Around The House

     My January decor is fairly simple. After having Christmas decorations, I actually love the "empty" spaces that are left when I put them away. This year, because my Christmas theme was a natural look, I left out several items and just shifted them around a bit. I did add the books you see in the above picture. I brought them home from my dad's place when we were there. They were my mother's books and I remember reading them when I was a child. I actually have my own Oz book from my childhood. The top book is a Shirley Temple book. 

     The cookbook doesn't exactly match the rest of the items on the table, but it has recipes from various holiday meals and treats at Disney. My daughter gave it to me for my birthday and I think your home should reflect things you love at the moment...things don't always have to "look perfect"! 

     My daughter also gave us the coasters for Christmas and they made me cry. Each one has a photo...some are of our old Nike (above-she has been gone since May) and some have our Zoe. There is one that has the rare photo of the two of them together. I am a total softy where my pups are concerned. The older Zoe gets (she is now 16 months) the more we see similarities to Nike. Maybe it is a beagle thing!

     The library table has a simple arrangement of winter things. I was going to change out the red candles, but I liked the pop of color on our gray winter days.

     I moved the quilt I used at Christmas to the other library table, added another pop of red and my winter wooden moose and branches. Every day I try to decide if I'm going to pull the quilt off the table...I'm having a real love/hate relationship with it. I think it may be put away today. I loved it at Christmas, but in general it is a bit too country for my house.

     The top of the china cabinet is also a very simple antique wooden bowl with "snowballs", dried hydrangeas and a lone pine cone. The picture we found at HomeGoods after Christmas. It is a winter scene with a bit of Christmas (the tree has lights, the house a wreath) but I thought it could go up for a little while without looking as if I forgot to take down the decorations. It was on sale for $5! You have to love HomeGoods!

     The big news around here is that we bought a new mattress! It isn't exciting, you can't see it and it is sort of like buying underwear...it is expensive and not fun. Our old mattress was 9 years old and we had been complaining about it for at least the last 3 years. I actually think it should have lasted much longer, but the store went out of business and we couldn't do anything about it. So, after adding a foam topper to get by a while longer...we both decided that we could no longer stand to sleep in a huge dent on our sides of the bed and we were tired of waking up with everything hurting. I did a lot of research this time and hopefully, we made a good choice. Did you realize that if you don't purchase the matching box springs, the mattress warranty is void? Did you realize that if you have a single spot of anything on the mattress the warranty is void, therefore you are almost forced to buy a waterproof cover for your mattress (add another $70). We learned several things with this purchase and it was delivered Friday. So far, it feels very different than our old one and I think we chose well. Fingers crossed! 

     I am joining Marty at A Stroll Thru Life for Table Top Tuesday 

and

Kim @ Savvy Southern Style for Wow Us Wednesday

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