Ballsy.

I’m all about adding touches of holiday sparkle all over my little house, but my budget forces me to be creative. Luckily, there are plenty of easy ways to deck the halls without depleting my checking account. So, without further ado . . .

Balls. Or rather, ornaments. They’re not just for the tree anymore! Sherry and John over at This Young House have some great posts about creative ways to work ornaments into your décor. I especially love their use of silver ornaments with moss.

My favorite Christmassy thing in my own house is still the ornaments in my kitchen window.

I tried to bring some ornamentation to the dining room by hanging a little cluster of them from the chandelier, but I’m kind of back and forth on whether I like them this way.

It’s a little reminiscent of a cluster of grapes. Or a uvula. What do you think? If I get bored (or if I get insomnia, which is more likely these days), I’m going to try re-hanging them individually from different spots in the chandelier, like I saw on the Domino website.

I also use ornaments in baskets, bowls, vases, and in large, lidded cylindrical vases on my mantel. (Side note: in my experience, TJ Maxx and Marshall’s are the best places to find glass vases and hurricanes, even cheaper than you’ll find them at Target or other discount stores.)

And the mantel brings us to our second cheap (free, actually) method of holiday décor: nature! Can’t get much freer than crap you pick up in your own yard! Stay tuned . . .

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Like Oprah's Favorite Things, except no one cares!

Sigh. My skin has reverted to its thirteen-year-old pimpliness, I have some monster pinched-nerve issue going on with my back and neck right now, and I have a sneaking suspicion that both of these things are at least partly due to holiday stress. I think it's pretty lame of me to let something as happy as Christmas make me all stressed out, so I'm going to take a moment to reflect upon some of the simple, non neck-pinching things I love about this time of year.

Seasonal Fruit.

Sure, summer's bounty is long gone, but there are some great things in season in winter, too. Like pomegranates (kind of a pain to actually eat, but so healthy and tasty), and my personal favorite, clementines!

Clementines are the ultimate winter treat for me, especially when I've been over-indulging on all the turkey dinners and baked goods we're inundated with this time of year. They require no silverware, they are sweet and (usually) seedless, and they add color and cheer (and their citrusy fragrance!) to your kitchen.

Trader Joe's Goodies.

No longer do I have to beg and bribe friends from out of state to send me Trader Joe's care packages, or drag my poor hapless hosts in other cities (sorry, guys) to grocery stores when I visit them. Nashville finally got its very own Trader Joe's last month, and I have already patronized it much more than I should.



Trader Joe's has its own version of Oreo sandwich cookies, the adorably-named Joe-Joe's. At Christmas, they stock limited quantities of Candy Cane Joe-Joe's. People, the creme filling is sprinkled with pieces of candy cane! So good.

I prefer to enjoy my Candy Cane Joe-Joe's with milk (the dunking is very important), but to accompany other cookies, I enjoy a nice cup of TJ's Wintry Blend Coffee, which has a spicy holiday kick to it. I need to get over there and snatch up another canister of this before it's all gone!

Starbucks Holiday Drinks.



I know, I know, times are dire and five-dollar drinks are frivolous. I agree. In fact, I've only had one peppermint mocha this year. I'll probably indulge in a couple more, plus a gingerbread latte. These goofy sweet drinks are a nice pick me up in the midst of all the holiday craziness.

For a cheaper treat at home, I indulge in the somewhat trashier. . .

Coffeemate Seasonal Creamers.
Look, flavored non-dairy creamer is seventeen kinds of wrong, and most of the time, I stay clear away from it. But something about these holiday flavors makes it all okay in my mind. I don't ask you to understand, but I do suggest that you try the gingerbread flavor.

As for the eggnog, that just seems too gross, even for me.

(Surprise: a non-edible item!) A Charlie Brown Christmas.

I love all kinds of Christmas music, and just like my wallet makes allowances for goofy coffee drinks and my conscience overlooks the nastiness of oil-based coffee creamer, my snob-o-meter lowers a few notches around the holidays. This is why Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas" will always be on my holiday playlist.

But even the most severe music critic has to admit that the music on A Charlie Brown Christmas by The Vince Guaraldi Trio, stands the test of time and taste. It's beautiful music that awakens the nostalgic, warm and fuzzy dork within me. Give it a listen while you're wrapping gifts, or play it in your car to lessen the stress from holiday shopping traffic. Pin It

Haul! Out! The Holleeeee!

Did everyone else have to squawk out "We Need a Little Christmas" in an awkward holiday musical program? No? Okay. The point is, I got all of my Christmas crap put up! My halls are decked, my stockings are hung by the chimney with care, and all that jazz.

I love the smell and look of a real tree, but space constraints and a lovely skin allergy (think welts and hives) to evergreen sap means that we go the fake route. Our tree is tall and skinny, and I kind of love it. It’s pre-lit with white lights (though I confess to preferring big, cheery colored bulbs), and we add some big bubble lights of our own.

My favorite thing on our tree is the vintage Bradford star, passed down to us from Seth's parents, who inherited it from a friend's parents. It has a little tin-can type thing inside it (with colored cellophane inserts) that fits over the bulb. The heat from the bulb makes the can spin, throwing crazy colored squiggles and W's on our walls. LOVE.

I’ve never been much into themed trees, choosing instead to accumulate ornaments over the years and not worry whether they match or not. Hey, if nothing matches, then everything does, right? Or something.

Anyway, this philosophy has resulted in some wonderful ornaments, and some not-so-wonderful ones. One of my favorite ornaments ever is this totally hideous thing made of plastic-wrapped satin floss that Seth’s kooky aunt and uncle gave us the year we got married.

• Wacky 1982 hair? Check.
• Cheesy sipping of brandy snifters in front of the fire? Check.
• A properly supportive bra for the lady? No check. Tsk, tsk.

Sorry, I got lost in the beauty of the ornament there for a second.

Big packages of glass ornaments are the cheapest way to liven up any room, tree or no tree. Inspired by a Martha Stewart Living cover from two Christmases ago (apparently this was an alternate cover, so sorry for the image. It was hard to find even a blurry image!), I like to hang ornaments in my kitchen window.


Martha suggested fastening eye hooks into your window casing, but my old, rickety windows have enough issues without screwing extra stuff into them. Therefore, I use a tension rod. This is a little more awkward-looking, but I like to think no one notices it because they're distracted by the ornaments. The ornaments are hung on pieces of ribbon collected from gifts, and strands of beads snipped from a roll of bead garland that we used on our Christmas tree a few years ago.


The best thing about the tension rod is that I take the whole thing down--rod, ribbons, ornaments and all--fully assembled, and just hang it in the attic until next year. All I have to do is give it a good dusting when it's time to re-hang it.

More cheap and cheerful uses for ornaments to come soon! Pin It

Thanksgiving in My Teensy House

I offered up my miniature house for Thanksgiving dinner festivities last Thursday night. It seemed like a good idea in my head. As Thanksgiving drew near, and both my sisters confirmed that their tall-tall boyfriends would be in attendance, in addition to my not-so-short father, my house felt like it was shrinking by the minute. My little pedestal table normally seats four, six with a leaf inserted.

We had to pull out the old dining room table from the basement, since it has two leaves and is crazy long. We borrowed some chairs from our friends Frank and Brandon, and their slipcovers just happened to merge perfectly with our decor! We also moved the buffet to avoid the situation of having guests with their backs pressed directly against dishes of sweet potatoes and cornbread dressing.

It turned out really well! I loved getting to use my china and crystal and gigantic tablecloth. It was still a tight squeeze to get to the buffet, but I was the only one who had to move, instead of one whole side of the table getting up and shuffling around every time someone wanted seconds.

I tried to add a little more fall color with some mums, a lucky find at Kroger on the manager’s special markdown table. All they needed was a little water and they perked right up. In fact, they still look pretty good. I stuck the cheap plastic pots down into my enamel flower pails to dress them up.

We lit a fire in the fireplace (well, a starter log, but whatever), shipped the dogs off to their “grandmother’s” house for the night, and had a wonderful time with everyone.

Next up: Christmas decorating. We face some special challenges this year, in addition to our usual budget and space constraints. Graham is in destroyer-mode all the time now, it seems, and we can’t figure out what to do with our Christmas tree to keep him from pulling it to the ground and shattering our ornaments.

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Nursery for Next-to-Nothing

My favorite room in the house is definitely Graham's nursery. When I found out I was pregnant (well, after I sent my husband out to buy 14 more pregnancy tests --"Make sure they're the most EXPENSIVE ones at the store!"--and after the hiccupping and crying jag--"I mean, I wanted to have a baby, but on my terrrrrmmmmms!"), I became obsessed with the idea of furnishing and decorating the nursery. I made dorky little diagrams of furniture placement (which is pretty ridiculous, as there are only so many ways you can position things in a 10 x 9 room). I lusted after all the chic baby furniture I spied on Ohdeedoh and Babble. I coveted a sleek Oeuf crib with Dwell bedding. And then I realized that if I bought these things, we would no longer be able to pay our mortgage, and we would all have to live on the streets, huddled under our overturned Oeuf crib, with only our Dwell bumpers for warmth.

Lucky for me, there's so much cute baby stuff out there for any budget! Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of ugly business, too. But I figured out what we needed, decided there were plenty of things we could do without, and adapted lots of things we already owned. The result is (well, I think) pretty dang cute.

I was lucky to receive a beautiful crib as a gift from my aunt. She had me register for one, so I tried to choose one from Target with basic lines that would convert to a larger bed down the road. Once I found out I was having a boy, I found some bedding I loved from Target (heck, now Target even has its own line of super-cute Dwell bedding), and figured out the rest of the room from there. I loved the Splash bedding from MiGi. I think it's cute without being too cutesy, and modern without being cold.

I had some Behr paint matched to the blue of the bedding. Although we had a spanking new crib, we had no other nursery furniture. We found a comfortable and sturdy Dutalier glider-rocker and ottoman on Craigslist ($65!), but it was oak, with a less-than-cute country blue cushion. I slathered it in white paint and recovered (okay, my mom recovered) the cushions in a lime microfiber ($9 per yard). I took inventory of our basement full of castoff junk and decided to use Seth's childhood maple chest of drawers, the tall brown Target bookcase from our former office (now the nursery), and a short bookcase that had been our kitchen microwave stand.

Seth's childhood dresser, above, got a fresh coat of paint and some chrome handles ($3 apiece at Home Depot). The shelves above the dresser are from Target's home office section, and are in the exact spot they were in when the room was our office. They just look a lot sweeter with Graham's toys on them. See, laziness works sometimes. That's our old kitchen microwave stand, cleaned and outfitted with a changing pad and some canvas bins from, where else, Target. The brown rug is wonderful--it's made of recycled t-shirts and is from Wal-Mart.

I used my leftover green and white paint for some fishy art on the walls that I tried to match to the fish in the bedding. I thought it was ridiculous to spend $20 per letter to put Graham's name over the bed, but I found a woman on eBay who sells them for under $5 per letter, plus she lets you pick your paint and ribbon color!

I think the room is so restful and sweet, which is nice since I spend so much time in there. And Graham seems pretty pleased with it, too.

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More Cheap Tricks

So, the dining room. To put things in perspective, you should see what we started with.


This isn't the best picture--it doesn't show you the entire room--but you get the gist, right? Please note the Pathway of Filth that leads through the avocado shag into the kitchen, and the swanky pull-down light fixture that was coated in years of grease and dust.

Okay then.

Like the living room, the dining room also went through a transitional period, during which I liked very dark, saturated colors, and also during which I had no furniture. The result was a very traditional cave/dining room with deep red walls, my mom's old uber-traditional dining furniture (which I was not allowed to paint), and some very dramatic gold fabric (with tassles! Oh, my!) twisted up over the window. The fabric was intended for curtians, but I was too lazy to make them. We did manage to put a chandelier and some crown molding up.




The red was okay, and I especially liked it in the fall and over the holiday season, but it could feel oppressive in my tiny, tiny house. It really didn't feel very "me," either. The table, even with no leaves in, was too big for a room that we have to walk through constantly, and the chairs were too bulky. Over time, the dining room has evolved into what I think is something that's brighter, crisper, and much more reflective of who we are.










The walls are now a crisp apple/pear green (Sherwin Williams "Parakeet"). The curtains are from Target, and I was thrilled at their quality: thick fabric, nice lining, available in the long length that I need for my tall windows. We found the Spencer pedestal table at Crate and Barrel a couple years ago (I think it pops up in the online outlet store from time to time now), clearanced out because it was a floor model. We had the white chairs leftover from our years as renters, when we actually had an eat-in kitchen.

I craved a different light fixture, maybe something with a drum shade, but just taking the mumsy silk shades of the chandelier has placated me for now.








The above picture shows some of our baby clutter (high chair, exersaucer), but I included it for the shot of the buffet (flea market, $150) and the sunburst mirrors that I ordered from Pottery Barn Kids, thanks to a hot tip from Holly at Decor8. I think I may paint the mirrors black.


I'd had my china and crystal and whathaveyou on a big white bookshelf that Seth's grandfather made him years ago, but when Graham started crawling, we realized what a bad idea that was. I scoured Craigslist for something with doors on it, but all I could find were massive, overpriced (and sometimes hideous) china hutches. Then, a few weeks ago, I found this simple cabinet:

I loved its scale and its cute legs. The picture didn't tell me much about the quality of the wood. I decided if it turned out to be nice (visions of Heywood Wakfefield danced in my head), I would use it as-is, and if not, I would paint it.

Alas, it was not Heywood Wakefield blonde maple; it was wood from the Ikea Tree. So I went through forty-seven cans of spray paint and ended up with something I'm quite happy with.

I still need to touch up the paint a bit, and I'd like to add some more exciting hardware (Anthropologie's clearance bins are calling my name), but I'm pleased. I love the Craigslist.

From the last picture, you can kind of see into my kitchen, which isn't quite camera-ready (and not just because of the giant playpen blocking the door). Hopefully, after over a year of painfully slow DIY renovations, it will be done very soon and I can show it off here.

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Cheap and Cheerful

Inspired by Holly's post over at Decor8 asking, "How do you decorate your home on a budget?", I decided to dredge up my stagnant, never-quite-got-off-the-ground blog to document some of my, um, "design" projects. The husband and I have modest jobs, and especially since I've had a baby and switched to working part-time, everything I do is on a budget. Well, more of a pittance than a budget, but I like a challenge.

So, I'll start with my living room. A word of warning: I'm a horrible photographer, and many of these pictures are taken with a flash because it was nighttime. You'll have to trust me that the room is actually very sunny, when the sun is actually out. Okay then.

For reference, here is what the room looked like when we bought the house a few years ago:

Nice, right? We (optimistically) saw it as a blank slate. The room has gone through a few incarnations since those photos, including a sort of Friends-esque period of overstuffed furniture, murky paint choices, and clunky armoires. Think late-90s Pottery Barn meets poverty. Poverty Barn? That look was okay, but last year I decided I needed more streamlined furniture and a sunnier, cheerier color. So here it is, in its current state:

I painted the walls a pale, yellowy cream color (Ralph Lauren "Victoriana"). (I really need to touch up most of the white woodwork, but we'll see when that happens.) I drug two knockoff LeCorbusier LC2 chairs out of the basement, where they had languished since our home office became Graham's nursery. These chairs were a crazy steal--when I worked part-time at a women's clothing store right out of college, our store was remodeled, and the employees had a chance to buy the furniture. These were our "husband" chairs, where bored men sat while their ladies shopped. I paid a whopping FIFTY DOLLARS apiece for them, and they've held up great.

Our "coffee table" is a leather ottoman that I got on clearance at SteinMart (kind of like Marshall's or TJ Maxx) that used to be at the foot of our bed. This is much safer (I think) than a hard-edged table, since we have a 9 month-old toddling around now. Plus we can use it for extra seating in a pinch. The sofa, from Macy's Corona line, was the only big purchase we made for the room. I made throw pillows out of some Waverly fabric remnants (fifty cents apiece at my favorite fabric store). I kept the old window shades, which are from Pier 1 and made of woven hemp and paper. In the winter, I hang velvet curtains over them, which adds a cozy, layered look and has the added bonus of keeping us from freezing to death. I put a couple of sturdy floor cushions from Ross in an otherwise useless corner as a make-shift bed for our doggies, as a bribe to keep them off the new couch.

The vintage 1950s floor lamp is my favorite yard sale find ever. It set me back a cool $40.

The wall where the TV lives looked so bare after I got rid of the hulking armoire. I craved some lighting and cheerful artwork, but those things cost money. I had two matching Target gourd lamps in different rooms in my house, so I put them together atop two skinny Target Hudson bookcases to flank my skimpy TV stand. The flatscreen TV takes up less space, which is nice, but it left a huge void on the wall. I ripped pages out of a Cavallini bird calendar ($10 on an after-Christmas sale at Barnes and Noble) and put them in pre-matted frames from JoAnn ($8 each after those handy 40% off coupons from the Sunday paper).

The fireplace wall is still unfinished. I have considered painting the mantel and mirror black or turquoise--I feel like there's just too much white going on here--and take that dingy, dated brass surround off of the fireplace, but I did want to share a couple of lucky, budget-friendly finds. The gigantic mirror was a hand-me-down from a friend who decided it wasn't "modern" enough for her. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it looked like it was made especially for my mantelpiece.

The alcove to the right of the fireplace was a real problem spot. I get hung up on symmetry (or lack thereof), so I wasn't crazy about the random, DIY brown shelves on brass brackets that were there when we bought the house. I wanted something that would sort of mirror the coat closet on the left side of the fireplace. When I spotted the Ikea Alve desk and hutch in a Real Simple feature a few years ago, I thought it could work. I was thrilled to find the measurements were almost perfect. I drove to Atlanta, found the Alve pieces, and painted them to match our woodwork. We found the small, armless banker's chair at a yard sale for $25. Its small scale is perfect for the tiny space. Finally, I find some flowers from my own scrubby "garden" (if you can call my weedy front yard that) in an old glass milk bottle to be the epitome of cheap, cheerful decor.

(Update: we had to move the little rolling banker's chair to the basement after Graham started climbing on it--and falling off of it), so we replaced it with one of our dining room chairs. We also found a great turquoise rolling storage bin at World Market, which works great for our files since that secretary is effectively our home office. And I still haven't painted the mantel or mirror. I guess the white has grown on me!)



That was fun! Next up: my parrot-green dining room and my super-cheap kitchen remodel (AKA, an ode to Ikea and Target).

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