Shopping & Grey Gardens

One thing just leads to another. As I took photos of my dinette area, I noticed the light fixture was just all wrong. I have always longed for a chandelier and there Sis and me were at Home Depot getting some primer for a furniture project and she encouraged me to just get this fantastic chandelier - in fact she bought it. Thanks Sis!

Let's think: a huge, lots of crystal type things on it chandelier in my tinsy dinette area -
I love it. And, what the heck, we also got a tile/plaster looking thing you put
on the ceiling to attach the chandelier. Of course that looks too new and too
glaring plain white, it needs some vintaging.

All my stuff is too old in an unexciting way, as in my husband's bachelor bedroom furniture, or the outdated hutch outdated because it does not
look good outdated or chippy, peeled and shabby.

I need some new old looking stuff. But, I was raised that you just hold onto your furniture forever and forever. Sure that might eventually after decades breed some fine antiques, but I am just not liking that idea for me.

This is the exciting era where we can take thrift shop finds and paint it or even take our Hubby's bachelor days furniture and paint it a darling Robin Egg Blue. In my Mother's time, women just redecorated with an Interior Designer with brand new furniture. To not do so was just so:

Grey Gardens...

That documentary that went behind the doors of some pre-Shabby Chic ladies that seemed so Miss Haversham then, but today would be getting top billing in a decorating magazine. They did have flair that someone noticed though, a European fashion magazine did a fashion spread based on the daughter's costumes she had fashioned.

If only these ladies had started the rampaging trend that is now, then. Their old, homemade, chipped furniture just did not launch any ships off into the stuffy world of home decoration. To be sure, when you have foundation cracks in the wall and well, a grey, untended, weedy garden and other dilapidations quite evident it just does not make one want to imitate the whole style. A thorough decluttering would have not been a bad idea either. You need that everything totally upkept, well cared for, maintained place; then you stick in your chipped pieces that would have years ago been relegated to the junk heap.

This is so liberating how this new trend came to be. Anything goes, and if it happens to be old, junky, thrift shoppy, flea marketed - that is so much the better. We brag about our junque. If it is new, well then we have these paint techniques to age it up.

And reading some blogs where the ladies repaint their walls, redo furniture just to change the room is to me very exciting. You just don't get stuck in a rut and your home becomes your canvas.

I look at a piece of furniture and see a blank canvas, I look at a blank white wall and see an even bigger blank canvas...for a mural - and if I don't like it all I have to do is repaint it. An easel the size of a wall - or a wall. If only art class had been like this.

I am planning, I picture the Trompe L'Oeil, the chipped furniture, the unframed paintings, the thrift shop finds mixed with my oversized chandelier; all these possibilities makes it all so exciting...and no documentarian will come knocking on my door to film the results.