I love history, I love vintage items, and I love using vintage items and antiques in my decor. But, I also think this is something everyone should do. Adding vintage items is one of the easiest ways to make your home timeless. Few and far between are the homes that can’t benefit from a few touches from the past. You may not want to add so many that your home starts to feel like an antique shop, but sprinkling in a few vintage pieces here and there will give your house a collected feel and depth that you simply can’t buy at the nearest chain store.
By adding vintage to your décor, you give your home a timelessness and collected feel that cannot be gotten any other way. Look at homes in magazines—I’ll bet just about all of them contain one element that you could not just go to the nearest chain store to purchase. That is the other thing about adding vintage items to your decor—it makes your home unique. It is very unlikely that anyone else will have the exact same vintage piece as you do and, even rarer, that they would use it the same way as you do. Is it expensive? I suppose if you are buying original antique chairs from the 18th century then yes, they will come at a price; however, so many vintage items can be found for a song at thrift stores, flea markets, and yard sales. You most likely already have a few things handed down from a relative! Have I sold you yet on using vintage in your decor? I hope so! If you would like to start incorporating vintage into your decor here are a few ideas of where to begin.
Books
Vintage books are one of the easiest and cheapest ways to start incorporating vintage elements into your decor and to make your home feel timeless. You can find them at library book sales, yard sales, online, Goodwill, and just about every thrift shop. Use a couple of books as a riser for a candle. (You may want to cushion the bottom of the candle with a coaster before sitting directly on your books—we are not fans of book burnings here!) You can tie a few books together with a piece of burlap cloth and slide a faux or dried flower in the ties and use it as part of a vignette. Vintage books can also look great next to a candle on your mantle.
Vintage Candle Sticks
These too can be found almost anywhere and quite cheaply. Use them in your centerpiece, to frame a large photo or sign, or in any vignette you assemble to give dimension. Also, think of how you can use them in unique ways—candlesticks don’t have to just hold candles! In the fall they can hold a baby pumpkin, or a small bird figurine, and I have even used candlesticks to hold my air plants! (Before I killed them..)
Vintage Clocks
Does anything add feeling and depth to a house like an old clock? How much time has passed through its hands.… I would even go as far as to say it doesn’t have to work! A truly beautiful clock is a work of art and can thus be hung on a wall as such.
Old Photos
An old photo adds so much sophistication—bonus points if it’s a photo of your family and you know who the people are! You can look around and find a gorgeous vintage frame, or update the photo with a modern frame—either way will create a great talking point in your home’s décor and give your home a timeless feel!
Wall Decor
While we are talking about things to put on walls, let’s not forget old paintings and other art. Purchasing old art that may have been reproduced quite a bit during its day and has now faded from popularity can be an inexpensive way to bring taste and style to your home. Instead of opting for a sign from a big box store, do a little searching and see if you can find something older that speaks to you. Art doesn’t have to be limited to paintings and drawings—a beautiful piece of needlepoint, an old mirror—these count too!
Furniture
Antique and vintage furniture is oftentimes made so much more solidly than today’s modern furniture! Sometimes you may need to paint or refinish the piece to bring it into style, other times the patina may have aged it nicely. My large upright piano has had a hard life in its 100+ year lifespan and is no longer in pristine condition. I love how it looks worn and well loved! And as they say, if it’s been around for a 100 years or more and is still going strong, you probably won’t be able to hurt it either—at least not easily!
Kitchenware
Ironstone pitchers, wooden dough bowls, and vintage serving trays are goldmines! You can use antique pitchers and crockery to hold unsightly paraphernalia: rubber bands, twist ties, etc. A crystal dish to hold sugar will add elegance to your coffee or tea station. Also don’t overlook the antique china—you don’t need a full set! You can mix and match different pieces for an even more unique and collected look.
Antique Tins and Baskets
You can use these to store items ranging from office supplies to cotton balls in your bathroom. You can also place a plastic cup within the tin and use it as a planter. The same goes for old baskets.
Miscellaneous
Antique irons, baskets, vintage rug beaters and basically anything under the sun can add an old soul to your decor. If you see something you love, try reimagining it outside of its intended use. Maybe a vintage hat can be turned into a front door hanging. Keep your eye open for little bits and bobbles as well; an antique knob off of an old dresser can replace a modern hardware on a drawer, giving it more of a collected feel. Can you add flowers and use the rug beater as a wall hanging? Get creative! And as always—happy decorating!
P.S.
If you enjoy reading these posts make sure you are subscribed to my email list! I won’t spam you- signing up will only deliver these posts directly to your mailbox rather than you having to go in search of them! Just enter your email in the box at the bottom of this page!
Meaningless! Meaningless!”, says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
Ecclesiastes 1:2
“You have to love the book of Ecclesiastes. Here is the second verse after the introduction; “Meaningless! Meaningless!”, says the Teacher. “Utterly Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” Wow! How is that for an uplifting sermon! No wonder we only ever hear the one verse, “To everything there is a season,” quoted from Ecclesiastes. No one wants to hear that life is meaningless. This reminds me of a conversation that I had with my husband a few months ago. We had just gotten home from a lovely, weekend-long marriage retreat and were unpacking and getting ready for the upcoming week when some of those lines from Ecclesiastes floated through my mind about how meaningless the substance of this life is. Then I remembered Paul’s words in I Corinthians 7:7-8 “I wish that all of you were as I am. But each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift another has that. Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do.” He wishes we could all be single, and therefore better able to focus on God’s work than this temporal relationship! He then goes on to list a bunch of guidelines that the church had requested to help them get along and live in God’s plan for them.
All this was going through mind and since I am prone to speak my mind in all things, I promptly said to my husband who was still basking in the glow of what a nice relationship-focused weekend it had been, “Do you ever think about how pointless this all is? We spend all this time and effort—in the case of marriage, a lifetime to maintain a good relationship and then we die and there isn’t marriage in Heaven as far as we know so all of this doesn’t even really matter. We could just save ourselves all this trouble by never entering into these earthly relationships to begin with.”
He was visibly, and understandably alarmed with where this all this could be going. Luckily for him, that was the end of my deep thoughts and I had no more such “encouraging” words to pour into our relationship at that time. My husband is much more optimistic than I am. He is a ‘let’s look on the bright side and see what kind of fun adventure we can get into today’ kind of guy. None of this is meaningless—it all matters! Me—I’m more like the writer of Ecclesiastes.
There are so many things of this life that seem so mundane and pointless. At the end of my life when I look back I will wonder why I ever thought they mattered. I can relate to the author of this book when he cries that everything is meaningless! Riches are meaningless, the vigor of our youth is meaningless, laughter is meaningless! The author concedes that food is for our enjoyment and we should take pleasure in eating. But as we read on, everything is still meaningless.
In chapter 3 verse 11-13 things get a little brighter: “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.”
The book of Ecclesiastes concludes by saying, “Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.”
So what are we to make of all this? Basically I’m right! And my husband is right too! This is all pointless; and it all matters. There are things of this life that won’t matter in eternity but were put here on this earth for our enjoyment. Fearing God and keeping His commandments are what will matter in eternity. Part of keeping His commands is to be loving and to build relationships with others. Another part of keeping his commands is being good stewards of what we own and taking care of our possessions. Striving for excellence in all we do is following His commands. The day-to-day things won’t matter in eternity, but the culmination of all these things will.
Hey! May I Send You Something?
If you are here, chances are you just might like my writing. (wink) If you Drop your email address in the box below I’ll save you time by emailing you the link every time a new post comes out!
You have Successfully Subscribed!
Disclosure
Please remember that this post contains affiliate links; that means if you click on the link, I will make a small commission at no extra cost to you. It’s a way to support my blog! I will only ever share an affiliate link if I love the product and think that you just might love it too!
By now you probably know that historical fiction is my favorite genre, but every now and then I stray and pick up something from a different genre. My feeling when I do this? Well, I usually enjoy the book, but not quite as much as I enjoy my historical fiction. I think some of this has to do with the fact that, very broadly speaking, historical fiction tends to be a little cleaner of a read than your average book. I find that there tends to be more foul language and more adult content in the books I’ve picked up outside of the historical fiction genre than I typically come across in historical fiction. That being said, I still found the following titles to be gripping reads with convoluted plots that kept me guessing so if you are looking for a few more titles to add to your reading list, check out the ones I am listing below.
Disclosure
Please remember that this post contains affiliate links; that means if you click on the link, I will make a small commission at no extra cost to you. It’s a way to support my blog! I will only ever share an affiliate link if I love the product and think that you just might love it too!
The Hundred Year House by Rebecca Makkai
I read a description of this book that said that we aren’t sure if the house was haunted or if the residents within the house were haunting it. … I did not think there was much of anything about the house being haunted but there were lots of pieces that keep me guessing, puzzling out how everything fits together until the very last page—and even then there were a few things that made me wonder. The Hundred Year House begins in 1999, right before we flip over to the new millennia; then we are transported back in time. We become acquainted with the current residents of the house. We are then transported back to the 1950s, and the people who lived there at that time and the tragedy that happens. Next we are transported to the 1920s when the house was a retreat for artists. Lastly, we visit the house at its conception in 1900 when the house’s tragic history all began.
My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand
This book is young adult fiction and is a retelling of Lady Jane Gray’s story—until the authors decide to take a different route than the actual history—with a bit of fantasy tossed in. I have to say fantasy is really not my thing … at all! However, I really enjoyed this book! It was written by three different authors which I think always makes for good plot twists and great humor. This book made me laugh out loud a few times! If you are looking for a twist on history with some quirky characters and a lighthearted read, you’ll enjoy this one!
The People We Meet On Vacation by Emily Henry
Rarely do I ever read contemporary romance; I just want more going on in my book than a love story, especially because, how many love stories have you ever read in which you couldn’t guess the ending? But, the joy is in the journey. … The people we meet on vacation is a story about two friends, Poppy and Alex, who have been best friends since their freshman year of college. Every year since then they have taken a summer vacation together until one year something happens and their friendship falls apart. Two years later Poppy wants to rekindle their friendship but they haven’t spoken in two years. She decides to contact Alex to see if Alex would go on one more vacation with her as her date to her brother’s wedding. Alex agrees but will this vacation be a dream come true or a nightmare? Will they be able to save their friendship or will things only turn out worse?
The Maidens by Alex Michaelides
Maybe it was because I read this book at the perfect time of year (early fall when the weather is just starting to turn cool and makes you want to curl up with a cozy mystery) but I really enjoyed this murder mystery set in present day England. Marianna Andros is a group therapist with troubles of her own. She becomes even more troubled when her niece’s friend is murdered at the college where her niece (Zoe) is attending and where Marianna herself attended. She gets hooked into trying to solve the murder and is becoming increasingly convinced that one of her niece’s teachers may be to blame. Things get even worse when another one of her niece’s friends ends up dead—killed in exactly the same manner as the other. Will Marinna be able to put the pieces together before something happens to her niece or herself?
Hey! May I Send You Something?
If you are here, chances are you just might like my writing. (wink) If you Drop your email address in the box below I’ll save you time by emailing you the link every time a new post comes out!
For His ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts like our thoughts.
This year at our church we are doing a year-long series on patience. I think we are all a little apprehensive and impatient about what this year will hold. When a series is done on patience, there will, no doubt, be lots of testing of our patience!
I remember a while ago I really wanted to redo my kitchen. It was one of those things—we looked at our current house and we talked about how redoing the kitchen and taking down the hanging cabinets could really open up the whole house … and then we moved in. And the fridge broke. And the skylight leaked. And the kitchen took the back burner—so to speak.
A year or so later after we were more settled into the house we revisited the kitchen topic, decided to start saving, and made an appointment with a designer to get ideas and pricing for what exactly we wanted to do. I dreamed about my new kitchen! We worked and we saved, and we saved.
Finally, we hit our goal and were ready to place the order! It had taken a year of dedicated saving to get to this point and I was so excited! We bought flooring when we first moved in as we had planned to redo the floors right away but when we decided to redo the kitchen, we thought it would make the most sense if we waited until the cabinetry was installed. Redoing the kitchen was the gateway to getting rid of the ugly, old carpeting and flooring, old countertops, cabinetry that had seen better days, and we were opening up the design of the house as we had envisioned it when we bought it.
We went for one more appointment with our designer to discuss all the details, the exact finish, hardware, and all the details for the cabinets before we placed the order. He told us to go home and figure out a few things and then call him with those details and he would place the order. So we went home and that was when everything fell apart. I’ll spare you all the details but it was one of those times in life when one unexpected expense after another came up, and pretty soon, we were back to almost the starting line in saving for our kitchen. I was devastated—we had been so close to getting it done! Have you ever had something like that happen? A goal that you have been working towards is almost within reach, when suddenly the carpet is pulled out from under you and you have to start all over? Sometimes things just take longer than we expect.
This stood out to me the other day when I was reading about the construction of the temple that Solomon was starting to work on. In the book of Exodus, the temple was talked about during the time when God led the Israelites out of Egypt. They thought they would be building the temple when they got to the promised land. But it ended up being another 470 years after they were settled in the promised land before construction even started! 470 years! 470 years before construction even started, then another 7 years until the work was completed. David thought perhaps he would be the one to build the temple, but his hands were too sullied by all the blood he had shed in battles so the Lord delayed the building of the temple. The Lord declared Solomon to be the one to build it.
Now if I was the Lord, I would have wanted it built way sooner, and probably would have tried to work a miracle or two along the way to speed things up. Many times we want to rush things, to make things happen and get it going quickly. But, His ways are not our ways. How much better to wait on His timing. The Lord wanted to maintain purity. He wanted to make sure He had the right people at the right time to entrust to build the temple. He didn’t rush.
We finally saved enough for our new kitchen. We ended up receiving the cabinets at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. We were doing the work ourselves so this ended up being a huge blessing in disguise—there was nowhere to go and nothing to do so we had more time to work on the kitchen and were able to get it done more quickly which was great because the process of living in a house that was totally torn apart showed me that I am no Joanna Gaines who adapts to living in a house under construction! If we had had our normal schedules while trying to redo the kitchen, it would have taken much longer and I’m not sure I would have survived that.
God taught me patience in waiting to order the kitchen. He spared me the turmoil of living in a torn apart house longer than was absolutely necessary. What things has He saved you from in the midst of teaching you about patience?
Hey! May I Send You Something?
If you are here, chances are you just might like my writing. (wink) If you Drop your email address in the box below I’ll save you time by emailing you the link every time a new post comes out!
You have Successfully Subscribed!
Disclosure
Please remember that this post contains affiliate links; that means if you click on the link, I will make a small commission at no extra cost to you. It’s a way to support my blog! I will only ever share an affiliate link if I love the product and think that you just might love it too!
We are in the process of setting up a nursery for our first child! It has been so much fun to think of all the possibilities to decorate a room for a new little one and, of course, there is some specialized furniture we will be needing: namely a changing table.
We had an old dresser that had been given to us that we didn’t have an immediate need for so it had been living in the basement. It is shorter in height and longer in width, making it the perfect size for a changing table. There was just one problem—it looked a little dated. My husband does not, in any capacity, understand my desire to paint real wood furniture and I don’t understand his desire to stop me! If we don’t like it we can always use a stripper to remove the paint. It took me months to convince him that it really would be ok to paint the dresser and finally I was able to get busy!
We do not know what gender we are having so I wanted to paint it something that would work for either gender—that I could either make more boyish or dress up to be more girly. I decided on a deep teal/navy for the dresser. Either way, I wanted to jazz things up a bit. I wanted to paint the outside of the dresser the teal and then do a wallpaper on the drawer fronts. I got on Etsy and found some wallpaper that I fell absolutely in love with (it is floral so my mom thinks it’s a little girly if we have a boy but I don’t think the baby will know that florals are traditionally more feminine) and found some snazzy bee knobs to keep things from being too sweet. (And too girly!)
Below are the steps I followed to update the dresser as well as some links to the paints and wallpapers that I like. Check them out and let me know if you have projects that you are working on. Find me on Instagram @Essentiallyemmamarie.com.
Steps for redoing a dresser
A few notes before we get started:
Disclosure
Please remember that this post contains affiliate links; that means if you click on the link, I will make a small commission at no extra cost to you. It’s a way to support my blog! I will only ever share an affiliate link if I love the product and think that you just might love it too!
1. Select the paint and wallpaper you want.
2. Remove all the drawers and hardware.
3. Lightly sand the dresser first. You don’t necessarily need to sand the drawers but doing a quick sand will help the wallpaper stick better.
4. Using a damp rag, thoroughly wipe all the dust from the dresser. Let dry.
5. Wipe again with a clean, dry cloth. I like using a microfiber towel for this.
6. Some paints require that you sand your surface first. Others will only require that you wipe and dry the surface. For the paint I was using I needed to do a light sanding first. (In my experience the paint typically takes better with a light sanding regardless.) You just need to sand enough to rough up the appearance of the finish—you don’t have to aim to remove all the finish. You can do this by hand or with an electric sander. You want a fine enough grit sandpaper that it will rough up the finish but not so much that you will have scratch marks to fill. Aim for 320-400 grit. I used an electric sander to speed things up. Don’t forget to wear a mask and protective glasses if you are sanding.
7. Wipe with a slightly damp microfiber cloth.
8. Wait a few minutes and wipe with a clean, dry, microfiber cloth to get all the dust off.
9. Now for the paint! Apply two light coats. If you need a third coat you can but it is always better to apply more thinner coats rather than fewer thicker coats.
10. After the paint dries (the back of the paint can you are using will have directions for how long to wait in between coats and how long the paint takes to “set”), you can apply your sealer. I used a polyurethane sealer because I expect this dresser to take some hard wear and tear.
11. In the meantime you can apply your wallpaper to the front of the drawers. Wipe down the drawers and make sure they are clean and dry. Measure each drawer and mark your wallpaper (on the backside of the wallpaper) before cutting. If you are really nervous, you can unroll the wallpaper and set the drawer on the wallpaper to use as a pattern. Make sure to leave an extra half inch around all of the edges of the dresser.
12. It is easiest to do this step with someone: Set the drawer so it is standing upright with what will be the front of the dresser in the air. Have one person hold one end of the wallpaper as you peel away the backing from the other side. Lay the wallpaper on the drawer and smooth the wallpaper with your hand, or a straight edge, like a ruler, as you go to make sure there are no air bubbles.
13. Press the edges of the wallpaper around the drawer and square off the corners. You may need to apply decoupage or a type of glue to keep the edges in place depending upon the stickiness level of your wallpaper.
14. Taking a tool with a sharp point on it, such as an awl, small screwdriver, or long nail, puncture the wallpaper from the backside through the hole where the knobs were. Just make a small hole. Be careful!
15. From the front, insert your tool and wiggle it in a circular motion until the hole is big enough to fit your new knob through.
16. Insert your new knob and tighten with a pair of pliers.
17. You’re all done!
I hope this helps spark some ideas of ways you can redo and repurpose some items that you may already have around your home! If you do (or even if you don’t) I’d love to hear from you! Come connect with me over on Instagram! I can be found at @EssentiallyEmmaMarie.
Hey! May I Send You Something?
If you are here, chances are you just might like my writing. (wink) If you Drop your email address in the box below I’ll save you time by emailing you the link every time a new post comes out!
