Holiday Home Tour – Part I

Hi Guys!  Long time no ‘see.’  I fell down a rabbit hole two months ago when I started cleaning up and then fixing up the old farmhouse at the location where most of our livestock are kept.  We lease the location – farmhouse and outbuilding – and house employees and interns there in addition to the livestock.  It is an old four-square farmhouse.  I did take pictures of my progress along the way and will be sharing this project with you in the near future, but today I am very excited to share with you part one of my holiday home tour.  This is an image heavy post, the best kind in my opinion.  I hope you enjoy it and possibly even find inspiration to use when decorating your own home.

I LOVE the holiday season.  I love decorating the house, I love starting and maintaining family traditions and I love finding the perfect gift for the special people in my life.  I fully indulge in all of it.  Decorating the house is usually a several day undertaking.  It’s always interesting to me how you can use the same decor from year to year, but by relocating and grouping different things together come up with fresh looks.  I do usually add some decor (and retire some) each year.  Sometimes because I specifically decide to change the color scheme or often because I am out and about and come across decorations that I cannot pass up. 

This Year’s Colors/Theme

I fell in love with black and white buffalo plaid for Christmas this year. The best part about this is that the only addition that I needed to make to my decorations was some buffalo plaid ribbon, a couple pillow cases and a table runner.  This has definitely been one of the less expensive years in regard to holiday decor (meaning I can spend more freely on gifts, yay!).  I was able to incorporate the print into most of the vignettes throughout the house and the tree just by tying some ribbon around a piece of decor.  Most of what I decorate with has transitioned to being a neutral base so its pretty simple to swing this way or that with the addition of just a few key pieces.  

Christmas in the Kitchen

You can see that I already had a black and white thing going on in the kitchen between my cabinets and kitchen accessories.  Adding a little buffalo check ribbon just ramped it up a notch. This is the first year I have ever hung a wreath on the vent hood and I have been swooning over it and asking myself why I had never done it in the past??  I found the ‘Meet Me Under the Mistletoe‘ printable on Etsy and was thrilled to be able to complete this space without having to run to town to locate a sign I liked or order something online that I would have to wait on. 

My very practical husband refuses to let me tuck the roll of paper towels away somewhere a little less noticeable and with four kids I’m sure I would be on them about making a mess everywhere because they weren’t easily accessible.  So I decorate around this lovely roll of paper towels and we are a happier household for it.  I have amassed quite a collection of trees over the years.  Last year my youngest son and I staged them all together on the foyer table.  It was a beautiful tree village, complete with all of the forest animals Chase gathered to disperse throughout.  This year I clumped them in small groups throughout the house.  I use vintage books to create height and depth within many of the vignettes that I create, like what you see here. 

This wood slab was another flea market find that I move around the house to pull different vignettes together.  I love the warmth that it adds to this otherwise stark gathering.  These little white porcelain houses are from the dollar spot at Target.  They are $3 a piece and I own about ten of them.  I have to force myself from buying more of them every time I walk by that section! 

When we painted the kitchen cabinets and replaced the counter tops a few years ago I had the doors removed from the main cabinet where our dishes are housed.  I love the look of the open shelf concept, the convenience of getting the dishes in and out and the opportunity to add a little bit of decor to this space.

My mom and I made these gnomes a couple years ago via a Pinterest tutorial. Aren’t they darling?  Simple and darling.

Dining Room Holiday Decor

When we built our house we opted to skip the formal dining room.  At times I regret this (like when I see beautifully set dining room tables on Pinterest or Instagram), but we just aren’t that formal and it seemed like such a waste of space.  Our dining room is an extension of our kitchen and I do love the togetherness that is fostered by this placement.  I feed a lot of people on any given day.  An oversized table is a must.  I searched and searched for a table like this and couldn’t find one, so I decided to build one…  Crazy, right?!  This table was the first of many things I have built over the past five years.  Thank you Ana White for the easy-to-follow plans for this farmhouse table! 

Anyways, back to the decor.  I ordered the buffalo check table runner, again from Etsy.  I ordered it about a week before Thanksgiving, but it didn’t arrive before I went into decorate-overdrive.  In the meantime I pulled the round place mats out of storage and decided to use them as my table runner.  I love the way the round place mats and the round cake stands play off of each other.  In hindsight I’m glad the buffalo plaid runner took a little longer to arrive because I love the way it peeks out from under the place mats and adds to the depth and texture of the vignette without overpowering it all. 

I made the Eat, Drink and Be Merry sign a few years back and I still look forward to pulling it out at Christmas time.  Especially this year with my color scheme! 

This advent calendar is the perfect size.  I was on the search for one for years before I found this one and I continue to keep my eye out for them every year and I have not found another one that I like as much as this one.  Most are pretty oversized and cumbersome.  The cubbies on this one house two miniature size pieces of candy, one for each of my ‘littles.’  Notice the buffalo check bow I added to tie it into the theme this year?  Not at all overbearing.

Our Holiday-Styled Living Room

My kids look forward to Christmas decor going up because it means that the furniture gets rearranged back to the ‘right’ way.  They DO NOT like change and when I purchased these two identical couches a few years back and placed them opposite each other, perpendicular to the TV, you would have thought that I shot the dog!  It was the end of the world to them! But I move them around to make room for the Christmas tree when I decorate and those kids ride Cloud 9 when I do.  This year I decided to move the oversized coffee table that I built out of the living room to make a little more space.  It gets pretty tight once the presents start spilling over into the middle of the living room and we lose our walk path through the space.  I replaced the table with this gathering of a much smaller side table, the cushion topped stool and the basket of blankets.  I love the way that the different heights play against each other, the conglomeration of all of the different textures and the functionality of having the basket of cozy blankets that the kids are fast to make use of.

Again, I used vintage books to add height and dimension to my vignettes.  My husband has a ‘thing’ for giant TV’s.  It is his thing.  He is not into watching sports, he doesn’t play golf, he doesn’t hunt.  But he likes his giant TV’s, as you see.  The funny part is that he doesn’t hardly ever watch TV and when he does it is mostly the news.

Ta-dah! Finally, the tree!  I’m so excited to share the tree with you guys.  I am so smitten with how it turned out!  I tied bows with one inch buffalo plaid ribbon on some of the white ornaments, added the black and white striped poinsettia flowers that I purchased from Prairie Gardens and the large check buffalo plaid bow at the top.  Not too over the top, but enough to tie it all together.  I did buy a set of wood slice chalkboard ornaments from Etsy, but they haven’t arrived yet.  I’m hoping that they will be here soon.  All of the other ornaments are ones that I have amassed over the past five years and I just picked and chose which worked with this theme.  The lambs ear and eucalyptus sprigs, as well as the cotton stems are new this year and I love the farmhouse vibe that they add.  The faux fur stockings can be found at Pottery Barn.

The white ‘puffs’ of snow are actually these dusters!!  I took the idea from the amazing Lucy at Craftberry Bush.  I have drooled over her Christmas trees for years and when she included a link to what she used to create the snowy goodness on her trees I jumped at giving it a try.  I added 12 of them to my tree, but I think it would have looked better if I had ordered more of them.  People that have seen the tree in person have all really liked my little snow piles:)

When it came to hanging the ornaments I tried something new this year.  I hung some, but if you look closely you can see that I clumped the ball ornaments in groups of two or three and I used pipe cleaners to attach the cluster of ornaments to the top of the branch, rather than it hanging below the branch.  I got this idea last year when we spent a couple of days in Vegas.  There were some amazing trees at the Wynn that were decorated in this manner.  The glittery German book page ornaments were made at last year’s Pinterest craft party and work perfectly with this year’s black and white color scheme.

If you look closely you will notice that hidden behind the pillows and blanket at the base of the tree is a box to raise the tree.  Because we have an artificial tree cutting the lower limbs is not an option.  I used to fight with having minimal clearance under the tree to fit presents until I thought of putting the tree up on this decorative box.  It makes for so much more room to fit those extra presents that we can’t seem to help from buying!

Well, that’s all for today!  I hope you enjoyed it.  I’d love to hear what you think of this year’s color scheme.  Check back soon for part two of this year’s Holiday Home Tour or you could subscribe by entering your email address in the side bar above in order to receive email notifications of new posts.