Decorating Woes

Our new house is finally starting to feel like home (thank goodness). But I am running into a few, serious problems. They are related to decorating. You see, I have spent the past 10 years occupying a modest-sized square footage. Suddenly, we are in a much larger home that requires much larger things to make it look like everything is in scale. Case in point: The photo below is of our previous home. Due to size, ceilings lines and walls, the pictures going up the staircase filled the wall in a lovely manner (you must look beyond Djeryd's Christmas-morning smile).

In our new house the entire staircase is visible upon entry into the house. The ceilings are extremely vaulted, and there are actually more stairs in the staircase itself. Suddenly my once opulent-feeling (at least to me) framed photos look like tiny squares on an immense, blank checkerboard. So it's off to the store to buy larger frames, and off to Costco to get all the prints blown up bigger.

The entire house is like this - bigger. My tables look small, my vases and mirrors and general decor look small. I resent the idea of purchasing items simply to be big space fillers. I really like the furniture we have carried around from house to house over the past decade and I don't want to part with most of it, but it looks silly in its miniature-ness.

Now you have all seen a little peek into the real me. The me who has a brand new, beautiful, huge house, and blessings pouring over her head; yet spends all of her time complaining that her stuff just doesn't "look right" anymore. In the book, The Millionaire Next Door (an excellent book - I highly recommend it), they discuss this phenomenon and how it effects an individual's ability to acquire wealth. If you buy a gorgeous new rug for the living room, suddenly all of the surrounding furniture looks pretty crummy - so you buy new furniture for the living room, and then the dining room looks crummy. Before you know it you've bought a house you can't afford in the Hamptons to hold all of your impressive belongings, that then have to be re-updated because now you are living in the Hamptons.

I'm certain most people would not care if their picture frames and end tables looked strangely out of scale. They would either not notice, or decide they don't care. Not me. I have the care-too-much-about-things-being-beautiful gene. And it drives me crazy every time I stare at one of my new walls. But, of course, it's not polite to stare.