loribee - thanks for the response and the moral support. Your home is one that inspired me to try to switch things out for the new season. I've never done too much in the past, well at least not enough that my draperies were going to impact the lighter look. Going to give it a shot this year. You seem to pull it off so effortlessly. Once I removed all of the Christmas decorations, etc., I wanted to change things up a bit. I love my SW Blonde walls, and there's no way I am going to convince DH that we need to paint most of our first floor for my whim, lol. With the reds, burgandies and golds, I feel like a break from that for the warmer months. I found so many great blue and green toned accessories, it was only on my drive home that I started to panic about the drapery currently in place. While I don't want to put out alot of $$ on new window treatments, I also don't want it to look odd either. I keep trying to find rooms with a similar wall color and blue and/or green accessories or drapery. I remember this feeling when I decided on the SW Blonde but have a huge collection of pewter and was unsure of how the pewter would play with the Blonde walls. The pewter worked in perfectly as I have a few pewter pieces that sport brass accents on the pieces. I've finally reconciled the pewter with the SW Blonde from the standpoint that in the colonial days, pewter was what most homes primarily used, and many homes were painted in a similar gold tone. Of all colors available, the aqua mist seemed to make the most sense with the accessories I've just purchased. Also, the price was so reasonable. Now I am trying to envision that color against the paint. I am thinking that if the aqua mist doesn't work, I guess I could go back to the soft gold Lisette pinch pleated sheers that were replaced by my current drapes. I probably should have started with the drapery rather than the pretty pillow in blues and greens that caught my eye at Pier I. Thank you again for responding!

Wow, do you move those outside? The deer would eat them in 1 night here. We got a foot of snow yesterday, so who knows when the daffodils will start coming up. I can't wait to get my "new" old porch furniture out. I really don't do anything else for spring decorating. I have 3 cute little snowmen on my kitchen window sill - whenever the snow melts I guess I'll replace them with (wooden) flowers. I have a brown thumb when it comes to houseplants - just killed an azalea I've had since b4 Xmas - though I swear I watered it when everyone was sick, all of a sudden it just shriveled up!

When we moved from New Jersey in 2006, it seemed like every home still had a flag hung at the front entrance. We have recently moved back to the East Coast and I don't see many at all. We are in Maryland, outside DC. Maybe it's a regional thing. I'll keep checking the neighborhoods as I travel around our new area.

At 37 I think I'm probably hitting the "paring" stage a bit early, although I've always been pretty brutal about getting rid of extraneous things because I've moved SO many times. I'm also just not a terribly sentimental person when it comes to material items, just because someone gave something to me or I made it in kindergarten doesn't mean I have to lug it around forever, it's like a millstone around my neck. When we started packing for this latest move last year and realized that the smallest bedroom, which we had been using for storage, was mostly boxes which had not been opened since we moved there in early 2004, and some of which had not been opened since the move before that in 2002 I said "to h*ll with this" and got rid of 90% of it. We ended up getting a very nice tax refund because of how much we donated to charity. A few weeks ago we cleared out the guest room which had been the repository for the boxes we didn't know what to do with yet. Lots of "why did we move this?" and another two station-wagon-loads off to Goodwill! With a 1250sf house (the RE agent had calculated it wrong) there just isn't room for any dumping grounds. I too spent a great deal of my life in white-walled-rentals, urk. I am looking forward to getting some of the wall work done so I can paint the PO's dull white walls. While I respect others' need for restful, serene, airy interiors I just get bored and a little depressed, and always have, although I did try it in a couple of apartments because I thought that was what I was "supposed to do"; being very much a homebody I need the stimulation of color, judicious mixture of pattern, and some interesting objects I've chosen because I love them. Sort of a medium level of busy-ness and lots of cozy feeling (my rooms are small and conducive to "nesting"). :-) Almost all of my accessories are still packed away and I do miss them, my rooms feel naked and dull. BTW, my mom is 61 and my grandmother 85 and I don't think either one of them would give up their tchotchkes in favor of "serenity". Mom's very much like me, has to have color and fun things to look at, although her decorating taste is completely different from mine - she's English country/cabbage roses/Laura Ashley/distressed painted furniture, I'm quartersawn oak/William Morris prints/melange of antiques.