This post about vintage baskets struck a chord in me. I have a particular fondness for containers. <g> It must be a mother’s (or maybe a farmer’s) instinct to herd things into little groups. I pick up baskets, old and new, wherever I can lately. I gathered Brendan’s board books into this one:

The books we use for morning time are in here:

Diapering supplies are stored in a wide basket in the bathroom which somehow didn’t get in on the picture taking. Anyway, that one was a gift basket in its previous life.

I found some nice wire baskets while thrifting but they were a bit too new. The garish shiny steel finish was a no-go for me. The solution was found in a can of rust finish spray paint. Instant antiquity! They fit in much better now.

I have a few more to work on. I picked  up a Jenny Lind baby crib and changing table for next to nothing last year. They matched our old cradle which admittedly is more useful for display than for baby. ; ) I decided to paint them all and found a few wicker baskets to paint in coordinating colors for storaging baby clothes right on the changing table. Stay tuned for that project. Well, don’t hold your breath though. I did mention I hatched this plan last YEAR, right? <g>

I saw some checked melamine in the new Country Living magazine (a must have subscription I am thinking!).  The CS Post and Company site which sells these beauties is a treasure trove of domestic lovelies.  Oh my.  Two words, girlfriends – Eye Candy! I think I have a weakness for primary colors (or secondary colors, or….)  I still get a rush opening the 64 crayon Crayola box.  But I digress. <g>  Check it out:

Homespun Living

I so enjoyed Mrs Chancey’s replies to the questions readers posed here.  I share many of her thoughts. Some favorites:

"A child left to himself brings shame to his mother."  Prov 29:15  This one has always rung true.  Though another truth is that children who are supervised will occasionally do horrifically embarassing or undesirable things as well. Still, many small troubles can be avoided by your presence. Which brings us to her next thought:

"99% of our frustration with our children comes from the fact that we ourselves are selfish and do not want to set aside our own plans for the day to deal with foolishness."  And lets face it, who DOES want to deal with foolishness?  But children (and puppies) respond best to immediate feedback. Mrs Chancey says, this means "being willing to drop whatever it is we are doing (the phone call, chores, gardening, –anything) to deal with the trouble."  It does not mean making the children stop bothering us which is a huge clarification. It means "Nothing is more important than training the children."

These ideals are consistent with the Montessori admonition to observe, observe, observe. We can’t observe when we are on the phone, at a meeting, or on the internet. Did I just say that?  Yes.  That is the hardest truth of all.  I have nothing but admiration for a dear gypsy woman I adore who has made selfless choices to ensure that nothing sidetracks her from this vocation. We can surf for schedules, we can print endless chore charts, we can attend innumerable mom’s nights out.  None of it is worth beans if we aren’t here, face to face with the little people entrusted to us.

I am not "super mom". I have children with behavior challenges, some more than others. I have no "super" answers. After 21 years of mothering, in fact, I still have only one simple answer – be home, be involved, be content. This year has stretched our family in ways I could not have foreseen. It has served to drive home yet again what my priorities are and they are all under this roof.  As I was reminded yesterday if these difficulties served to bring this conviction back to the forefront of our minds then they were not for naught.

"We tell ourselves that nothing has changed. That we have achieved very little and our goals are as far off in the yonder as they ever where. Because we  are haunted by the sentiment  that life must move on, we suffer a shiver of disappointment when we look back and see that despite monumental daily
effort, life today is just what is was then and life tomorrow will be exactly the same because we do not have the will, the money, or the wherewithal to make it different.

But we do ourselves an injustice when we fail to stand back and look at the minutiae of our lives from a different perspective. When we do not recognise that every teeny weeny teeny step towards our domestic goals are steps in the right direction." –Brocante Home Chronicles 

She is right, you know. It is all too easy to convince ourselves that nothing is really changing despite herculean efforts to improve our lot.  I believe much of that is due to our season in life.  Dorcas Smucker wrote about her love of fall harvest time in her book Ordinary Days. (love it! love it! You must read it and tell me what you think!) She speculates that part of the draw is the fact that while gardening, unlike the rest of her life while in the throes of childrearing, she is able to actually see her work reach completion.  Completion does, in fact, elude most of us mothers on many days. Our children and our homes are works in progress at this stage. This can be demoralizing for homemakers and mothers, both of whom thrive on seeing a job well-done.

The secret is to look critically, to find areas of progress. We may not have every drawer of the kitchen sorted right at this moment but the appliances, backsplash and floors are scrubbed – at least until the next rain – and we finally hung our crochet valances.  The hall closet sports tidy stacks of sheets as I type.  The living room book shelves are in order. The laundry room has been emptied, dusted, mopped and reorganized. The girls have nice new comforters and sheet sets since we retired the old sets. I won’t describe my bedroom closet nor the teens’ room, nor the new school room, not just because they inspire far less contented thoughts but because my goal here is identify progress. Every day we make some. To modify the full/empty glass cliche – the house is halfway perfect or halfway messed at any given time. I am choosing to focus on the areas of near perfection while acknowledging, one area at a time, those that are next on the to-do list. I will not be discouraged into inertia by the impossibility of completion in this season.  Instead I will heed these additional words from the Brocante Home Vintage Homemaker:

"Inspiration doesn’t come from that which through utter boredom our mind’s eye chooses to ignore. In every aspect of our life we need to  keeping moving, rearranging, seeing things anew and drawing from that, reason to KEEP seeing things anew…"   

Challenge:

Move something around this weekend. Surely there is something that might work better in a new place. Set at least one goal that can be completed each day, whether that is filing your mail or filing your nails.

"When worry manages to work its way into my life, I’ve learned to clean away my troubles or put a polish on my let-go by mopping my floor or hanging high my laundry. For some reason, the utilitarian act of being on my knees or hanging garments on a line changes my brain chemistry. I become a better problems solver. I remember to step back." MaryJane Butters

Have I mentioned lately how much I adore MaryJane Farmgirl?  She says it just right. My ‘let-go’ has been in need of polishing as have my floors and woodwork so I have spent the past several days tackling all of the above as well as a few closets and pantries.  My brain is decluttering along with the corners of my house.

I read an inspiring article in Country Living this month about a family that turned a mobile home into a Shabby Chic paradise. The wife had purchased the home years earlier with as few interior walls as possible. She later married and the couple built a new home. Later they decided to throw themselves into their antiques business so they moved back into the now paid off mobile on two acres. See what they pulled off here!

Here is a totally different look but the same type of structure. Deep colored walls and warm country pieces transform this mobile.

How about Santa Fe style?   Or contemporary country?  Beach cottage?

These homes exemplify thinking outside the box and showcase what can be done with very modest homes. It doesn’t take a mansion. Just creativity and vision.

A couple nice sites to inspire you in the Decorating without Decorating pursuit:

A Montessori Home

The House Art Journal

Craftsman style rooms

Real Simple – Decorating with Everyday Items   Spend Nothing Makeover  Timeless Living Room

"There is a famous law of the physics that states that, with every passing day, the universe becomes more and more disordered; be in no doubt that this law applies equally to the home."

I believe Joanna Copestick may have been a fly on my wall when she wrote these words in her book The Family Home. Pleasantview Schoolhouse made mention of the title and I am so pleased to have located a copy. "Some books," the author says, "focus on specific aspects of decorating without taking into account the daily life within those carefully colored walls and thoughtfully furnished rooms." If you spend most of your days outside the home then this may not pose as much of a problem as it does for those of us who are living in our homes all day every day.

The web and the magazine stands are full of strikingly beautiful images of creatively appointed interiors. Shabby chic is one enduring favorite style.These spaces are often a virtual collage of texture, color, and vintage items. They photograph especially well as still shots and often feel far warmer and inviting than more sparsely adorned rooms. That is, until they are inhabited. The House Thinking bk I read last year pointed out that in practice these rooms often feel a bit claustrophobic and chaotic. Ms. Copestick recommends we "resist the natural inclination to fill every bit of space with furnishings, accessories, and clutter" thereby making "the job of maintaining order a great deal easier." 

Under-decorating does not have to equal sterile and generic however. Simple Scrapbooks magazine ran an article in their SEpt/Oct 2003 issue (which is not online) called Shabby Simple. Now obviously their focus was on scrapbook page design but the technique translates well to the home. They take elements of the Shabby Chic style and use them sparingly to create that vintage, one of a kind image but then showcase them with lots of white space. The purpose here is to give the eye a place to rest. Instead of ‘collage’, think ‘gallery’ and you have the best of both worlds. Remember that people will be an permanent part of your decor.

Lady Lydia has two excellent posts along this same line of thinking. One is STreamlined Home from April 16, 2007 in which she describes reordering her daughter’s home with ideas we can all use. The next is called Creating a Beautiful Home without Decorating.  This last one I LOVE. She has an unparalleled ability to describe a room, in such a way that you can both picture and long for it. She describes the homes of her youth saying, "We preferred everything to be very plain because it was easier to look after, an empty jar or tin can filled with wildflowers might be a centerpiece for a day and then the whole thing was tossed out. Some things came in colored jars and bottles so we kept them and lined the windowsills to see how pretty they were with light coming through them. Making a bed as perfectly as we could or setting a table as neatly and precisely as we were able, using a diagram from a cookbook, was as close to decorating as we got. The idea was to create a scene or mood by the way we displayed the ordinary things we used daily." Like the Family Home book she suggests, instead of purchasing more "stuff" to decorate with, you look at the items already filling your home and consider how proper cleaning and display of those things can beautify your rooms.

The Family Home bk appears to be written by a British woman and the rooms have a bit of a Euro feel with some in the IKEA genre and others more traditional. There are six real family homes displayed. Whether or not the particular styles appeal to you the advice is universal. Throughout all these sources is the advice to "remember how quickly dust can gather and only display frequently used items that have no time to turn into ‘dust me guilt-trippers."  This, along with my favorite advice: find new and creative uses for ordinary items.

You don’t need MORE, you just need to rethink what you have. It helps to remember that universal laws are, well, universal. Meaning that disorder thing is happening to all your friends’ homes too. <g> Our goal is to get up every morning with the firm purpose of creating order out of the chaos our children present us with. Better yet, to help them to do that as well. I am off to practice what I preach. Again.

: )

Check out the Lazy Organizer. Elizabeth sent this link this morning and I am already hooked. You’ve gotta love a woman with a name like that. Her Flickr set alone is work perusing. How about that baking center? Oh, I can feel organization envy setting in! <g>