In my heart of hearts, I’m lazy. I usually start decorating with two colors (or non-colors, whatever) and then branch out color-wise as I see things I like. My living room, for example, started with a palette of blues and browns, but I’ve since added orange, which meshes with everything else a lot better than you might at first imagine.

Black and white are easy starting points because ‘black and white’ is a proven combo. Once you’ve got your timeless and classy black and white interior established, you can start adding other hues, like vivid red, bright yellow, baby blue, or even apple green. Voila! Instant eye draws!

Growing up, I never once encountered plastic furniture covers. My grandparents, who had the most chic furnishings my little girl mind could envision, sat directly on their couches and chairs, ate meals off their dining room table, and walked on their lovely Oriental rugs. Plastic furniture covers were something you saw on TV shows about elderly people with ridiculous pretensions. Furthermore, the furnishings under said covers were never as nice as my grandparents’ stuff. Thus, I concluded it was an affectation used for comedic effect in fiction.

Oh, how wrong I was. The images below both came from a listing I found via It’s Lovely! I’ll Take it!, which means that someone out there is still protecting the integrity of their furniture from rogue butt prints and spills.

I wonder if it comes off in summertime, when bare, sunburned legs are most likely to be thrust into the agony zone by the amazing adhesive properties of smooth plastic…

Those two-part covers must take a while to put on, what with at least six dining room chairs. Then when company is coming, they have to come off! And when company leaves, it’s time to put them back on again. It’s exhausting keeping furniture this clean!

For those who have known someone with plastic furniture covers, I must ask whether there is an unspoken hierarchy of visitors. Do professionals stopping by for whatever reason get to sit on bare chairs? What about relatives that one sees all the time? Or is the privilege reserved for relatives and loved ones who don’t visit often? I am curious because I would be much more embarrassed to have people see my plastic covers than to have them see a small stain or bit of schmutz on the couch.

As you can probably imagine, I subscribe to a lot of magazines that focus on the making of a home. I adore being given a window into the houses of people with a lot more money, time, and creativity than I happen to have right now because I’m inspired to make my own house that much nicer and more comfortable. More often than not, however, I’m dismayed to learn that the individual being interviewed did not choose his or her own color schemes, furniture, and accessories, but rather employed the services of a professional who chose everything. How, I wonder, does that help the rest of us who have aspirations of chicness, but not the money to outsource our homes?

That’s why I was pleased to read this piece of advice from Mimi Reilly in Real Life Decorating:

“You’ve got to have a sense of yourself,” she says, “what makes you happy, what makes you tick. And then you have to make the leap: You have to trust yourself.”

In an interview, Reilly shared other, more specific tips like “Keep things a little quirky” and “Focus on the details,” but that first quote just nails it for me. Last week in the comments, the lovely class-factotum brought up the difference between being fashionable and being stylish. When you have a sense of yourself and you trust in that sense, stylishness will inevitably follow. You may not always be fashionable, but who cares about that?

Let’s say you want to integrate the side table below into your generally old fashioned decor…

Ask yourself if you love it, if you’ll use it, and if you think it will look sharp in the spot you’d like to put it. If the answer is yes to all three, but you’re worried about whether or not other people will like it or approve of it, worry no more. Trust yourself and your sensibilities, and YOU will create a home YOU adore. That’s what’s really important, right? You, after all, are the one who has to live there!

Trends bug me. A lot. For one thing, keeping up with what’s “in” takes a lot of dough when you’re talking about home decor. It’s way easier to dress fashionably on a budget than it is to keep one’s house completely up to date. Most of us just can’t afford to update our accessories, upholstery, furniture, and fixtures every couple of years. Then there’s the fact that almost every trend will be trendy again in a few decades. True story: My grandparents had this bizarre abstract mirrored wallpaper when I was a tot, and I would kill to find it again!

Thus, I tend to take the trends I read about in all of the home decor magazines I subscribe to with a grain of salt. The way I see it, if you stay true to your own style, you’ll be comfortable in your own home and said home will be trendy every couple of decades, no matter what you do to it. How’s that for low maintenance? The trick is to wait until whatever you like is hot, and then capitalize on that by buying a bunch of it or ganking other people’s ideas while there’s plenty of stuff and ideas to be had.

Below the cut are three trends I *can* get behind, mostly because you can take them and make them your own. It was super easy to find manifestations of each that I liked — and if you like them, click on the pics for more info.

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I’m running short on time today while my to-do list is getting bigger and bigger and bigger, so I thought I’d present you with some snapshots of interiors that I find particularly inspiring in their use of color, their elegance, and their originality. Enjoy!

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Photo by the lovely and talented tofutti break

All I can say is that if you plan to decorate your ceiling in this manner, you’d better reeeaaaaaally like your chosen wallpaper. If you look closely, you’ll see that even the light switch covers have been papered to match.

Wait, here’s one more tip: Before you commit to a wallpapered ceiling, give some thought to the poor folks who will someday live in your domicile — after you move, sell, or die — because they will be the ones up on a ladder, desperately trying to yank yellow apples off of the crumbling plaster.

Once upon a time, a certain aunt of mine had a series of plates depicting scenes from Russian folklore hanging on her dining room wall. I simply must find out what happened to those because they were awesome in a almost-no-one-will-understand-them and they would look great in my office.

When I was a tween, however, I went through a phase inspired by Franklin Mint commercials in which I associated any plate-on-a-wall with elderly ladies who obviously spent most of their Social Security checks buying things they saw advertised in Sunday’s coupon circular. Isn’t that the target demographic for all Franklin Mint products?

I did get over it, and I do have one wall plate in my house. Specifically, it’s a handmade plate fashioned by this weird potter that works out of a shack off a highway somewhere around the border between Nevada and California. My MIL presented it to us as an engagement gift, but it was only many months later that I realized it had a tiny hole in the back making it suitable for hanging.

All that exposition above was just a long-winded way of leading into the fact I’m lusting after these Good Luck Garden dessert plates from Anthropologie’s August catalog. Naturally, the darned things are sold individually, which means if you want to hang and display the lily, the marigold, the chrysanthemum, AND the peony, you’re ordering one at a time.

Of course, if you’re so inclined, you can eat off them, too.

This past weekend, I attended a party at the condo of one of The Beard’s work colleagues. Said condo was utterly fantastic — the owner bought the building with her downstairs neighbor and between the two of them, a lot of work was done. So much work, in fact, that her mortgage consultant did not even recognize the building when she drove past.

The condo itself is spacious even if the individual rooms are a tad small, and it’s painted in lovely bright colors that (along with some big windows) keep everything beautifully bright. The highlight of the entire pre-party mini-tour was the kitchen, which The Beard’s colleague designed with functionality (sweet stove, lots of prep space) and looks (rad tile backsplash, chic steel island) in mind. She is an accomplished chef — seriously, in addition to 10+ dishes, she whipped up homemade mint chocolate chip ice cream with mint from her own garden — with a keen eye for design, so I wouldn’t have expected anything less.

That’s not a photo of the actual kitchen, but it does give you an idea of how fabulous it was. I was later inspired to look up kitchens in general to see what I could learn. What I did learn was that kitchens can be the most important room in the house if you happen to be selling yours. According to Kansas City Realtor Sarah Snodgrass, a good kitchen can redeem an otherwise not-so-good home.

People will by a house based on the kitchen – even if the rest of the house is painfully outdated.

I think I understand why. Besides the fact that a quality kitchen will add value to your home, people just plain congregate in the kitchen! I know from personal experience that guests end up spending a lot more time sitting around my cheap-o Ikea Jokkmokk than they do sitting on the living room couch or the loveseat in the den, even if I’m not cooking and necessity forces some people to stand.

If we’re all going to spend so much time in there, it better darned well look cute…and if you can cook in it, all the better!

I adore this occasional chair from Pottery Barn…

But I love this one from Overstock.com so much more…

My grandmother decided recently to clean out her cupboards and gifted me with a great deal of vintage upholstery fabric. I took it all, fearing I’d miss something spectacular if I poked through it to find the good stuff when my ferry was set to leave in a mere half hour. A lot of it is rather thick and nubby, leading me to believe my sewing machine would balk if I tried to make curtains, but a few yards were utterly gorgeous. One swath in particular is white and orange and two shades of blue that just happen to match the two shades of blue in my living room.

How is it that I only recently learned that blue and orange can be combined to good effect?

No matter! Thus far I’ve pre-washed and ironed the fabric to prepare it for its eventual fate, which is to become a pair of throw pillow covers for the living room. Too bad my sewing machine is on the fritz. There is, however, one benefit to not being able to indulge my need to sew, sew sew, which is that I can spend all sorts of non-productive time looking at beautiful fabrics, contemplating what I’d make if I had all sorts of money to drop on the raw materials for dresses and shams and slipcovers.

I’m a huge fan of Amy Butler fabrics — in fact, it was she who taught me not to hate florals. Previously, I associated all floral prints with a certain high school math teacher who daily wore dresses that looked more like couches.

Lovely, no? The nice thing about sewing pillow covers is that they’re generally square or rectangular, which means you only have to sew on a straight line. Additionally, you’ve got a lot of freedom where fabric is concerned unless your pillows see a lot of ‘butt action’ on a regular basis. If you want to give this simple project a try a try, the easy, illustrated instructions found here and here are a great place to start.

Now I’m off to inspect my newly delivered wicker set!