Dollar Store Decorating--Make a Grouping of Small Items

• Who can find a virtuous woman?  her price is far above rubies
• She looketh well to the ways of her household
• She maketh herself (and her house?) coverings of tapestry...

As you can tell from the pictures I've posted over the years, I'm not much of a decorator.  When we first moved into this house sixteen years ago, I didn't hang much on the walls--as a matter of fact, I went several years with blank walls.  When you put a hole in paneling, it's there to stay, and I didn't want to add more holes to this 1962-era paneling than were already there, unless I knew I really wanted something hung! 

On top of that, I'm a bit of a cheapskate, sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity, so I always try to be really really sure that I like something and am willing to live with it a while before I invest my hard-earned dollars.  

One mistake that I've made in the past, and have to remind myself not to do even today, is buying something the wrong scale. I tend to go too big with furniture and too small with decor.  I can't really do too much with too-big furniture, but I've learned a fix for too-small decor, and one that doesn't have to be expensive, either, and that's to group small like items together.    



Several years ago I found this pretty mirror at Dollar General for around $10-15.  It came in this sort of pewter and bronze color, and then the same pattern in a really hideous gaudy goldish gilt. The width of the frame gave it a good weight and scale, but once I got it home, I realized it was still too small for the space I wanted to fill. I got the bright idea to buy another and hang two of them side-by-side.  Unfortunately, search though I did, at every Dollar General within a 25-mile radius, all they had left were the ugly gold ones. I thought about buying a gold one and spraying painting them both a third color, but I really liked the pewter/bronze color.

So it sat in a bag in the bottom of a closet seemingly forever. Periodically, I'd search through the mirrors and frames at different store locations in hopes of finding a matching piece.

And then finally--voila'!  Not the same mirror, not an exact match of color or size, but one day, searching through the frames and mirrors as always, I found a little mirror with a metallic-ish frame that I thought just might work. And this time, having learned my lesson, I bought two!  I don't remember exactly what these cost, but it was less than $10 for the two of them.  

And they worked! Close enough in color, two are enough to help fill the blank spot, and the whole arrangement was inexpensive enough to change at a moment's whim.  

Not that I do "a moment's whim" for decor changes.  But I could if I wanted to. 

Until next time...

This post is linked to:

Penny Pinching Party at the Thrifty Home

Works for Me Wednesday at We are THAT Family

The HomeMaking Party at Hope in Every Season

Make Your Home Sing at Mom's the Word

My "Ugly Room Challenge" Update

• Who can find a virtuous woman? her price is far above rubies
• She looketh well to the ways of her household
• She worketh willingly with her hands

Did you see my post last week with the "before" pictures of my "Ugly Room" self-challenge?

No? Well, you need to go look at them.  I'll wait.

Rough, right?

Now let me show you what this room looks like today.  (Pardon the lighting, it was an early morning pre-dawn hour when I took these, and my flash and the lighting in the room aren't the best way to view this room.)

This is the first glimpse you get when you head down the hall.  Better, yes?

Here is the desk area.

Bookcases and cleaned and straightened.  I purged at least 100 books, believe it or not, but replaced them with books from boxes and piles.  This is probably about half of the books we own. There are still others stashed in boxes, our son has at least two bookcases worth of his personal books in his room, and I have probably another book case worth, at least, in my office at church.

The lovely couch is now ready for a nap or a sit, as is the "reading nook" chair.  

And just to show you the reality, we had company coming over, so, while I did do a lot of cleaning, organizing, and purging, I also did some "stash-and-dash" cleaning--put things in a box or bag, and stash it someplace out-of-sight until later!

Another, smaller "stash-and-dash" pile.  

I still to do some work around the desk, too.

And whatever do you do with old journals and sentimental things?  I read somewhere that Beth Moore has instructed her daughters that if anything ever happens to her, they are to take her journals and burn them immediately!  That's how I feel, I would really hate for anyone else to ever read these, and yet I'm not quite ready to torch them myself yet!

I noticed over on Mom's the Word that her post is about having a cut-off-time for chores--this is especially true when you tackle something huge like my "ugly room".  There is no way this could all have been done in a day--even a week, to be honest, unless every thing else is neglected.  But laundry and cooking and dishes still needed doing.  I had a funeral to attend, and church and grocery shopping and company coming over--I needed to attend to the rest of the house, too.  And besides that, you can only work on clutter and cleaning and organizing for so long before you start to make poor decisions about what to keep and where to put it--as soon as I started getting to the point of just mindlessly wanting to through it all away, or alternatively, box it all up and avoid dealing with it, I knew I needed to take a break.

My "ugly room" is still far from finished.  I need to do another sweep through the bookcases and purge a little more.  I need to go through the "stash-and-dash" boxes one at a time. (Oh, and did I mention that I stashed a few boxes in the closet, too?) But at this stage, it's at least clean--you can't imagine the dust I've inhaled in the last week or two! And it's do-able, and approachable.

My "ugly room" is no more.  Now it's just a room---not good or bad, it just is what it is, and I'm up for the challenge to make it into a peaceful retreat for this family of book nerds. I want to change the curtains, add something to a couple of the walls, maybe a throw rug to cover the worn-out wood floors, who knows?  It's still far from pretty, but it's definitely a change in the right direction!

Until next time...

This post is linked to:
Make Your Home Sing at Mom's the Word
Make it Pretty Monday at the Dedicated House
The HomeMaking Party at Hope in Every Season