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| Big Blank Wall Alert |
Now that
I’ve been in my home for 2 and a half weeks, I’ve decided that I’m giving
myself a grace period of a year…as far as décor and design go. I’m going to need a year to figure out what I
want for my home, a year to make it all the way through the house. Right now I’m just logging in hours here,
reading on my couch and looking around at the bare walls. I brainstorm a bit about what furniture
pieces or wall décor would look good, but my brain really doesn’t naturally
storm that way.
It’s not
that I want to just keep reading and neglect my bare walls; it’s just
that…dude, where do I start?
As a
college and grad student, I learned a few things about procrastination and
working under a deadline. When I had a
paper due, I had to muster up the discipline to write out the outline—just sit
in the seat and close down my internet browser.
Just start, just write. Once I
had my outline done, I knew where I was going. Half my energy was exerted in just getting off
to a good start. Getting started was the biggest step, followed by several
small steps.
Any mess in
life—whether the mess in my bedroom or the mess in my office or the mess of a situation
I care about—any mess in my life seems to paralyze me. I’d really like for the situation to become
completely clean and organized, but where do I start? I whine to my mom or to
my friends that I just need them to help me get started.
I have
often talked with my mom about this. I
have some strengths in life, but organizing a mess is not one of them. Neither is figuring out how to put together a
beautiful centerpiece or decorating an entire home. Most of the time, this kind of thing
literally gives me a headache. When I
think about these projects, I feel like I have a heavy blanket on me, and I
can’t move. I have to fight myself to do
it, and I usually end up getting ticked at how inefficient I feel.
That’s
naïve and immature, but also very real. (Anybody else with me on this?) I guess it’s natural to cringe and hate our
weaknesses like they’re lice or something.
But organizing, decorating, and creativity are important parts of
life. I can’t go through life saying I’m
bad at it and just figuring that I will always have a semi-cluttered home that
will only be about 25% as beautiful as it could be. I have to remember the times when I’ve worked
hard at a project, and it turned out beautiful.
It’s exhausting
spending money on décor, but that also shouldn’t be my excuse. In her book The Nesting Place: It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect to Be Beautiful,
Myquillyn Smith encourages us to take advantage of craigslist, thrift stores,
and garage sales. She says, “Even if I
had all the money in the world, I’d still look for secondhand pieces for my
home.”[1]
Great, more creativity required. But
maybe creativity is a muscle; the more I use it, the stronger I will be.
So I’m
giving myself a year, letting myself off the hook, letting myself live and
breathe and eat here, letting myself take my time to make up my mind.
And even
now, as I write this, I’m looking around and staring at my walls. I’m staring at my furniture. My brain is trying to storm. Even though I’m giving myself a gracious
deadline since design doesn’t come easy to me, I still need to start now, room
by room.
If I think
of my house as a research paper (which I am more familiar with than interior
decorating), then I think of my purpose for my home as my thesis and each room
as a section in the paper. I’ll think of
developing each room like I would develop a paragraph.
To begin, I
need to choose the room that I will focus on first. This is an easy choice for me. I choose my bedroom. I’ve told some of my friends that I am LOVING
my bedroom because it is so big, and the paint color is so soft and calm, and
I’m still hopelessly in love with my ivory bedspread even though it gets
fuzzies all over my pajamas. This love
is unconditional—the ivory fuzzies do not bother me one bit (but my black jeans
do not go near it).
The bedroom
that I had at my parents’ house was a good-sized room, but I had 26 years worth
of stuff packed in there—2 bookshelves, 2 dressers, a crammed closet, and full
bins under my bed. Since I often left
shoes and books on the floor, there was barely enough space to walk or sit down
to paint my toenails. It’s my fault; I
really should have given a bunch of stuff away a long time ago. But either way, now it makes me appreciate my
new bedroom all the more.
My new
bedroom feels so big and open and easy-breezy to me. But it is still majorly unfinished. Oh, help.
2. Find
your muse. I guess my muse in my bedroom is the color combo of white and
bronze against the grayish-blue paint color.
It looks country and a little antiquey and just nice and simple. I’m
really not interested in introducing more colors to this room because I don’t
want to take away from that simplicity.
3. Quiet
the room. I need to clear out the
excess of the room and let it be for awhile.
This is easy for me because as a new house, the room doesn’t have years
of clutter that needs to be cleared out and years of the tradition of how the
space was set up before. But I’ve got
about 3 big boxes in there right now that I still need to unpack. Then it’s time to stare and consider what new
things can happen in this space. (Myquillyn says she “quiets each room” at
least once a year.)
4. Enter
my lovely limitations. By this point (after a considerable amount of
staring), I’ve figured out what is weird about the space and what I wish the
builder would have done differently. Even
though the room is big, my options of where to put a dresser are limited
because of where my window is and because of the side-by-side doorways to my
closet and bathroom. And then my smaller
decorations won’t look right on the walls because they are so big.
At this step,
Myquillyn encourages us to be creative to work with these imperfections. She has found that some of the cutest touches
in her home have been when she was forced to work around a seemingly awful
imperfection.
5. Prep
your canvas. Now I can’t make excuses. It’s time to go for
it. Stop being a wuss and take risks—forget about the fear of making
mistakes. Forget that this is my
“weakness.” I have to believe that creativity
is a process. I have to believe that beauty is worth it. (Remind me when you can, when my face falls
and I glare at you that I just need a break…my mom and sisters know this facial
expression of mine well.) Lest I get
overwhelmed and quit, I’ll be focusing on the canvas of one room at a time.
I'm so prone to get overwhelmed by this. But I think the one-room-at-a-time strategy will help. My bedroom this month.
Probably the living room next month. Deep breath and go at my own
pace. Enjoy the little victories. I think this goal is worth it. Just one room
at a time.
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| My friends Dave & Marie gave me this. I love how it looks in my bedroom!! |
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