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Blog: If Your Money Ain't Happy, Ain't Nobody Happy
 More Secret Shopping Secrets...This Time For Your Home
Last week I gave you some tips on clothes shopping and how to look great without the big price tags. Again as money gets tighter with prices of everything on the rise, its time to get smart about how you spend your money. We all love to watch those shows on T.V. for decorating on a budget, well this week I am going to elaborate on how I have and am doing that. We have two homes and making them both nice is important, but I do not have an endless budget by any means. So here are some of my secrets to decorating a home…without the big price tags. As they say "A woman is a diamond and her home is her setting."
Furnishing and decorating your home can be so much fun. If it didn't cost so much we might decorate it differently every year! I really try to get a feel of the look I want by looking through magazines and catalogs and pay attention to the type of furniture and accessories that suit my taste. Shake it up with my own personal signature and my mom's expertise since she has a degree in interior design, and voila I am getting my home personalized the way I want it. Since moving in at the end of last April I can say I am about 80% done decorating my home the way I want it. I think I've done good considering I had a new baby a couple months before moving last April too. Feeling settled in is starting to feel great and I am having fun but definitely having to watch my expenses after all the expenses of moving less than 20 miles from our other home. It's not cheap to move near or far away.
Furniture costs the most, right? I mean you can spend a bundle on just a few pieces. My best friend is the queen of knowing the right places to go to find all the deals. However I've now let her in on one place I found. Up 2 Us furniture in Greenville and Simpsonville buys their furniture at the furniture manufacturers, odds and ends, in North Carolina and sells them a little above wholesale prices. They go every week, bring back their truckloads on Wednesdays and open their stores Thursday through Saturday. You can find some great deals! Designers try to beat everyone else there if that tells you anything. The pieces are not only nice but unique from what you find in run of the mill furniture stores. My best friend I mentioned above saw the tables that I bought from Up 2 Us in a furniture store around the area and I basically got all my tables for the price of one of theirs! I have gotten a buffet too. Look for these places around your area, hopefully you'll have something similar, they are worth taking some time to find because of all the money you'll save. Then spend a little more on furniture pieces that compliment the ones you have if they are a hard to find piece. I totally redecorated my living room (it was hard replacing the well loved sofa and chaise I have had for 13 years!) this past week and all we needed was a chair that would fit nicely in with everything else, the only place we found the style we were really looking for, after searching online, was Pottery Barn. It was what I wanted and what I needed to finalize the look, so my husband bought it for me for my birthday coming up…yes, he is a wonderful man!
One more way to save on furniture is look for people moving in your neighborhood or online like CraigsList.com where people are willing to sell their furniture for a good price. We bought furniture over time like this or looked for really good deals and bought them and stored them until the dream of our weekend home came to be. We were able to furnish most of our home with these good deals and not money out of pocket right when the mortgage kicked in. Again, thinking ahead goes along way!
Now onto accessories, all you women know you can't furnish a home without the right accessories. It's like having the perfect outfit without the perfect pieces of jewelry or shoes! I love Old Time Pottery and Hobby Lobby (especially their sales) and Kirkland's to find some similar pieces that I have seen in pricier catalogs. Rugs, foliage, wall décor, outdoor furniture and all the other good stuff can be found at some of these places and discount stores such as Marshall's Home Goods.
Remember the most important part of decorating and redecorating is being patient with finding the pieces you need and waiting for the right sales. Look for slightly damaged merchandise and ask for an extra discount off, I have gotten some of my best pieces this way and for bragging prices. It's not about quantity to decorate, it's really about finding the pieces you want that really make your look come to life. Usually this is fewer pieces that make a statement rather than lots of little things that clutter up your living space…since being in the organizing biz for eleven years so I know that you can clutter a place up quickly if you don't have a plan of what look you want. So happy shopping and decorating!
posted on: 3/26/2008 11:30:00 AM by Triste Horrell
category: Finances
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If Your Money Ain't Happy, Ain't Nobody Happy
by Triste Horrell
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About Triste:
Being an organizing expert makes one want to be a "showroom" in all areas of life. However reality can hit hard when you're a mother of small children and a military wife and own an organzing business. Of course Triste would like to have a picture perfect Better Home and an even Better Garden. Throw a Pottery Barn in the backyard for exceptional creative time to become the wiz-woman for all the ideas and inventions that the world could not live without. But Triste has settled on the fact of telling herself "I can be perfect in my mind and no one can mess up my space there!" In reality Triste is very self-motivated and has true business accomplishments like having SYSTEMIZE since 1997, the first home and business organizing firm in the state of South Carolina. She has been repeatedly recognized in her Greenville, SC area for her organizing expertise and makeovers on local NBC and FOX news, Greenville News, local magazines such as Greenville Magazine and Upstate Parent and NPR radio. She has turned people's lives around by focusing on what she calls the "four building blocks of being organized" consisting of space, time, financial and personal. This is even represented in her business logo. "That's what I'm in business for, turning people's lives around!" Also applying her popular 3 Steps to Systemize have not only organized her clients but KEPT them organized for years.
Triste's Website:
www.systemize4u.com
Downtime Activities
- Reading Magazines
- Spending time at our cottage
- Keeping our Westie pretty
- Putting tealights around after the kids are in bed
- Adventures with my awesome hubby
- Making microwave smores...just for me
1 graham cracker, broken in half 1 small piece of chocolate 1 big marshmellow On one side of cracker put piece of chocolate and marshmellow on top. Place in microwave and heat for approx. 17 seconds (while cooking replace marshmellow on top of chocolate if needed). Put other half of cracker on top, eat and enjoy and watch out for oozing chocolate!
My Organizing Tool-Box
- Time - Outlook
This is a great way to keep papers off the desk and track where you need to go, task list, jot down quick notes on the virtual "post-its, keep up with contacts in the virtual Rolodex
- Personal Finances - Quicken
This simple yet practical program keeps your bank accounts in tact...did I mention simple?!
- Business Finances - QuickBooks
I have used this program for years and have set many clients up on it. It is a must for keeping track of business transactions and keeping tax time easy...push a few buttons and out come the reports, your done and your tax preparer loves you.
- Space - turntables
I love these things! You can put them in cabinets, the fridge, garage, and closets. They are inexpensive, easy to find and available at any discount store and you can even find fancier ones. If you are not sure what they are, they are the white (or other fancier kinds) and spin around like a lazy susan, you can have a single or double-tier one for spices.
- Personal - Magazines and Internet
I love to look at magazines and the internet for good articles on personal development, pictures for decorating inspiration and fun projects to do with my family. I keep my magazine subscriptions to a minimum (3) so I can read them and enjoy each one. I look for things on some of my favorite websites for whatever fancies me at that time.
- Online Recipe Boxes
Use these on some of your favorite websites, bring the laptop into the kitchen while the recipe is up and you never have to have the paper clutter. One of my and my husbands favorites is Williams-Sonoma.
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www.OnlineOrganizing.com is a service mark of Bradford, LLC.
