the anti-pottery barn

let me just say right up front that i was born without any kind of decorating gene.  in fact, i think the reason i have 3 boys and 3 dogs is to make it acceptable that my house always looks like a small bomb went off in it.  i dont care about furniture or wall stuff.  i have only the window treatments my mother in law insisted on, and mismatched everything else.  its really no wonder my mother shudders when she comes here.  and its not like i dont APPRECIATE a beautiful home.  i absolutely LOVE walking in to those amazing homes with STYLE...you know what i'm talking about - you all have friends (or maybe are that person yourself) whose house is just RIDICULOUS.....everything looks like it was ripped out of a catalog....my college roommate has this picture perfect house in rhode island that makes me feel like i need to go back to school to learn how to decorate a house correctly.  but alas, i'm not going to.  i'm going to keep rocking my backwards ass, stunted approach to just keeping furniture in the house.

what brought this up?  well you see, today started out like any other, except i had to drive 90 minutes in the rain to a meeting.  which as you can imagine, pissed me off.  long story short, nothing BAD happened, but i had a series of small irritations all day - not the least of which was upending a sample bottle of grease lift in my brand spanky new, super deal of the century coach bag.  dont you just HATE when that shit happens??  its clearly not end of the world stuff, but its just SO ANNOYING!  so now i'm grumpy....actually id say SUPER grumpy.  and i walked into the house after work, and it was just a freakin DISASTER! now this should come as no surprise due to the 3 boys/3 dogs thing, but for some reason today it just set me off.  i HATE cleaning.  like DETEST it.  with a GIANT FLAMING PASSION.  i have a friend who loves it.  says it relaxes her.  i think she is brain damaged.

probably the very first thing i promised myself when i went back to work full time was that i would not have to clean the house.  seemed like a reasonable reward.  i couldnt really rationalize NOT cleaning the house when  i was home all day, but really with work, its all i can do to keep up with laundry and run the vacuum.  and that's when i make myself.  the solution seemed simple right.  hire a company to clean.  EXCEPT that every company i found wanted you to pick up all your shit so they could clean.  so i found myself cleaning for my cleaning people.  which is ridiculous.  if i have time to pick up, i can run the damn vacuum and dust right?  super frustrating.  but eventually i found the PERFECT person who would actually pick up AND clean...and she quickly became my favorite person on earth.  i knew that every other tuesday i would come home and magically everything would smell great and be sparkly.  PERFECTION!  and boy did that totally spoil me.  when i felt like going on a tear, i could clean out closets or whatever, because i always knew my house would be cleaned.  did i say i LOVED my cleaning lady.  LOVED her.  and then she had to stop working to deal with her own family things.  which i totally understand.  but i have been sincerely unable to recover from it.

we tried someone else - but cooper scared her to death.  shocker. so here i am, still no cleaning lady (go ahead, say poor deni) and GRUMPY!!  you heard grumpy right?  and periodically losing my shit.  because now i have to pick up AND clean.  and i have a giant white dog.  GIANT.  and a house surrounded by ten million trees.  so between leaves and dog hair, my house usually looks like a storm blew through.  and today i just LOST IT.  in the way only  a non decorator type person can.....i threw shit out.  that's usually my answer to most irritating house things - i start chucking things...today it just so happened to be my couch cushions!  who DOES THAT??  what's even better is that after the whole vacuuming/freaking out episode, i dragged my 17 year old BOY to the store to help me SHOP FOR REPLACEMENTS.....THAT is how you know you dont have any decorator bones in your body.  ZERO.

the good news is that i feel better :).  the bad news is that i'm not sure my new couch cushions match.  jake is a little color blind and neither one of us ever matches anyway.  but for today at least none of my couch cushions have ANY dog hair on them.  and THAT my friends is considered decorating success in the bayer house!!

“We’re really into comfort. Not some abstract idea of what a comfortable room should be, but real comfort—the kind where you can happily drift off for an hour or two with your dog at your feet.”—Decorator Jeffrey Alan Marks