Decorating 101: Welcome to Your House With Kids

I don’t know about anyone else, but something about the fresh new start of January inspires me to make changes around my house.  Maybe it’s because, after clearing away all of the Christmas clutter, you realize that you have all of this unused space.  Not that it’s really unused space.  It just looks that way because there are big gaping holes where your tree and an assortment of Santas and nutcrackers once stood.

All I know is that the vibrant splashes of color that infused my living room and dining room last month are now void, and I’m left with the January blahs in regards to interior décor.  So, I’m on a mission to perk up our nest.  This means I’ve returned to my previously-cured addiction of … dundt-dundt-duh-duh …

ETSY.

Could there be any better collection of affordable, fabulous stuff?  I find all sorts of things that I need want, and once I start it’s almost impossible to stop.  Now I will say, I’ve gotten much better at culling through the myriad of vendors and assortment of items, becoming more selective over time.  The first month I joined, I ordered so much stuff that our mail carrier actually asked my husband what the hell was going on.  I’m not kidding.  So I bought her a Starbucks gift card to (sort of) make up for all of the boxes she was carrying to our front porch in the sweltering summer heat.  She probably already thinks I’m crazy anyway because I subscribe to about ten magazines, and the other ten I get a month are from various vendors that have figured out I have a weakness for home decorating and cute children’s clothes.

***sigh***

I’m also serious about this mission to redecorate because I’m hosting a sizeable baby shower for my sister next month.  It’s her first (and it took a longggggg time), plus it’s a girl (an anomaly in our family), so it just absolutely has to be fabulous.  What is it about throwing a large party that makes you look at your house and proclaim, “major overhaul ahead!!”  I do know that it makes me get my butt in gear on projects that need to be tackled or completed anyway.  It’s a great motivator. 

To be honest, I don’t want a guest noticing that the curtain rod in our bedroom is hanging like someone swung from it, because they did.  Or that someone colored on my windows with blue Crayola, because they did that too.  Or that someone might have broken a glass sconce by throwing a rubber ball at the bathroom wall.  Oh yeah.  That one was real fun to clean up.  Microscopic shards of glass that I had to meticulously sweep and collect from inside the tub so that they didn’t go down the drain or poke me in the butt the next time I needed a soak.  Fun I tell ya.

Maybe I could leave it all as is and make it the shower theme: 

“Welcome to Your House with Kids!”

Nah. 

Because that sure wouldn’t help any of those Etsy vendors.  They’re counting on me.