How to Decorate Your Walls on a Budget

I'm not a particularly gifted decorator, but I know what I like, and one thing I like is to make the wall art in my house fluid. I want to be able to change it up now and then. But there's a problem. Art can be expensive. After all, artists have to eat, too.

So I try to utilize a combination of art I've bought directly from the store or from an online shop. Deviant Art is my favorite online shop, but there are others, such as All Posters, Art.com and many others.

But because I want to change things up frequently, I need to save money, and I've found that estate sales, garage sales, rummage sales (especially church and school rummage sales) and thrift stores enable me to buy art at bargain prices. Other people want to change their walls, too, and their castoffs might be my (or your) next wall art find. Here are some of the things I've picked up at such sales (apologies for some of the images. I took them with my camera, and I'm not skilled enough to get rid of the reflections. Where possible, I found a duplicate image online, but that wasn't always possible).

This image doesn't do the art justice. It's actually a poster from the America's Cup 25 in 1983, and there is faint writing on the image. The frame was broken, so we re-framed it.

I believe that this sunflower painting by Anne Worthington was formerly an IKEA item, but we bought it for five dollars at a garage sale.

This one came matted in a gaudy gold frame (there's also writing beneath the image on the matting), and we didn't have the right sized frame, so we cut the matting a bit and re-framed it. I've shown both the original and our framed version (complete with my awful photo with reflection and washed out color).

 This is on Irish Linen, and someone framed it.

A National Park poster (we framed ours, but this is the poster sans frame).

This was originally from IKEA (years ago), but we found it at an estate sale. It's really large.

And this one was from a garage sale in our town. The woman selling it said that it had been her husband's before they got married, and he loved it, but she didn't. She sold it to us (framed) for $10. Not bad.

It's always an adventure at sales, especially estate sales where you can sometimes see the art hanging on the wall. I doubt that we've ever paid more than fifteen dollars for a print (well, maybe twenty for a really large one). That has enabled us to move things around when the mood strikes.

Best wishes,

Myrna

Uncluttering My House

I am a tosser, a clear-out-the-excess-stuff kind of person (with exceptions, of course), and lately I've been doing more of that. My husband loves to go to estate sales, but he also likes to have an annual garage sale, so between the two of us, we manage to get rid of a number of things every year. With that in mind, I recently checked out a book that was hot not too far back. It's called The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson, a woman who has, more than once, been faced with the task of clearing out a house after a person has died. Her suggestion is to avoid waiting and begin cleaning out one's own house now even if you're nowhere near to being old. This is to save your descendants from having to make tough decisions you can make now.

I'll be honest. I didn't read the entire book. A lot of it was common sense, but more importantly a lot of it dealt with things I already do. I don't do much gifting of things I own (because most of the things I own aren't valuable and I'm not particularly sentimental about things. I would be the worst kind of antique collector, and when watching shows like Antiques Road Show, I often think that I would have pitched the items in question rather than keep items that don't appeal to me. But that's just me.

But even given my propensity to add things to the garage sale box, the donation box, the recycling bin or--in a last case scenario--the garbage, there are still items I vacillate over.

1. One woman in a comment somewhere mentioned that she only keeps a few dishes, just what she and her husband use on a daily basis. I would love to do that, but...while I don't entertain frequently, I do have people over several times a year, so I have to keep enough dishes for those functions. In spite of that, I'm sure I have extra cookware and serving dishes I might be able to get rid of. Unfortunately, I've had difficulty doing this. Too many instances of thinking that I might need those things one day.

2. I do donate books, but those are difficult, possibly the most difficult thing for me to get rid of. So I still have lots of them and probably always will.

3. Paper. I have so many spiral notebooks left over from when my sons were in school, and I just can't get rid of those. Most are partially used, so I can't donate them to school supply drives. So, I'm very, very slowly using them up. Some I use in their original form, some I cut up and use as note paper.

4. Pencils (see paper above). I do use pencils, but I still have far too many, and the erasers are shot on most of them due to age. Still, I keep an art eraser nearby (Staedtler Mars Plastic ones are my favorites), and again, I am slowly (turtle slow) working my way through all those pencils.

Are you a saver or a pitcher? And what are the items you struggle with clearing out?

Best wishes. Happy reading and happy clearing!

Myrna