Remem­ber when I wrote about dust bun­nies and my fan­tasy of hav­ing a blog ded­i­cated to home décor? I’m still work­ing on my issues.

But, I came across two blog posts from The Nester which dis­cusses this very topic. Do you know The Nester? She has one of those great blogs that shows won­der­ful dec­o­rat­ing ideas, but stresses that “It doesn’t have to be per­fect to be beau­ti­ful.” I love her. She speaks my language.

Any­way, I thought I would share the links here so that you can read some of her sim­ple ideas to help your house look even better.

One of her ideas that I par­tic­u­larly loved was the idea that you can take your screens off your win­dows. Okay, I should know this one already. When we lived in Eng­land, we had no screens. I adored not hav­ing screens. Every­thing looked so clear and beau­ti­ful look­ing out. You didn’t have to look through that dark screen to the out­side. It just adds so much more light. But for some rea­son, I never brought the idea back home to the US. Where we live, we don’t really have bugs. Oh, except dur­ing moth sea­son. Hmmm. I’ll have to rethink that one. Think “The Birds” only in minia­ture. Scary. Not that I have actu­ally ever seen “The Birds,” but I can imag­ine. Any­way, if you don’t have a moth sea­son like we do, it might work for you. It’s glorious.

the nester

The first blog post is Three Weird Rea­sons My House Looks Decent Online. I couldn’t help but won­der if she was talk­ing to me. Like she knows I exist. Yeah, prob­a­bly not.

The sec­ond one is actu­ally my favorite of the two: 3 Ways My House Looks Worse In Real Life. Maybe she just makes me feel bet­ter about where I’m at.

the nester

Oh, and did you see the idea about the fire­place? It points out one impor­tant thing to me: I am a rule fol­lower. Who knew you could take the glass out of the gas fire­place? Seri­ously? I would never have con­sid­ered doing that! But I have always hated that glass. I scowl at it often. It just takes away so much from the effect of the fire­place. I have dreamed of mak­ing that fire­place pretty when not in use. Which is about 6 weeks in the sum­mer, on good years. Assum­ing win­ter ended early and starts late. Yes, I exag­ger­ate. But not by much. I thought I was stretch­ing things when I took all the brass accents and painted them black. I am not a fan of brass. But I love black accents. It made a huge dif­fer­ence. After the fact, we won­dered if we used the right paint, was it going to melt and get paint all over the floor…So far, 6 years later, it is still black and no paint on the floor. I guess we did okay.

So, in addi­tion to learn­ing some great ideas for improv­ing the way my home looks, I also learned that I need to think out­side of the box more.

Which is the cat­a­lyst for another post com­ing soon. I went to Good­will and found some­thing cool. And I am try­ing to think out­side of the box about it. More details to fol­low soon!