Decorating in Early Yard Sale....

**Heather** · 04-24-2005, 02:08 PM

I love this article!!

Decorating in Early Yard Sale
by Mary Fleer

Discover a home where you can kick your shoes off and feel comfortable... a home where children can slide down the banister and be free.

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Decluttering and simplifying my life have been some of the most cleansing things I've done lately. I finally grew up (since I'm now officially the big 4-0) and realized that materialistic things won't lead to happiness. I love filling my house with flowers that I've grown in my garden, oftentimes using a simple canning jar as a vase.

I can spend an entire afternoon straightening my daughter's room, marveling at her growth while I separate clothes she never wears to take to the Goodwill. I love changing her bed and putting on freshly laundered and air-dried sheets, opening the windows and letting the nature breezes fill the room. I love going into my son's room and seeing the things that captivate him displayed on his walls.

Certainly I could fill my home with "themed" costly paintings, elegant furniture, expensive wallpaper and borders, etc. but I choose to use an eclectic mix of items.

My daughter's room is done in "cottage" style, as I like to call it. Nothing matches.

Her curtains are my old kitchen curtains from the time we lived in base housing. They're a country blue with eyelet lace and flowers. Her shelves are two pieces of 8' pine board that I painted white and sponged with three coordinating shades of blue. Her quilt rack is an old wooden ladder from a bunk bed that I propped against the wall. Her floor is wood with an area rug and on the walls are cross stitched pictures that I did while pregnant with her, posters and things that she likes.

As she grows older, she'll have more say in what she'd like her room to look like and we'll scour thrift shops, estate sales and auctions together to find just the right touch.

My son's room is done in a sports theme. Even though he's not into this "theme" anymore, he continues to tell me he's happy with his room the way that it is and until he tells me otherwise, I won't change a thing.

We bought a baseball comforter for his bed and I purchased Home Interior pictures and plaques at various yard sales with a sports theme. For his curtains, I decided to make a valance of "pennants". I purchased a few different primary colored pieces of material (the Walmart broadcloth at $1.87 a yard) and made 3 coordinating pennants for each window (2 windows). Then for the hanger, I used a dowel with a wooden ball at each end. I spray painted the dowel and the balls white and then put "stitching" on the balls with a red fine-tipped permanent marked to make it look like a baseball. He's got a plain cream colored Berber rug over a bare wood floor and he's all set. His desk came from a yard sale as did his bookshelf and his dresser. Again, this isn't a matched set but in my opinion, it looks fine.

We are blessed to have a huge recreation room at the back of our house, which we are redoing slowly. For my bay window I filled it with plants such as African violets and hanging baskets of English ivy and spider plants. I found some lace panels that the previous owner had put on her living room windows, cut them down to size, hemmed each one and made panels to fit the bay windows (there are 5 sections). They are hooked top and bottom by running a cafe curtain rod through them top and bottom and this provides a twofold benefit...privacy and filtered lights for my plants. We painted everything white (since I'm a fanatic about light filled rooms), carpeted with sturdy industrial carpet which my husband and a friend laid, purchased cabinets on sale with a standard counter top to match some of the colors in the carpet and hung up coordinating pictures which I purchased at a yard sale.

I grew up in a "designer" house, which seemed to me to be sterile and uninviting. I want the opposite for my family...I want a home that they can kick their shoes off and feel comfortable, a home where my children can slide down the banister and run up and down the halls and be free. It's a wonderful feeling to be able to give them this and on a budget to boot!