Little Touches

So, confession.
I fail at home decorating.

When it comes to my home, I tend to be overly utilitarian. Combine that with a strong desire to be frugal (bordering on cheap), and my beautiful Cape Cod is pretty much doomed to plainness for eternity.

We are getting close to 1 full year of living in our house, and I am daily grateful that we bought it fully painted. If the walls had been white when we bought it, they would probably still be white today. Sure, we've hung a few pictures, gotten a few new pieces of furniture (from yard sales, of course!), but really, I felt like after living hear for this long, our house still lacked those little touches that make a house yours.

With that in mind, I decided to do my best to add some little touches here and there to stake my domestic claim in this house. As we currently don't have a dedicated home-improvement budget, it was time to get creative and use what we had on hand. Turns out, we had quite a few fun things just lying around, and over the past few weeks I have put them to good use!

Let's take a look:

A photo clock.

We got this as a wedding gift 3.5 years ago, and this is the first time we have put pictures in it. Better late than never. Which, coincidentally would have to be our motto for all of life if this were the only clock we used...it is not the easiest clock to tell time on. Largely because there are 8 pictures...and obviously 12 hours. So trying to compute where the hands are pointing is a mind bending exercise.

But, hanging on the wall by the front door, it does a great job filling in a previously blank spot.

This one I can't take full credit for. Mon Amour came across this little shelf (which used to hang in the tiny bathroom in the farmhouse) recently and we decided that it was doing no one any good just sitting on the floor. So up on the wall it went:

The little goblets we got as a gift a while back. There used to be 4. One broke. 3 is an inconvenient number if you want to use these as decorative dessert dishes for when you have company over (we don't often have just 1 person over), but my minimal knowledge of home decorating tells me I should decorate with odd numbers. 3 = the perfect number to decorate with.

So now this little shelf graces our kitchen wall.

For our next exhibition, do you remember these? The lovely curtains I made for the farm house.
Well, we had no use for the green ones in this house, but I was feeling like we needed a table cloth to dress up our all too ugly dining room table.

So, I cut one curtain in half and sewed it to either side of the second curtain (so there wouldn't be a seem straight down the middle), and voila! A shiny green table cloth. It does nothing to help with the ugly chairs, but I will take what I can get for now.



While we are in the dining room, take a look at the wall:
We got some black trivets as wedding gifts, and I rarely use them, opting instead for the easier to reach (though, admittedly not as fancy) potholder-trivet solution. So in a not-original-at-all move, I hung them all the wall. Enhancing them with some similarly styled picture frames which we had gotten on super-clearance some time ago.


There have been some other little touches around the house, and there are a few more in the works (one which I am SUPER excited about and will definitely blog about eventually! Its really bold). But so far, I am quite pleased with what we have been able to do with just the things we have had around the house.
Anyone have any other suggestions for little home decor touches that don't cost a lot of money?