Decorating!

Don't worry, there's lot more posts on the way! In case you wonder why it's been a slow blogging week for me, I've been working on getting the house fixed up a bit.

We've lived here now for nearly 15 years, and we put in new carpet last year, tile a couple years ago, and we're interviewing some folks now to replace the cabinets in the kitchen. So that's been a bit time-consuming.

Plus I've been sprucing up a few things up around the house myself.

For instance, we have new drapes, which let the light in and have the advantage of not being clawed up by the cats when they were kittens like the last batch. Here's a shot of the bay window with the new curtains up.

We also bought a recliner for the family room which is SO-O-O comfortable I am sitting in it right now as I post this. The Engineer and the Rhino (who is now, at not-quite-15, over 6 feet tall) tell me the recliner is STILL not big enough for them, although it was literally the longest, tallest one they had (that's okay, I'll sit in it enough for both of them). We added a swivel base so we can also turn and talk to whoever is in the kitchen.The living room is now a bit comfier thanks to the addition of wing chair I picked up for a song at a garage sale.

Here's a pic of it next to our old rocking chair.

Continuing on in the home improvement vein, yesterday I bought some green floral foam, wire cutters and loose flowers at the craft store, got down the old baskets I had for our plant shelves, and made up new flower arrangements for them.


Here's all that stuff, assembled, and the plant shelf, looking all bare and empty and sad.

Consider this the before picture, because although I had the baskets up there, the flowers were really ugly and didn't fill them up and...well, just not good.

I took a RIDICULOUSLY long time picking out all the flowers. Long stems are popular now, as are tall vases, and though I like them, and even have a couple in the family room, for the plant shelves I needed something shorter and wider to go in my baskets. I finally decided on lots of "cottage flowers," bunches of blossoms in shorts stems. I bought some greens and just a few longer stemmed items for fillers.

And then I had to arrange them. Ugh.

Don't get me wrong, I had fun, but flowers NEVER look the way I imagine they will once I get going on them. I felt like I spent a lot of money on flowers, but when I was done I maybe still needed a few more to really fill up the baskets properly.

Even so, I actually saved LOTS of money by doing it myself. One arrangement I saw, which was about 1/2 the size of one of my two baskets, was ON SALE for $60! Most were $99.

I bought all my flowers, the foam and the wire cutters for about $40.

Here's one of the finished products.

What do you think?

I think I might go get a few more poofy flowers today...