garden decor

My Favorite (and free!) Home Decor Hack

In my kitchen silverware drawer, I keep a pair of clippers handy for routine plant maintenance and spontaneous trips to the yard to forage. Before I begin, I’ll tell you that I don’t live on acres of land or have particularly great gardening skills, and you don’t need them for this! A fresh and modern way to bring some nature indoors and to add visual impact is a dramatic arrangement of greenery in a simple vase. You simply head outside, find something that looks good and snip away!

A few tips and reminders:

Use good clippers! You can get them affordably at a home improvement or hardware store.

Forage wisely. Be aware of where and what you’re clipping. Don’t disturb protected wildlife areas, or your neighbor’s yard!

Bring your vase with you. Sometimes translating scale can be a challenge. If you have the vase you can clip and fill at the same time (and it makes less mess inside).

Dead or alive! Living greenery is really wonderful, but dried branches or flowers can be really amazing too, and even last longer since you don’t need them to stay in water. Look for interesting shapes and differing lengths.

For a more modern, minimal look, go with a few longer branches, and vary the lengths.

Happy foraging! If you’re looking for more tips on home decor check out this article.

For the Fall Nights Ahead

We’ve been living in our house for about a year and a half now and this was the year that we decided to tackle our yard and garden. Our house is 110 years old, which for Seattle, isn’t uncommon! However, that meant that most of our time and money and effort has gone to renovating the inside (check out our primary bathroom renovation here). This has left the poor garden in the dirt.

With some help from professional landscapers, we’ve been working with our very mature garden to keep the good and cull out the not so good. As a native Midwesterner I never could have believed the trouble that blackberry causes in the PNW!

To get me going, I planned a birthday garden party (anyone else need a deadline to get projects done?). For weeks, I spent nights after the kids’ bedtime driving out to Lowe’s and spreading mulch and weeding and laying pea gravel and installing garden lights and and and — it totally became a different garden. Now we’re focused on a courtyard we have on the side of the house. It’s going to be the perfect place to host bonfires and to sneak out with my husband on chilly nights while the kids sleep upstairs. Swoooon!

Since we’re basically starting with an empty slate I pulled together a mood board. We already have the black bench and the fire chiminea is coming! The rest are roundups (mostly from World Market) that are on our wishlist.

Stay tuned! Can’t wait to show you once we get the rest together.