Decorating Is Not In My Genes

I don't know what happened but I definitely did not inherit the decorating gene that gives some people the natural ability to look at a blank wall and picture the best way to dress it up. All I see is a blank wall that needs washing. I've heard rumors that somewhere, back in the really olden days, there were people who could take a sod house and make the dirt floor look like a nice floor. They could make the holes cut in the walls look like windows by adding a bit of fabric. These people are definitely not related to me. No one I am directly related to by blood has this gene. I know this since I've been in their houses. The closest I've come to having a relative with the gene that gives them the ability to look at a blank wall and not say “It's fine the way it is” was my stepdad's wife.

When she married my stepdad and moved into the home he and my mother occupied for many years, it was like it wasn't even the same house. It was actually “decorated.” By decorated I mean she had objets d'art tastefully placed around the house. The walls were painted in a modern style. The first time I walked in, I thought I'd walked into the wrong house. I stepped back onto the porch and checked the house number. Yep, it was the right house alright.

Unfortunately, even though I hung around as much as I could, I did not absorb any of her talent for decorating. I guess you have to be born with the decorating gene. I clearly was not.

We've accumulated a lot of stuff over the last 47½ years and there's not a single objet d'art in the lot unless you count the (some really tacky) souvenirs I bought every time we left home. Fortunately, as I've gotten older, I've curtailed some of my souvenir buying by asking this question each time I pick something up – “Where in the heck would I put it?” That usually stops me if it's very big. Do my approximately 200 collectible spoons count as decorative? Fortunately for David, souvenir spoons are getting hard to find.

Anyway, my decorating style is to haphazardly place stuff wherever I can find an empty spot. (Wish me good luck with that!) I've discovered that our house is kind of like my purse or stretch pants – the bigger they are, the more they hold. Just as Aristotle postulated that “nature abhors a vacuum” I guess I abhor an empty space. I haven't achieved hoarder status yet but I'm dangerously close. Regular donations to the thrift store keeps me in check.

But I try. Really I do. I start out thinking of the best place to display my hundreds of pieces of collectibles but after an hour or so, I end up stuffing the leftovers in and around the things I'd just spent half an hour placing for the best display then I get frustrated and give up. I have no patience, talent or taste for decorating.

To give you an idea of my lack of decorating abilities, in our last home, when we moved in the previous owners had curtains hung that I'd never seen before. There wasn't enough fabric to qualify as traditional curtains. I guess they were more of what the snotty interior design magazines refer to as “balloon” curtains.

Balloon curtains can best be described as curtains with a thyroid condition. They're very short, covering about an eighth of the top of the window, and fat. They were still on the windows when we sold the house 15 years later. I did take them down a few times to wash them. I was afraid to launder them too often, for fear they'd fall apart and I'd have to come up with something new to hang on the windows besides old bedsheets.

I tried that once in the home we lived in before the “balloon curtain” house. This was our first home as newlyweds and we didn't have much money so I decided to make due with what I had on hand. I had read in “Cheapskates Weekly” that bedsheets with cute designs make cute curtains.

I took our only spare set of sheets, added ribbon and a lovely tieback to add a little pizzaz and viola'. Standing back to admire my work I came to the conclusion that the magazine lied. They still looked like bedsheets hanging on my windows. My Betty Crocker homemaker gene was AWOL that day. Now I had ugly bedsheet curtains and no spare sheets for our bed. I decided then and there that decorating was not in the genes for me.