Decor

As I'm sure most of you know, buying a house is a blur of mortgage applications and appraisals and inspections and paperwork and constant meetings with your realtor to sign just one more thing. And we are dealing with all that logistical stuff and actually I find it all very interesting. But oh, thinking about this house which will so very soon be ours... it's like a blank canvas. It's just been redone, so we don't need to worry about the house itself. But the furnishing, and the decor? I don't even know where to start.

I've never really decorated before, at least not since I was into posters and dorm room chic. Our DC apartment had some framed artsy photos and a couple of paintings hanging up, but that was it. 95% of our furniture is from Ikea, and we never painted because it's too much of a hassle to paint back when you move out.

But oh, I love accent walls and bright colors and interesting artwork and light fixtures and cabinet handles and lamps and vases and fascinating furniture that fits together beautifully but unexpectedly.

What we're starting out with is so minimal it's almost laughable. Our house has eight rooms, not counting the basement or the bathrooms: 4 bedrooms upstairs, and a living room, family room, kitchen, and dining room downstairs. The basement is another big room with a bedroom off it, so I guess that counts as ten rooms, but I'm not even thinking about basement decor yet, so let's not go there.

In terms of the furniture we already have... well, there isn't much of it, at least not when you spread it out over eight rooms instead of the two we lived in for so long. We have a bed, dresser, and two nightstands for the master bedroom. We have a mattress, and just a mattress, for the guest room. We have a desk for each of the other two bedrooms, which will be turned into our offices, at least for now. We have a bookshelf to go in one of those offices as well. We have a couch, coffee table, and TV stand for the living room. We have a small table and four lightweight chairs for the dining room. We have a lone armchair for the family room. We have one area rug that can go... somewhere.

We also have an Ikea entertainment center, but it is too big for the layout of the living room and the color of the wood (very light) would clash with the floors of the house, so I think we're going to put that in the basement and turn the basement into a bit of a media center, eventually. Once we have somewhere to sit on while enjoying the media. Other than the floor.

A lot of the furniture that we do have is stuff that we eventually want to upgrade. The dining room table, for example, really doesn't fit the dining room. It's too small and the wood is all wrong. We'd like a glass coffee table for the living room, I think. Our bookshelf is already full to bursting, so we need another one of those. It would be nice to have a second armchair in the family room. We'd like a bedframe for our bed, and a proper set of furniture for the guest room. Eventually we'll need kiddie furniture for two of the bedrooms (or at least that's the plan). We'd like some furniture on the patio too. Maybe a china cabinet or something in the dining room. And I assume we'll want some assorted end tables and whatnot on which to display photos, vases, and other accessories. Plus, we need artwork for the walls. And let's not even get started on the yard.

Obviously we aren't doing this all at once. We do plan to go to High Point next time we visit my parents in North Carolina--it's the furniture Mecca, where you can get high-quality furniture at pretty much any price point. People go there just for that. They stay in hotels and buy truckloads of furniture to furnish their entire houses at once. We won't be doing that. We don't have the funds and I think we'd like to add on to and upgrade what we have slowly, over time.

But oh, just looking around and trying to get inspired is so fascinating. I bought Elle Decor yesterday and while I was overwhelmed at the high-end nature of what they featured ($2,000 teapot? Anybody?), the colors and the stylish furniture that they featured was just so beautiful. A lot of it isn't what we want for our house--too outre or modern or whatever--but it's definitely inspiring.

It's hard to know what we want. A lot of stuff looks lovely in photos, but the idea of really having it in our house is just overwhelming, or wrong. A lot of rooms just look SO put together, like too much so, if that's possible? I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself clearly. I look at amazing design blogs, like this and this and this and this, and it's all so gorgeous and exciting. But at the same time, if I stayed in a guest room like this:


Well, I'd be impressed, but also I'd feel kind of like I was staying at a bed and breakfast. And I would wonder just how compulsive my host was to have created such a ridiculous guest room to begin with. Do you know what I mean?

And yet, I love this.


And this.


And this.


And this.


And this.


And I'm wondering how to do similar things in my own home. And I really have no clue if I can, or if it would look good if I did it, or how much it would cost. But I'm kind of excited to find out.

What do you think? Do you do any interior design in your home? What's your style? What are your inspirations?