New Year's resolution

Greetings from New Mexico. It's that time of year when we review what we've done over the last 12 months and make a few resolutions about what to avoid in the future. So here goes...

I made a huge decorating mistake this year, and it is a painful one to admit to, because I usually pride myself on avoiding this kind of bonehead move, in my staging business and at home.

So here it is and you can probably relate. I wanted a couch. Our beautiful old suede couch was breaking down a bit and just wasn't right in our new house. I knew exactly what I had in mind ...leather in a buckskin sort of shade with nail head detail. It started out as a notion... I think I'll look around and see if what's on the market like that...and quickly became an Obsession.

I spent weekdays looking at couches. I added hours to my workday by just stopping by to see if this store or that might have the couch I was looking for. I went online and searched the offerings at the store i used to shop in Denver. After all, I told myself, we could just run up there with the truck and haul a sofa back to New Mexico, if they had that perfect one.

This is terrible shopping technique, of course. The more couches I saw, the more I was determined to find just the right one and the more elusive the "right" one seemed to be. Then, a few months into this, I turned a corner in a large furniture store in town and there it was, the perfect leather couch with nail head detail in a soft buttery shade of buckskin. It was The Couch! And it was $1400.

This is where the mistake comes in. To some people, $1400 won't seem like a lot of money to spend on a couch. But I am a fickle decorator and I get easily bored. So it is usually my policy to buy less expensive furniture that I won't feel bad about replacing in a few years. The price of this couch was really pushing my limit. But as I said, I was Obsessed! Here was the perfect couch and I wanted it right now!

So I bought it, and when the store delivered a model that was more chocolate than buckskin, I sent it right back, insisting on the buckskin sofa off the floor. So get this, now I have a floor model for $1400! (less the measly $100 the manager gave me as a discount which is hardly worth mentioning).

At any rate, I did and do still love the couch but there was more pain ahead for me in this particular deal. About two months ago, I saw the same couch at the furniture store's discount center for $700. Not the chocolate one I rejected but another one in the exact shade of buckskin I have at home.

And still more painful: Last week, I saw an almost identical nail head leather couch on craigslist for $300.

So lessons learned: I will never get in a hurry to make a major furniture investment again. If I had had patience, I could have saved at least $700 and maybe even $1100! Taking my time -- on decorating and on other decisions -- is my New Year's resolution!

True confessions

Welcome to my blog.

To get the niceties out of the way, I am a magazine writer and editor who took up real estate staging a few years ago. We moved to New Mexico on sort of a whim in 2005 and I thought I would give up my little staging sideline because the real estate market here was red hot then and I didn't see the need for staging.

I took a partime job editing a home magazine in Albuquerque and figured I would just be decorating my own house for fun and getting inspiration from the custom homes we featured in the magazine.

But then a realtor friend of mine asked me to stage a house that she had just relisted after it had been on the market for six months with someone else.

I could immediately see how it hadn't sold -- it was down a deserted, rutty dirt road, and it was odd in every way. It had a giant open space plan in front, but the back of the house backed into a hill so the downstairs bedrooms were dark and dreary. In the kitchen, the refrigerator was just sitting along a hallway, with no wall behind it! It was definitely a funky house.

So true confession: I wasn't sure at all that staging would help this house. Did I mention it had a bathroom where you had to walk downstairs to get into the shower?

But I didn't want to let my friend down and I figured I would never get another chance to rekindle my staging business down here if I walked away from the challenge. So I spent a few afternoons there at the house looking for inspiration and this is what I found. The afternoon light through the clerestory windows was spectacular. The tall pines along the drive would cast shadows on the floor, and it was just lovely in the great room. There was a large windmill out in the yard and it would gently clank like a bell in the wind. Otherwise it was so silent down that road, you could almost hear your heart beat.

The entire first floor had brick flooring with pine paneling on some of the walls. That combination of brick and wood made me think of a kitchen in a Pottery Barn book I had, and sure enough, when I looked up the shot I was thinking of, it felt a lot like this funky house. Wish I could share the image with you but I respect copyrights! So let me paint a picture. It was a funky old kitchen with tons of glassware and baskets and wood counters.

As for the refrigerator backed up to the open hall, I asked my husband to hide the back of the fridge with a wall screen. This is how he made it: He took bamboo fencing you can buy by the roll at the home store, used enough to screen both the back of the fridge and the counter next to it, framed the bamboo with wood and attached it to the ceiling. It disguised the back of the fridge without making the hall dark. We have used these screens a couple of times at home, to block the sun on our patio and to screen our dining room from the hot western sun in the afternoon.

The big fun was that I got to spend a lot of time in the house and I really came to love it. One afternoon I was ironing bed linens and listening to that windmill and I thought, "I would love to live here." And that was a turning point for me in the way I stage houses. I never look at a house's faults and try to "disguise" them. I look for the love! Why would someone love this particular house?

I finished the job, and about three weeks later, the house was under contract! Nobody was more surprised than me to see it go that fast. But the lesson I walked away with was that loving a house never hurts! and that if I get inspired by something, I should be as creative as I can and run with it.

Not to mention the fact that my husband can solve just about any problem that comes up with a property. Not always gladly, but still...You can see more of our ideas at http://thehowtohouse.com/

In coming posts, I want to share some other fun jobs I've done and some of the stuff I have learned along the way.