Thank you everyone for the encouraging words and wonderful compliments! The party went great :-) Now it's time to make the grocery list for the family party next weekend, no calling the caterer next time...lol. But at least my house is ready! So many of you asked about the door sprays. I found those in a booth at an antique mall early in the fall. They were an autumn arrangement and I liked the look of them so much that after Thanksgiving I just added the sprigs of red berries and decided they would work through the Christmas season too. The holder is a cone shaped metal (tin?) with florist foam stuck down in it to insert all the dried leaves and stems. After I bought the arrangements I saw the holders sold separately at another shop. They were $15 each with no arrangement. I took a close-up picture and another one of how I mounted it on the door. I used the 3m Command hooks that peel and stick on. Then I used a little spot of the Bluestick putty like teachers used to stick things on the walls to anchor them toward the bottom since they are so tall. It seems to be working. They've stayed up since October. sippimom...You asked about the living room rug. It's Karastan and the design is Paysage. Whenever you look up Paysage it looks nothing like the real thing. My living room picture is an accurate representation of the colors in it. Thank you for the compliments :-) You must be somewhere down around the Oxford area? It's fun to find people here that are close by!

Sometimes the biggest risk in decorating is to go the safe, neutral, 'in-style', paint-color-of-the-year route. Now, there's nothing wrong in painting your living room the same beige as the model home you fell in love with when you bought your house. There's no harm in getting a microfiber couch that will stand up to the 4 kids and clean up well for company. There's no foul (yes, you know how I want to spell it...) in buying a beautiful painted rooster for your kitchen island because it ties in all the colors of the adjoining great room and you also have a set of chicken plates somewhere. There's not even a good reason to pull down your own mullioned, (as the case may or may not be!) ginormous mirror that just fills up that zooming wall in the entry and gives you that satisfied feeling that you found just the right piece for Your house, and looks very real since it's up way too high for your own visitors to suspect that it's anything but the real deal. Why? Because a risk for you may be entirely different than a risk for me. Painting a nerf football and using it as art would not be a risk for me. It would be an act of insanity. I can imagine visitors to the house of MV coming innocently close to the giclee-nerfe' and only thinking... "How cool is that sculpture?"--but in my own far more pedestrian/subdivision/cookie-cutter house setting saying... "What the hey?? What were you smoking when you painted a sponge football, Red?" And BTW, have you seen the football in question? Or the plastered table? Bet you could scroll through the photos fast in the link below and not spot it immediately. I've seen it before in the magazine and had a hard time picking out the makeshift art from the artist-painted. Fabulous. No, taking a decorating risk is not the sensible thing to do for everyone. And my risk might make you snicker. Your risk might make me shudder. Beauty is most assuredly in the eye of the beholder. And sometimes beauty is found more plentifully in areas where the shopping is more limited. I know for sure that my house in a small town in New Mexico, at the edge of the desert, next to a Walmart, had more interesting, 'found' items, than any place since. I had few options for furniture or accessories. Now, with stores surrounding me, and a truck to haul things with, I find myself bringing home a lot more cheese than I ever thought possible. Thankfully, most of mine comes with a return receipt and rarely makes it past the first few hours in my house. And interestingly enough, the things I find in the corner of a barn at an estate sale out in the country, are usually not risky buys at all. I know that old piece of rusted iron will work somewhere. The aging needlepoint with spider webs on the edge will make a great pillow. The chipped cobalt and white clay vase will be wonderful on the dresser. No risks and no regrets. It's the stuff I get the register receipts for that always prove to be the the question marks. Right now, I'm working on my own art project. I'm applying plaster and a coat of pink latex paint to a bottle of Nyquil. Then, when it's dry and perfect, I'm going to send it to a good home in Chicago. Watch for it next year in Expensive Home Magazine. Red Here is a link that might be useful: from Apartment Therapy

I am really not trying to be recalcitrant, and I know I am coming off as argumentative, but I am not trying to be purposely so. People are always entitled to do what they wish with a house, of course. But in the process of that, it would be nice if somehow the house retained some of its' original character, or at least alluded to its' character in the remodel. But a builder who is flipping a house doesn't really care about anything except their profit margin, and most people aren't particularly well educated about architecture or design. And why should they be? Except it's part of why people remodel houses that end up sort of fragmented and soulless, no matter how trendy they may look when first done. Many people have the assumption that people who don't redecorate to current trends have neglected infrastructure. You can tell the difference between a well maintained time capsule and a house that's been neglected if they want to, if they care enough to look. I had a client who was trying to sell her father's house at the same time we were trying to sell my father's. She asked my advice about pricing and I said price it at x below what a well-maintained house is selling it for in your neighborhood and market it toward contractors. The house completely neglected. She was furious with me because she saw her house and my house as the same. I grew up in a very well maintained time capsule. My dad had a new 25+ year roof and exterior painting done at the age of 89. She could not see the difference. My father's sold without even being fully listed at close to asking in a market where houses linger for years. Her father's sold 14 months later at less than I told her to list it at to a contractor that gutted it, in a market where most houses sell in a month. That house needed to be gutted as you say. My father's didn't. The thing is being able to tell the difference and treating the houses differently, and that's where the problem is. They are all being treated the same. I have nothing against a house that has been fully remodeled in the interior, particularly if it was a distressed house, if it's done carefully and consistently. There are some beautifully renovated Federal and Greek Revival houses that are pure mid century on the interior. However, the architects and designers acknowledged the proportions and vocabulary of the original shell in a manner that worked with, not against the building. Some may argue that the charm is then gone. Maybe it is, maybe I am seeing a new type of charm because the renovation is 40-50 years old and I may have felt the house was ruined at the time. That's hard to say. I look at real estate on a national level every day or so, and what I see is a little different than you are suggesting above about people spending a lot of money for a house then wanting to do more to update it. I would say proportion wise, I see more expensive properties that have expensive but older interiors that have been left intact than I see middle of the road properties and perhaps even lower cost properties that have been left intact. I am not talking about just when properties change hands. Clearly whoever built the above house in 1959, and I am taking a guess that this house is probably still in the original owner's hands unless it was resold when it is new...clearly the house was expensive and the interior decoration was expensive, and because of those two factors, they maintained it as it was. In contrast, I see many more ordinary properties that have been remodeled piecemeal at different times with each little segment fully reflecting 1975 or 1987 or 2000 independently, each very distinct, with little regard to the house or the other rooms but with great regard what was in highest fashion at that particular point. In contrast socialites like Annenbergs, Brooke Astor and Nancy Pyne had rooms decorated in the 1950s or 1960s or 1970s and never redecorated them again. So I would say that it's probably middle market houses that end up losing more charm during remodeling, and there are probably a bunch of factors that play into that. (I am still not sure what you are trying to convey about taxes. I know a number of people who pay around $50,000 in property taxes because they live in large houses in areas with high property taxes, New Jersey, Connecticut, lake or waterfront properties, etc. I am not sure what that has to do with the interior of the house?)

^^^Bingo, oakley - you said exactly what;s on my mind. I feel a bit 'selfish' about it as well but there it is. The sense of 'privacy' within our small conversation community is disappearing and of course I know that was a very false sense of security even before Houzz - we were open to unknown lurkers forever. The cross posting that includes the conversation forum has made us more visible to people that never knew we existed before - which would not always be a bad thing except..... because we have Decorating in our forum name, people think this is just yet another place to ask about drapes or paint color. And yet I find it perfectly ok when familiar names pop in with a question about drapes or paint color of furniture arranging. That's not a particularly flattering admission on my part so think of me what you will. localeater I too have some pending decorating posts to make and planned to ask here when I'm ready. I'll probably also post on the 'real' decorating side but as a separate, not cross post. It will mean following 2 threads but since I don't expect either one to become a hundreds+ topic, I'll deal with it. 3katz that's a great way of putting it - distracting nuisance - and again it's because we have Decorating in our forum title and new people don't know the basis for this forum.