Views from The Porch...: One True Thing.

I used to own a children's boutique. We did it all--furniture, bedding, window treatments, custom art, and on and on and on. I had clients with small budgets and clients with budgets so large that I couldn't total their purchases fast enough. While I loved the big sales, the budget-friendly sales made me work harder. How to make a $5000 room with $500 is a challenge and this was before Pinterest. I shudder to think what would have been presented to me had Pinterest been around then...

With every room I did, I asked people to bring in one thing that they loved. Be it an antique *tsotchke, a fun piece of art, or a tiny scrap of fabric, I loved seeing what people had a connection to. I didn't care if it came from a generation of grandmothers before them, a yard sale, or TJMaxx. The customer just had to love it. When we were asked to do a nursery for a "Street of Dreams" house in Tyrone, Georgia, my inspiration piece was a sheet that I had seen on the Garnet Hill website. I bought 12 of them, and this is how it turned out:

Photo from Parents magazine. See more of the nursery here:

http://www.parents.com/baby/nursery/design/girlie-garden-nursery/

That's how I look at every room in my house. I am in the process of re-decorating several rooms in my house (even while I have a few that have never been finished in the almost 7 years we have lived here). Having the store gave me the ability to look at price tags with suspicion (since I knew what the mark-ups could be on on things). When I decide to redecorate, I find the one thing in the room that I love and build around it, whether it be with color, theme, texture, etc. Here are a few of my newest inspiration pieces, and I'll post photos of the completed rooms (along with their Polyvore plans as I complete them).