The Wall

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Here’s a confession: For a long time, I’ve been deathly afraid to tune in to Hoarders. The truth is, I feared I’d see too much of myself.

See, I’ve never been the  most… meticulous. An elementary school teacher sent home the feedback, “Karen is so talented! But… she needs to work on her organizational skills.” My bedroom growing up (and even beyond)… oy. Can you say “trail to the bed” and “the carpet stays perfectly clean because it doesn’t actually ever see the light of day?” I practically have the cold sweats even posting this for fear that friends and family will share “I remember when!” comments. Worse – their memories would be from only three years ago. I know I’ve gotten much better at the whole organizational thing, but these fears stay with you (and I still have bad habits)!

My mom loves to tell the story of how I was super excited to have a birthday party for my 10th birthday – but the stipulation was that I had to clean my room before I could send out the invites. I disappeared into the mayhem and emerged a couple of hours later, shoulders hunched. “I think I’ll have a party next year.”

It’s a lethal combination of “why do today what you can put off until tomorrow,” never wanting to get rid of anything, and loving to collect things. Kind of sounds like a Hoarder, right?

A few weeks ago, the remote landed on an episode. I tensed as the homeowner introduced herself from her driveway that looked normal enough, placing an innocuous-looking box into her recycle bin. She strolled back up the driveway and cracked open her front door;  the cameraman was now inside the house, pointing the camera toward the foyer. In between them, filling the living and dining rooms: A five-foot-tall, wall-to-wall flood of boxes and bags. The homeowner called over the ginormous pile as she explained her secret shame.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

I do love to collect things, and I hate to get rid of things. But I do limit myself when it comes to bringing things home, and I force myself to purge as necessary. So, yes, we can actually see that there’s a table in the dining room. I admit though, it’s still an effort to put my clothes in the laundry basket, and I still leave my shoes all over the house – my secret cross to bear.

But as we’ve slowly been redecorating our living room, I’ve been making trying my very best keep things comfy, casual, and most of all,  uncluttered – not easy when you’ve got a lot of crap you love and want to display. Oh, and also not easy when you’re merging your style with someone who’s been in bachelor mode for a long, long time – and you were a bachelorette with a loooooooot of girly things.

My solution? Keep the furnishings neutral, the surfaces uncluttered, inject a bit of personality with little touches like throw pillows and coffee table books, and then add a ton of personality via…

Dunh dunh dunnnh…!

The Wall (with bonus dog)!

That was a lot of build-up for a bunch of crap on the wall, eh? No matter. I’ll just keep going. So obviously, we needed something on the wall behind the couch. Obviously. We could have done the three-mirrors-in-a-row thing, or hung a huge painting. But I’ve always liked the eclectic look of framed photos and mirrors gathered together artfully – and, of course, this way I was able to include all kinds of things that were meaningful to us. Like a photo of our feet on the beach in Puerto Vallarta. And the cake topper from our wedding. And us in our getaway car – you know, getting away. And the dogs, including Miss Angel, of course. I miss her sweet face. A couple of pressed leaves from our Weekend in Leavenworth. Some of my favorite photos – including a girly flower, goshdarnit, (which I talk about here)! And a shadow pic of my guy giving me rabbit ears. Hmph. This thrift store candle holder shelf thingy that just needed a quick coat of java-colored paint and some votives. Why should they match, I say? That’d be boring. And my very favorite thing that I made, a cross-section of one of these cardboard Mustang convertibles in a shadow box. We served burgers in these cute cartons for our rehearsal dinner BBQ; this was a leftover. I gathered mirrors and picture frames from thrift stores, doing my best to maintain a balance of ornate and sleek. I wanted a little texture here and the occasional pops of color there. It’s far from rocket science, but it does take some time to get it right.

First, I laid everything out on the floor, and arranged and tweaked until it was just right. It took awhile, because there’s actually a hyper-obsessive Martha Stewart-like Dr. Jekyll counterpart to my disorganized near-hoarder-level Mr. Hyde. The spaces between each piece didn’t need to be exactly equal, but it had to feel balanced, depending on the visual mass and what’s next to it. Another element of design that I kept in mind was rhythm: It just feels right to see some sort of rhythm in pattern or color. So with that in mind, I interspersed the bits of red and white for that natural balance. But ultimately, I didn’t want it to be perfect – perfect is the enemy of the casual and relaxed, right?

Then I took a photo of the arrangement, because I knew that with my sometimes scary short-term memory, I might forget exactly how it should be positioned in the time that I picked up the piece and handed it to my guy to put up.

(Please pardon the horrible photo. It’s all I’ve got.) And yes, I referred to the photo often as we added items to The Wall.

(Needless to say, Lizzie loves “her” new sofa.)

If you want to do something like this in a more precise way, you can also cut pieces of paper in the sizes of your frames, arrange them on the wall until they’re just right, and then replace the paper with your frames and mirrors. Me, I lack the patience.

So there it is. I’ve got some hoarder tendencies, but I’m limiting the hoarding to The Wall. At least, in the living room. I don’t even want to talk about the trail we’ve got going through the Craft Office right now.