The Nesting Place

The Nesting Place: It Doesn't Have To Be Perfect To Be Beautiful
By Myquillyn Smith (198 pages)
Published by Zondervan
Bookish rating: 3

This book reads like a blog, mainly because it's based on a blog and packaged into a book. Nothing wrong with that, but the prose meanders, the themes are all over the place, and the book lacks a cohesive arc to make it less . . . . blog-like. Overall, though, I think reading it was time well-spent. Hear me out.

The premise is that you can decorate your house or apartment, even if it's less than perfect, or even crappy. I buy into this approach, particularly as someone who decorated several crappy apartments to the hilt, and I really liked Smith's deliberate inclusion of RENTERS in the conversation. Why wait for your dream home to bust open a can of paint? Home is where you and yours are, so make it pretty already!

I am also on board with Smith's assertion that decorating is a type of homemaking (oh yes, I just used that 1950s term) that carries a lot of value. Sure, it's literally valuable when your stellar decorative eye allows you to stage your house and obtain a higher price when selling. But more importantly, a nicely decorated house gives off a certain FEEL that makes you and your family feel solidly at home.

The good: Smith provides some basic good ideas for getting started in decorating and banishing the fear that goes along with trying something different, new, or (gasp!) bold. I agreed with her argument that you can't worry about ruining a crappy piece of furniture you don't like. That resonated with me, as I had an old $15 side table from Wal-Mart that I wanted to spray paint with some extra silver spray paint I had lying around. Chris didn't see the point of ruining perfectly good wood, but I thought silver would look much more girly in the girls' playroom. And you know what? It turned out great.

I also liked Smith's idea of repurposing what you already have in your house---can a table be moved to a different room, can a collection of framed art get more decorative mileage in the foyer, can the reject furniture get spruced up with fabric and paint? This, my dears, is a very low-cost way to really MAKE a home, and make it your own. So, gold star to Smith for that.

Finally, Smith made a good point that I'm definitely guilty of: Stop insulting your own house or décor. Dozens of people have heard me lambast our banister, and I've been guilty of apologizing for carpet stains to my mother-in-law, or tabletop crumbs leftover from the kids' breakfast to an unexpected visitor. Doing this reinforces the myth that everyone else's houses are perfect. Besides, I'm extremely lucky to have a large, newly built, nice house. My DREAM house. Pretty much everyone who visits comments on it. What on earth am I accomplishing by loudly declaring to all who will hear, "I effed up the stain color choice on the banister! Don't judge the banister, I already know I screwed it up! Craaaaaaaap!"?

However, I did wryly smile when Smith tsk-tsked that complaining about our houses was insulting to the husbands who provided them for us. Apparently, women don't pay mortgages in Smith's world, but hey, I'm not surprised that sentence worked its way into a book published by Zondervan.

Decorating-wise, Smith's aesthetic is unlike mine---I find hers very cluttered, to the point that it seems like a lot of her decorative shit would just be in the way of actually functioning in the home. Sometimes "eclectic" is really just crap. But hey, it's her house. I like quirky only up to a point (my limit is my 1923 typewriter that sits on the writing desk in the office), and I would no sooner hang a hockey stick on my living room wall than I would put up a fake Christmas tree. But if you live in a house full of boys who love hockey . . . and you don't MIND a hockey stick on your wall? Makes perfect, homey sense.

Also, as someone who lives in an arguably cookie-cutter house (i.e., in a development), despite the fact that I personally selected each shade of tile grout, or that we changed the floor plan and bumped out the kitchen and added crazy things like TWO dishwashers, I do tend to sense my home falling into a certain predictable blandness. That said, I've gotten a very fun boost from a local shop that refurbishes old furniture, which has given me several unique (and cheap!) pieces that defy the matchy-matchy we often fall into. For example, a farmhouse-style small dresser for the guest bedroom, which fit perfectly with the patchwork quilt my mom made us for our wedding, or the pale pink, Victorian-style nightstand for Charlotte's room. (Chris has asked me--dead serious--whether we need to add a category for this shop on our monthly budget. Equally serious, I said "YES." It's a good thing it's only open once a month.)

Rumor also has it that this might (!) be the year I finally get formal living room furniture (yeah, I don't buy Smith's argument that ALL your furniture can be hand-me-down crap). Of course, this might be contingent on me selfishly denying Emma a fenced backyard.

(Wouldn't a beagle just dig out? I ask you.)

The bad: I found Smith's writing style bland and trying-to-be-witty-but-coming-up-short. At times, she could be cloyingly . . .  I don't know . . . wholesome or something. I just like more spice in the prose I read, I guess.

Also, the all-over-the-place nuggets of advice and themes and topics I mentioned earlier. That's annoying and worth losing a star.

Like I said, though, reading this book was time well spent. I took a closer look at my decorating and now want to tackle recovering a crappy ottoman doomed to the basement soon, and I want to look into reupholstering the glider (currently a perfectly acceptable shade of khaki) into something bold. I was also smugly reminded that opting for the bold, lime-slash-olive green chair in the sitting area of our room was a genius move.

So, in the end: recommended.