The Ugly Truth

I don't think I've ever showed you a "behind the scenes" glimpse at my decorating process, have I?  Be forewarned--it's not pretty!

First I tour the house to make sure I've taken down and put away everything from the previous season's decorating efforts, including all of the decorative quilts and bedding.  Then I pull out the next season's quilts and decide where they will go.  Normally I do these things, in order to set the stage, more or less, the weekend before the big push to change things out.

Once I'm ready to really dig in, the next step is to comb through the garage storage areas for the various boxes and bins that hold the decorations.  I pull some of the boxes into the house and then I start unpacking.  Before long it looks like this:

Kinda like fall vomited all over the kitchen, right?  All of the available surfaces are covered with foliage and "stuff" (my husband would tell you "stuff" equals "junk," I think!).  And these were taken AFTER I'd already sorted though everything and put the mostly-empty boxes away.

I should also mention that we're stalled out on the kitchen cabinet refacing because Soccer Son is super busy right now and we haven't found cabinet doors to match the refaced "boxes" anyway.  As a result, I spent a lot of time last weekend trying to make the kitchen shelves look a little more "decorative"--kind of like the open shelf thing was the plan all along.  And, of course, that took a bit of time.  One of the things I did was to cut a curtain panel and then I re-hem it to cover the opening under the sink--you can see that in the photos.

And then somewhere along the way in the fall decorating, I found I was missing some of my favorite items, like my Halloween dishes, so I made another search of the storage areas in the garage.  Waaaaaaaay up in the rafters with the Christmas decorations, I spotted a box marked "Halloween."  Soccer son came over on Monday to get that box down for me and found four more boxes.  So the decorating continues this weekend, and I hope to have some photos to show you soon.

It's always still fairly warm here in Northern California through most of October, and true to form, our highs have been running in the high 80s/low 90s, so it feels a little odd to be getting ready for fall.  But cooler temperatures are due to arrive a little later this week, and the leaves in the trees are just beginning to turn.

Today it's still going to be pretty warm, but it's fairly cool and breezy this morning.  Now it's time to pour myself a second cup of pumpkin spice coffee and get back to the decorating.