As I mentioned yesterday, I spent the day Friday getting small things to redecorate a couple of spots in my house. There are always a few things that I don’t feel quite work and so I end up tweaking things here and there and it drives my husband a LITTLE crazy (especially when I get upset at the furniture and spend a couple of hours shoving it around the house) so it’s best to do all of my ADJUSTMENTS while he is gone.

Our ideas of how to redecorate are a tiny bit different… Usually the conversation will go like this:

Me: I want to rearrange the furniture/wall art/entire kitchen.
J: Do we have to? (He’d be perfectly happy if nothing changed, ever.)
Me: Yes.
J: (sighs) Okay, let me pull up my graphing program on the computer and add the measurements of the room/wall/kitchen and then everything that is already in the room/on the wall/in the kitchen and then use the program to moves things around so we can better visualize…
Me: (already pulling things off the wall and shoving a couch) Or I could just do this. (shoves more stuff around until it’s in a pile in the middle of the room.)
J: (eye is twitching)

He doesn’t understand that there doesn’t need to be a plan, I just need to move stuff and see how it looks. This makes me happy. He’s learned over the years to just play along and help me move everything around and then when I’m happy again he can be happy again. It’s still less stressful to him if I just do it while he’s out of the house, so lately I’ve been rearranging and just couldn’t get satisfied with a few things.

You may remember, for instance, the wall above the TV? I didn’t like how blank it was, so I added shelves and it looked like this:

That was in February, and I found that I didn’t like it. I liked the kitsch, but it felt too… cluttered. I appreciate good, artistic clutter but I can’t have too much of it or I start to feel hemmed in by it. So I pulled all that stuff down (some of it went into storage, some went to the windowsills above the couch) and now it looks like this:

So now the little shelves are covered in photos of J and me (well, and ONE photo of the cats– come on, it’s ME we’re talking about!) and it’s much better!

(I added a cut in case you don’t want to see a LOT more photos, mostly of my bathroom… but there IS a fun surprise at the end. Well, I think it’s a fun surprise.)

In both of the bathrooms, I got a little Hawaii-excited and did oceany themes with carved wooden fish and sea turtles and all… and it works for the downstairs bathroom but not really for the upstairs bathroom. See, I’ve got these orchids up there, and a lovely Sarah Bernhardt* portrait that is pink and lavender and light green and the towels and rugs are light green and the curtain is light blue and green and silver… and it just didn’t WORK. I wanted it to be like a garden. SO all the little fish came down and they will be put into the downstairs bathroom and now I’ve got dragonflies and mirror sconces. Here are the dragonflies; you can see how they work better with the color scheme than wooden fish…

The other side of the bathroom, with Sarah’s portrait.

These are the sconces:

And here’s the sink, just to include the whole thing.

Other things I’ve done include playing with the hangings on the balcony; I’ve never wanted or liked it as a blank space (though it’s lovely for garland at Christmas!) and I put bamboo hangings there but they just didn’t look right and now I’ve got these. I still want to change out the middle, but haven’t decided on what to put there yet.

And for good measure, the cats have some decor, too. ^_^

So that’s been my rearranging. It’s mostly just the stuff on the walls (probably to J’s relief, if he reads this– I promise you won’t come home to all new furniture!) and I’m MUCH more pleased with it now. And if all of this was BORING to you, have a picture of Caspian looking judgmental.

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*I have had a portrait of Sarah Bernhardt in my bathroom for as long as I can remember. My parents still have the original, but I now have one of my OWN because it is IMPORTANT. Maybe that can be an entry for another day.