This is the mid-spring reminder to shop your house before you shop anywhere else. While it’s tempting to want to buy everything in the West Elm Spring/Summer catalog, when it comes down to it, I can usually find what I’m wanting (or some iteration of it) in our storage room, garage, another room or mother nature. If I’m willing to think outside the box, the items I find can serve my purposes or as placeholders until I find exactly what I’m looking for. This also keeps me from spending too much money as well as buying items haphazardly.

The wall in this picture is part of our back deck and in my dreams, I would commission a big outdoor painting to take up that space but that’s not our reality right now so I went hunting through our garage and found some things I could hang up there to keep it from looking empty in the meantime.