C-O-D-E-R-E-D

A Decorations do have too many unplanned items somehow crept onto your shelves? Maybe they’re from another era of your life. Maybe they were gifts that no longer “fit” (maybe never did!). Give away, pack away, throw away those that are there because you sort of forgot about them. Try to concentrate on each area where you have decorations with the eyes of a stranger. I’ll say it again—use an empty toilet roll or make your hand into a spyglass to see with “new” eyes the areas you suspect might not look their best anymore.
If all this seems like too much to tackle at once, take a deep breath. Instead of getting overwhelmed, start a list of the areas in your house you’ve been tolerating but not really enjoying. Then commit to taking steps to upgrade them, one at a time, checking them off your list as you go.
Pretend you’re moving and want to make a great impression on the new buyer. Better yet, pretend you’re the buyer. How does it look? What would make you fall in love with the house? Then upgrade your house for the deserving new owner—you! You’ll feel more confident when having people in. And that, in turn, will improve your relationships
with others. You’ll also find that your energy level and (may I say it) joy will spike as you upgrade what some people call “your larger self”—your home.

Work by chiseling down big projects into small steps. Set up an outside area with the tools you will need. Give yourself a time
limit each day so you don’t become discouraged by obstacles or
overwhelmed by the enormity of a particular job.
Remember that the journey is the destination. Work mindfully knowing
that each week’s task is changing you as well as your landscape and
garden.
When winter rolls around, bring in the outdoors. Decorate with bouquets
or leafy branches in watering cans, garden benches along a kitchen
wall, or tropical fish in a pretty bowl. Create a garden meditation
corner with flowering plants.Add a willow chair with a chintz cushion
and a small trickling water feature. Nestle garden-inspired quotes in
the comers.Come rain or snow,enjoy your lush little inside Eden.

Without our realizing it, things drift into shabbiness, or at least cease to look their best. Look around. Are there areas in your house that need upgrading so that they contribute to a more gracious way of life?
Consider whether you would be more enthusiastic about your house if you simply spruced up your
Flatware. Are you using bits and pieces of sets in a myriad of styles? Buy a new matching set and enjoy the benefits of being proud of how your table looks. Over the years pieces get nicked in the electric disposal, become dulled with use, and look generally dingy Certainly, if you are going to entertain, you will do so more happily with a presentable table.
I’d been shopping for a new set of flatware for a while, and I stumbled upon a set at a discount store for a good price. I said, “Enough with using junk flatware!” and snapped it up. I don’t know of any purchase I have enjoyed using quite so much. I hadn’t realized how ready for retirement
old set was, until I employed the new one.
Shoe area. Are your shoes lying around in a jumbled pile, kicking at each other in the bottom of your closet? You’ll feel better about the entire area if you buy a shoe holder and vacuum the bottom of your
is very important, get rid of shoes you don’t wear. Can’t stand throwing them out? Move them into the lives of other people who can happily wear them, while you happily stop storing them. Or throw them away. It’s okay. Really. I promise.

Create a calendar for the coming year on which you place photos and visual inspirations—seed packets or photographs—for your dream garden. Write in one or two very simple steps (and the cost) each month that may be possible for you to accomplish.
Enjoy the anticipation, but don’t think about how you’re going to do it all, Let yourself feel the sensation of accomplishment ahead of time by imagining completed projects. Do what you can, but don’t stay attached to a particular outcome or the completion of everything on your calendar Substitute anything unlikely to be accomplished with smaller similar projects that bring you pleasure.

The Rooms like the dining room become a home office? Has the guest room become a storage room? With thought, you may be able to reclaim them for their original purpose, so you can enjoy them more.
You can do some flower arrangements and plants. Are your artificial ones dusty and droopy? Clean them with an air blower or silk flower-cleaning spray. Are your live plants straggly? Depot them or replace them. In the beautiful rooms of decoration magazines, flowers and plants play an important part in making the room come alive. If you imagine those pictures without plants, you will notice the rooms lose a lot of sparkle.

Another of my friends who is a home enthusiast, Luna Herr, lives in a Spanish U-shaped adobe house atop an inland California foothill. Red tile roof, Terra-cot ta courtyard, and semiarid foliage create an exotic aura. But to the rear, adjacent to the pen pasturing Sigmund the Goat, Luna has created a blossoming utopia. A fenced rose garden, replete with meandering brick pathway, unusual bird feeders and houses, and a labyrinth of colorful flowers, accentuates the contrast in landscape. Her philosophy is based on an old English proverb: “Tickle it with a hoe, and it will laugh into a harvest.”
Jane and Luna are part of a flourishing trend of home owners indulging their personal whimsies by using them to create a private outdoor paradise.

What makes one house or another appeal to us? The architecture? The details? The location? “I finally came to the conclusion that it is always about the landscaping,” my friend Jane Green told me. That summer I never saw Jane without garden gloves and straw hat, working the soil around her cottage that sits on its now-pampered lot across from the local park. What resulted was a whimsical mixture of wild country and styled English garden. Botanical surprises are tucked into the landscape, including all sorts of teapots topping every post in the picket fence—the sort of stuff that turns home into wow!

I have to admit, my landscape is not well defined but definitely what experts call “low-envy” I wish I could have tall stalks of hollyhocks frolicking alongside fences, aroma-rich sweet peas, and stately sunflowers nodding in the breeze. Instead, a scraggly juniper tree bears tiny pale blue berries in the fall. Miniature fir trees sit primly in Terra-cot ta-turned-white pots. The trees are disheveled odd shapes. My backyard blueprint does not involve innovative ideas or exquisitely detailed plans. Visual accents of the artificial kind are not my cup of tea. I am shaping a context for a personal experience in the wild, adopting Thoreau’s philosophy, for I also believe that “in wildness is the preservation of the world,” or at least the preservation of my particular soul.

Taking this one step further John O’ Donohue, author of Annam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World, says, “The landscape has a huge influence on shaping the rhythm of mind and perception. Celtic spirituality had a recognition of nature as the theater of divine presence … [it was] where divine presence articulated its imagination.”
In landscape, and in shaping the landscape of our homes or our lives, we have opportunity to express ourselves as made in God’s image, to articulate our imagination. There seems to be no limit to the gardens we may create: container gardens, rock gardens, kitchen gardens, children’s fairy gardens, shade gardens, organic gardens, and so on. Whatever we call it, a well-defined landscape can feed the soul as surely as it can add curb appeal—and, my Realtor tells me, 15 percent to the selling price of a home.

Artful attention and arrangement on the grounds of your home, the balcony of your apartment, or the window box outside your rented room can make your space a mini Eden. You may go for the opulent, the exotic, and the tamed, or you may follow a wiser path to paradise. Using plants appropriate for your climate,
you may go low maintenance. But that needn’t mean boring or plain. When you imitate the natural landscape on your grounds, you’re going for the greater aesthetic.
Celts of the fifth century brought their love of nature and their awareness of the sacred into Christianity when they converted, says Bob Abernathy. They were fierce warriors who lived simple lives and valued the hushed, brooding landscape.2