Debbie Does Decorating

My aunt would probably kill me if she saw that title, but she doesn't read my blog, so it will be our little secret, k?

I just got home from St. Louis where I went to see my aunt Debbie. She has been on me for about a year now to come help her decorate her living room and I finally got a window of time and the nerve to make the 9-hour drive with Miss Priss. Here are the pictures of what we did...


This is my aunt's house. As you can see, it's a pretty traditional style for St. Louis...a typical center-hall colonial. As you walk into the front door, you step into a small foyer. The formal living room is on the right, the dining room is on the left and the stairs are straight ahead. We were working on the formal living room.


This bookcase was our jumping off point. Debbie bought it about a year ago because she wanted more places to put books and pictures. Thankfully, she had already picked out a paint color she liked and had the room painted before I got there. She also had her window treatments up, so all that was left for us to do was shop!

And we did...we were shopping maniacs for two days.

As with any room, we had some challenges to overcome and decisions to make. You can tell from the picture that the room isn't very large so of course, that always limits what you can do. Also, Debbie and my uncle Doug are very casual people...so a formal living room wasn't really working for them.

Still, it is the first room you see when you walk in the house so it needed to look nice. They have a large den right off their kitchen so they didn't need this room for watching television and they have a home office upstairs, so we didn't need to worry about that either.

Debbie is an avid reader and she'd recently bought this painting that she really liked...



Given the bookcases she'd already purchased and this painting you can see it was practically a no-brainer. This room was going to become a library!







What this room needed to do:

Debbie and Doug have a 19-year-old who is still living at home and two grown daughters who live on their own. Their oldest, Kylie, has just had her second baby so, of course, the baby pictures are rolling in. Debbie needed more places to put pictures and books, so that's why she bought the bookcases and why we bought three tables for this room.


I think nothing looks better than a smattering of family photos placed around a home. It says, "A happy family lives here."

AND not forgetting that my cousin is still living at home and the house is always full of teenagers (and I mean ALWAYS), Debbie really needed a room that was all her own where she could go and read in relative peace and quiet. The only thing we couldn't address was the smell...teenage boys stink!

The Breakdown:

We bought the chairs, the round table and the library table at Value City Furniture in St. Louis. Our original plan was to buy two matching leather club chairs, but when we saw these, we changed our minds. Debbie liked how the chairs didn't exactly match, but coordinated. We also thought we got extra style points for the masculine and feminine look of each chair. The bigger chair was $180, the smaller chair was $150. The library table was $250 and the round table was $150.

We bought the lamps and the clock on the library table at HomeGoods and most of the picture frames, accessories and the smaller three-legged table at Hobby Lobby.

The gold sconces on either side of the bookcases were mine, but when we saw how good they looked, I had to give them up for the cause because I'm sweet like that.

Lessons Learned:

Power shopping with a 2-year-old is a byotch! But Miss Priss was a real trooper, bless her heart!

When we bought the furniture, they originally told us it would be six-to-eight weeks for delivery. We didn't have that kind of time, so we asked if they would sell us the floor models and they said yes...and not only that, because they were the floor models and one of the chairs had a little ding on the leg, we got it for a discount!

It never hurts to ask for what you want. In this economy, people will do almost anything to make a sale and the worst they can say to you is "no." We've all been told "no" before and went on living, so don't be afraid to ask.