Pretty Pretty Pretty

[no, this is not my house.] [but so pretty, right?]

With extra time on my hands - and plenty of flexibility to spend that time how I want - I have been loving the chance to "fix up" parts of the house that needed some TLC. I love looking around and seeing art on the walls, pillows on the nice couch, pops of color where before it was just bland. It feels good. I would love to be expert at this and do it for a living. Just call me a Joanna Gains wanna-be.

But I notice how calming our house is now. It looks happy, organized, pretty. And I really love a pretty house.

What comes up quite a lot lately is the need to observe myself and my patterns. To figure out where you want to go, you have to figure out where you are. And that's part of the work that I'm doing on myself. What the hell do I want? Well - I gotta look at the stuff that makes me happy. And this stuff makes me happy.

I've always loved "primping" a space to make it feel fresh and pretty. Even as a child, I felt very grown-up (always the goal) when I could dress my bed up like a day bed, and organize my dresser with a display of my favorite tchotchkes (there were many). I had little plants even. What has always been missing is the massive budget that I think it takes to decorate a space properly. Those addictive decorating shows on TV make it seem so easy - they have access to crazy funding. These pillows that I fell in love with from Coyuchi, for example, they EACH cost $250. That is so not happening (well, thank God for DIY and my mom, because she made them for $20 each).

I'd like to figure out how designers do that. I guess they just find rich clients (?) but it seems to me that the budgets they work with on those darn TV shows would no way cover the furniture and all that construction work. It's a mystery. I'm intrigued...