Fall Home Visits

It has been brought to my attention,  that ‘Fall’ appears to be THE season for bloggers to invite their readers, and other bloggers into their homes. A way, perhaps,  to showcase their particular ‘spin’ on what a true home should look like.  Some of them are breathtakingly beautiful. And I mean gorgeously inspirational.  Doing a ‘formal’ house tour helps promote your site (your brand) thus creating that overwhelming state of happiness to all that read it.  It just makes sense.  I like the idea of social networking.  I am guilty, after all, of being an ‘attention whore’ myself.

I love the homes.  I love the staging.  I love the photography.  I love the furniture.  I love the artsy-crafty part of it.  I love them.  I love reading them.  I just love everything about what they entail.   I.AM.A.LOVER.

Except, I kind of hate the posts.  

They have this strange ability to awaken my inferiority complex (which generally only awakens during the summer bikini-clad months).  Bloggers: Listen up,   I don’t need any outside help feeling inferior, thank you very much.

But, social networking is key in Bloggersville.  It helps you target your audience; plus it’s awesome to see blogger helping blogger helping blogger.  That’s cool.  And I’m also guessing that some of the more ‘seasoned’ bloggers get together and think of a theme – and then they all work together.  

This is my first season coming out as a ‘blogger’, and I think I can safely say that Fall is Home Tour Season.  Yay!

Except, they haven’t asked me.  Boo.

Well, you know what?  I don’t care.  Because you know what?  I can host my own Fall House Tour all by myself.  

Yes, Sir-ee.  I don’t need no invitation.  I SHALL dance at the party.

So here goes.

My House Tour.  The home in which Diane from the renowned and infamous The Paint Factory resides

(along with some other people with the same DNA – and a shared name).

Let’s begin with my hallway.  It is featured on almost all of my ‘staging’ photos.  This is the only part of wood flooring that I own, it measures about 12 feet x 3 feet.  If I want to be a successful blogger and produce awesome photos, I really should have gleaming wooden floors – throughout.   But my husband hates me.Instead I have a floor that resembles (if we’re being completely honest) a used tongue depressor.

But wait – it gets better.  Once you walk past the massive piece of furniture positioned on the tongue compressor, you are greeted by this vision of loveliness.  This is the part of my floor plan  where the floors (literally) unite – it’s like I have the United Nations of flooring smack bang right in the middle of my home.  What were the builders thinking? I do not know.  

I blame Meth.  

*I don’t know if they really were Meth users, but their decision-making process would strongly suggest that.

I can’t overlook physical evidence.

Anyway, the reason why I started bashing focusing on my floor is that Miss Mustard Seed wrote a really good blog (and I mean a really good blog) about staging, and what to use.  She suggested using a tripod and attaching your camera to your computer.  What?  Yes, it’s a fabulous idea. But wait -what?  I have a narrow slip of wood no bigger than a lollipop stick.  Where would I put the tripod??  On the wood, the stinky carpet, the torn up linoleum, or the other completely different stinky carpet?  Such a dilemma. …And moving right along.

Like most bloggers,  I search for things that inspire me.  Especially when it comes to color. I’m  really quite bad at coming up with color combinations; it’s not something that comes easily to me.   I’m leaving this cobweb here on my coat rack:  for inspiration.  When in doubt, turn to nature.  I like to go the ‘organic’ route.

And on we go, to my kitchen.  I painted my kitchen cabinets in Annie Sloan Chalk Paint.  I think I’ve posted them on my Facebook page.  I used Country Grey on the top cabinets and Coco on the bottom.  Even though they were builders grade oak, I think using the two colors gives it more of a custom feel.

I seriously cleaned for days to get it looking like this.  

But it’s a thankless job.  I seriously doubt it will ever be that clean again.

This is another cabinet in the kitchen.  I use it as a pantry.   I throw organize all of my dried food in there.  Again, it was originally oak. I hate oak.  It just screams 1980’s. Yuk.  I painted it with ASCP Primer Red and Dark Wax.  

And I bought vintage key plates and attached them to give the piece a more vintage feel.  

Except my doorknob keeps falling off.                       (There are snacks and yummy stuff in the pantry. Trust me, no-one in this house needs a knob to open it.  We will always find a way).  Trying to fix the doorknob is low on the priority list.  Clearly.

One of the things that I have enjoyed throughout my marriage is collecting these Kate Libby calendars.  They’re perpetual calendars, so you basically collect 7+ calendars, and because they don’t have the year printed on them, you then get to reuse them (except when pesky leap years mess your schedule up).   I used to love them, until I had to change them.  I don’t like change.  It irks me.  I especially don’t like to mark the fact that time just went right on by.  Physically changing a calendar makes me almost nauseous now.  That’s why I also have a slight problem with decorating for EVERY season.  I don’t like the Whoosh mentality:  Alrighty then, onto the next season.  

The older I get the more I like the ‘Let’s just BE’ approach.  

Let’s just be us.

Let’s just be in the moment.

Let’s just be present.

But back to the calendars.  They remind me of the East Coast, where I used to live.  The one I have on my kitchen wall is quite nice.  It’s November.  Why, I hear you ask?  Well, funny story, but I keep forgetting to change it.  In December it didn’t seem that important to change it, because everyone knew it was December.  And then sometime in Spring I realized that it seemed really warm for November, but I figured I’d just leave it because November will come around again, it always does.    

(I think I have to wait until 2019 – unless there’s a leap year.  In which case, I’m screwed).

So, I’m going out on a whim and saying that there’s a slim chance that I’ll be invited to partake in the Bloggersville Fall House Tour.    

(and I heard that Slim just left town).

But, it’s cool.  It’s chill.  I don’t need to clean.  And I won’t need to arrange my antique Santos doll, magnifying glass, color coordinated books on the coffee table. I can keep it dusty; with room for my TV remote, and my feet and my glass of wine.  Because in real life,

that’s all you need.

{insert catchy ending phrase here}

Diane aka The Paint Factory

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