try Hobby Lobby tomorrow.

"Take a Chance"

ALERT:  If this isn't successful its the fault of Laurie from  http://bargainhuntingwithlaurie.blogspot.com/ , Cass from http://cass-thatoldhouse.blogspot.com/  and Susan from http://betweennapsontheporch.blogspot.com/.  They are the ones who mostly made me want to play like they do!!    :) 

In Blogland there are a gazillion sites from people who have incredible skills and abilities in the area of home decor (see above).  Mostly I love what they post, but I knew I would never feel confident about much that I do in that regard, at least not confident enough to share! 

Nevertheless, somewhere along the way I have been bitten by the bug!   I have succumbed to at least trying my hand at some Fall/Halloween interior decorating.  I've usually done some things for the holiday, but it was kind of haphazard.  This year however, I have been sucked into .....inspired to try my hand at mantle decorating for the season.  The only time I ever did anything special with the mantle was Christmas.  I don't know why it never occurred to me to do the same thing for Fall....but it didn't.
 You know that I am not much of a photographer.  I don't have the eye or the patience.  It's obvious from the very few photos that I post, that photography is not my best thing.  (Give me a monologue to perform or a song to sing and I'm on it like white on rice, but taking pictures??  Nope, it just isn't me!)

Well, I decided to "Take a Chance"!


All of this is prelude,  of course, to what could be summed up in a few words, i.e., This is my first effort at Mantle Decorating for the Season, so please be kind!

After struggling with this for two days (!) I finally got two of four to load.  I'll settle for that I guess, 'cause I'm tired of dealing with it!!


The first picture is the mantle, which doesn't actually look quite so bare in reality.  The second is my table centerpiece, it doesn't look like enough though, does it?  I'll have to figure out what I could add.
 Soooo, what do you think?