After the fact

I suspect I am not alone in that every year I feel a sense of let down once all of the Christmas decorations are packed away.  Where surfaces were once covered with a warmth and glow, everything now suddenly seems stripped bare and completely devoid of character in the wake of their removal.  I have, for the last several years, subconsciously counteracted this by re-arranging decor, trying to organize better and adding a few small items that make life in general a little bit better.

This year, I found myself in a local gem of a store, The Little House Shop in Wayne.  It is a classic breath of fresh air in a world of trendy, disposable home goods.  The inventory reads almost as though it was taken directly from the "Displaying the Loot" page of The Official Preppy Handbook.  All cliches aside, it is a great place to go if you want something nice that you will enjoy for a very long time.

The inside of the store is warm and soothing and the staff are kind and helpful.  It's the sort of place you can get lost in and completely forget about time in general.

My big find (or I should say solution to a very annoying problem), was a small basket with slatted sides.  I keep the charging cords for my phone and iPad near a small table in the breakfast room.  The problem here is keeping them ON the table, which they almost never are unless they are plugged into something with weight.  Besides looking awful, having cords draped on the floor is just plain dangerous.  The basket solved this problem perfectly since I could slide the cord ends through the slats, they stay in place and now I have a place to stash the items being charged and looks fairly neat and presentable.

The next undertaking had to do with my new found orchid addiction.  I love having fresh flowers in the house, but buying them to watch them die after five days or so was not only getting to be depressing, but seemed like a waste of money.  Enter Trader Joes and their extremely reasonably priced orchids.  The blooms last exponentially longer than a nice bouquet for roughly the same price.  Even longer, if you are better than I am at keeping things alive, but I digress.  I bought a fresh specimen to spruce up my desk, but it came in a simple clay pot that was neither attractive to look at or friendly to the surface of my desk.  I didn't have an extra cache pot, so I headed over to Valley Forge Flowers, which is sort of a sister store to The Little House Shop.

In addition to being a traditional florist, they sell a variety of horticultural oriented home goods, preserved boxwood topiaries of all shapes and sizes, soaps, lotions, candles and a wide variety of unusual cache pots.

They also have a great little gourmet cafe and coffee bar.

This perfect little black painted pot came home with me and makes my work space a much happier place.  I can almost forget about how awful the panelling on the wall looks.  That's the next project.  Stay tuned.

~ESM