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Decorating

1970 home renovation

progress on the front garden bed

I’ve been chipping away at gardening projects this week and have most of the front garden bed planted. After looking at black plastic for a year, it’s nice to see plants and mulch out there.  As a reminder, I laid down black plastic to smother some weeds and get a fresh start with this bed.  A couple of weeks ago, I started lifting up the plastic to plant a boxwood hedge along the house.  I received several comments from experienced gardeners, encouraging me to move the hedge away from the house and porch… As I started spacing out the rest of the plants, I decided it would be best to listen to seasoned advice and move the hedge. I removed the plastic section-by-section, planting, laying down cardboard as a weed barrier, and mulched.  I planted a small square boxwood hedge around the birdbath and surrounded that with English lavender.  I’m

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All Things Home

what to get rid of, what to keep | organizing

As I’ve been sharing my organizing and purging efforts, I have been asked by several blog readers how I decide what to keep and what to get rid of.  One reader expressed hesitancy to get rid of something for fear she might need it down the road.  So, I thought I would share some of the rules I used for deciding what to keep and what to get rid of.  These rules aren’t unbreakable, but they are guidelines that help me make better decisions about stuff.  Not only the decisions of what to keep and what to let go, but also what I buy in the first place. rule number one – space The first filter everything has to run through is do we have space for it in our house.  Space can be subjective because you can have space for a lot of things and not be able to

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Decorating

the mediumalized living room shelves

The living room shelves were one area that made me decide it was time to thin down my ironstone collection and other antiques from my stash.  I put ironstone casseroles on the top shelf because I had nowhere else to put them.  Since I’ve displayed all sorts of ironstone pieces all over my house for years, it didn’t seem odd, but I realized I put them there by default, not because they were the best thing for those shelves.  I felt like the shelves would look better if I removed them and rearranged.  Here’s how the shelves and mantel were decorated over the holidays… And I left everything in place once I took the greenery down.  As the weather was starting to warm up, though, it felt like too much stuff, and I wanted to simplify. I removed everything from the mantel except the blue and white ginger jars and

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All Things Home

tackling the side garden

Earlier this year, our family worked together to trim down the abelia hedge as part of the first phase of getting this garden bed under control.  You can tell it used to be a beautiful garden bed – a semi-circular hedge of flowering abelia bushes framing a lilac tree that offered some privacy to the bedroom and bathroom windows.  It has gone unchecked for too many years, though, and it needs a lot of work.  Here is how it looked before we trimmed the hedge in February… And here is how it looks today, now that the abelia bushes have started to leaf in. It already looks better, even though there is still a lot to do! We had a beautiful evening yesterday, so I worked on this garden bed for about an hour.  There were maple saplings that had been allowed to grow haphazardly for a few years, coming

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All Things Home

sheet organizers

About a year and a half ago, I worked on organizing our linen closets.  I had just dumped everything in them when we moved in, and they were consistently a mess.  I did a pretty good job at the time of thinning things out and getting the closets to a place where they felt organized and functional.  For the sheet sets, which are always a challenge when it comes to having a tidy linen closet, I folded the flat and fitted sheets together and stored each set in a pillowcase with a label pinned on. I knew pulling sheet sets out and putting them away would be a pain, but I tried it.  Yeah, it was a pain, and while it looked okay, I felt like there might be a better solution.  I happened to trip across sheet organizer boxes online and had to test them out!  There are various

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All Things Home

organizing the guest room/sewing room

As I’ve been organizing, I’ve done a terrible job photographing how closets, drawers, and cabinets looked before!  I sort of hop around, working on multiple spaces at once, and get a closet half ripped apart before I realize I didn’t capture a before picture.  I did manage to get a picture of this closet in the guest room after I had only pulled a few things off the top shelves.  Other than having overhead lights installed, we haven’t done any work in this room since it’s used as a guest room and for storing my sewing and knitting stuff, but it’s on the list! Anyway, here is what this closet looked like before I started working on it.  I had organized it pretty well when we first moved in, but it’s gotten a little messy as I’ve shoved things in there over the past couple of years.  As with the

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All Things Home

the mixer that’s always a tad too big

One of my main functional objectives when I designed our kitchen was to hide all of the appliances except for the Ilve range.  I didn’t want a toaster, electric kettle, coffee maker, or any small appliances sitting out on the counter, and I wanted the fridge and dishwasher to be paneled.  While necessary, those appliances almost always look modern and feel out of place in my aesthetic.  The one exception is my Kitchen Aid stand mixer.  Jeff bought it for me as a housewarming gift when we bought and moved into our first home, and through all of my different decorating stages, I’ve liked having it sit out. My plan in this kitchen was to store it under the freestanding antique kitchen island.  I eyeballed it, and it looked like it would work, so that was the plan.  In reality, it didn’t work.  It was just a smidge too tall. 

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All Things Home

mediumalism

Over the weekend, I continued working through the house, thinning out areas and setting things aside to sell or taking them to the thrift store.  I have unearthed an entire closet in the guest room that was embarrassingly piled floor to ceiling with stuff.  At the bottom of the pile was a bin of clothes I hadn’t seen since our move.  It contained some of my favorite pairs of jeans that I thought I had donated!  I keep calling Jeff over to look at a closet or a cabinet, drawer, or shelf I’ve thinned out and organized.  It feels good. As I was pulling stuff last week, I decided to thin out the items on my kitchen counters and hanging from the potrack.  As a collector, I sometimes have a hard time putting the brakes on when I have enough!  I was trying to fit way too much in a

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I’m Marian, a painter, writer, and lover of all things creative. From art and antiques to home projects and everyday life, I share my journey in hopes of inspiring you to embrace your own creativity and make beauty in the spaces you live.

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