Easy Fall Decorating Ideas (When You Don’t Want to Decorate!)

I have a confession. I don't want to decorate for fall this year. So today's video I am going to start right now this very moment planning my fall decorating and I'm going to do it real time with you because while I have literally no ambition to decorate for fall I also am dissatisfied with my remaining summer items that are just out. I'm feeling bored. I'm feeling restless. I have a million house projects going on behind the scenes that I am excited to share with you in future videos but they're really intense, time-consuming, labor-heavy, and expensive and so I don't want to be spending money, time, or too much effort decorating for fall and I feel like you probably have similar situations in life that are demanding your attention beyond and above what fall decorating should be and so let's do this together. Here are what I hope to be some easy ideas to decorate for fall when you really don't want to and I hope that because I don't know what I'm gonna do. So you're gonna find out at the same time that I do. It's more fun that way. Willow, come here. And this one is gonna be along for the ride because she's decided that she has to be under my feet at all moments of the day and can never leave me alone and no. So you might hear some clickety clacking on my audio. It's her toenails, okay? Now I am excited to show you my new sofa. I told you I was getting a new sofa that better fits this space and it has arrived and we're still determining how we want to live with it the best with the ottoman placement and everything else but you're really loving the bigger size. It's been a game changer for our family already in the last week. Dude, can you see her? You can't see her at my feet going absolutely bonkers. So my first step is gonna be taking all of the non-fallish. Those could work for fall. I don't really want this pillow though. The non-fallish colors out of here. A lot of them are just pillow covers. Oh, look at that. I forgot what I had under here. That could be cute for fall as my feathers go everywhere. That might work. We're gonna put away all the pillow covers that are for summer though. Oh no, don't eat that. Don't eat that. I'm also gonna take down the really summery winter or the really summery blankets and store them away. What I do with these is I just keep a pile of blankets in our basement on our like console table and they're like pretty. I said like four or five times there. I don't normally do that. They're like really pretty. You know when you get to a stage and you know that you've taken on too many things because your brain stops functioning to its normal capabilities. I have a couple of pillows that like I feel like this could do well for fall because it's brown but oh my gosh the feather situation here. But I've had it out all summer and so I'm just kind of tired of it. Probably should have just left the cover on and topped it with my next one because holy smokes what in the world. You're not to be trusted alone. You gotta come with me. All right I've got a few replacements. So I like to just put one blanket over this chair. We don't ever use it. We don't ever use it to cover up with. It's pretty. It's pretty for me and I like it. Willow. Hey. Then I had a few pillow covers that are pretty for fall for a couple of reasons. These are all old. They're very old. This one's got a lot of texture to it. I like texture for fall. This one is just like your classic. Oh that's bigger than I thought. Perfect. I thought it was an 18 by 18. Your classic like tweed feel to it and then I thought maybe a pop of leather for our blue sofa would look really nice. It's kind of like a bit of a masculine feel to it so I wanted to get something on there that kind of flowed with that look. What are you eating? What are you eating? One thing I've noticed as I get older is that I have less desire to change my house which is kind of a problem for what my job is because I like to share ideas with you but I also feel like I kind of get to a point in my house where I like how it looks and that I just don't want to change it and that's normal for any homeowner. It's not normal to continually change all the time unless you want to and it gives you joy and then anything is normal as long as you love it but I have just kind of felt like that weird pull towards more simplicity in decorating and in changing my home and so I think that kind of is part of what's stemming out of my lack of desire for fall decorating but also I don't know I'm just tired. Anybody else tired? I mostly blame this one for my level of tiredness because she is a full-time job but these are the things that we do for our children. Now I've got just the right amount I think off. She is not allowed on the sofa. No! You stop your terrorist tendencies. No. No! I'll tell you what for every time I tell Willow no in this video you get to go do something that you love. You're gonna have so much fun by the end of this video. Off. I'm gonna do all the pillow situating later but first I want to start removing all the non-fall items out of here. So I'm gonna leave a lot of it but certain things just overly springy and sometimes all you really need to do is take stuff out instead of adding. This feels particularly fallish. Get down! No. I do still want to paint this cabinet or stain it darker. One or the other I haven't decided yet. Right now I'm tossing it up between like a dark walnut stain and to match all the other walnut in my house or a black paint. Those are my two options. Can't decide. I think it's a good winter project. Sometimes even the process of taking things down is just really tiring. Now look at how pretty these are. I stopped into a shop and they had these on display off all over the place like in their store and they were it was the store display and I was like can I buy these and she said yeah they're for sale and so I felt like I was undecorating their store but they're all tangled right now. There we go. Isn't this gorgeous? I love how realistic they look. They're like a little crinkly. They're the perfect color. Not bright orange. No. No. They're not bright orange but they're not brown. They're a burnt orange. It's the perfect color. I thought it might be pretty up here. I should probably take off the tags. Where are you? No. I tend to like kind of like more subtle garlands than a full-fledged like hanging off of both sides so I'll step back and see how this looks. No. I see you. You know how new moms like have tuned their ear to their baby's cries? That is how I can recognize when Willow is doing something very naughty. I have tuned... No. I've tuned my ear to her chewing noise. She's a little over the trial right now. It's pretty but it needs more oomph. Needs more. I just got done saying that I like things to be a little bit simple and not overly done for a garland and then I'm like, oh let me add another one. Now my little coffee nook, I feel like I kind of designed it like fall. Like the colors are very fall-ish but over time it's become my drop zone of decor that I don't really know what I want to do with so that needs to be cleaned up and maybe I can use some of these pieces somewhere else or maybe they'll just go into storage for now. I don't know. We'll see. I really like having these branches here because it just like makes the space feel a lot more alive but these ones are obviously very springy. They're bud branches and I've had them up all summer so maybe I'll swap these for some fall ones if I have any. I don't even know if I do. No, Willow. I got these this year at Hobby Lobby and I think they're adorable. I actually don't usually use faux pumpkins very much because I think that they look very fake and these ones obviously you can still tell they're fake but I felt like the coloring was really cute and would look really cute in this nook specifically so I did get those this year and I got this little cutie jar for three dollars in the antique store. Isn't it cute? It has markings on the bottom but I cannot read them. I think they're in a different language. Bulgaria perhaps. I do think it says Bulgaria. Let's take this out. You see my problem is I don't actually have a lot of fall decor. I sold the majority of it when we moved and then I sold even more in my last garage sale so I have basically nothing to work with and I'm just taking everything out. Now I got this really beautiful marble cup. I don't know. What? I don't know. What is it? A vase? In an antique store and then I have these and I thought that they would be really pretty kind of sitting out of it but I don't want to cut the stems to fit because then they won't be very usable in the future so I'm going to take a little green zip tie and make a super tight bundle here just to keep the top like together and tight and then I'm going to bend the stems kind of into like a circle almost so that they will rest inside of my vase. There we go. Here we go. Here we go. Maybe. Let's see how that works. Tighter. Tighter. Get in there. The effort required for that was a little bit excessive here. I love it. That's so cute. I like that. Over here in the kitchen I kind of like I already changed my fall foliage up top to those purple leaves. This feels a bit too springy with the really bright green so I'm going to take that out and I have another one I think that I'll swap in but other than that this might be just a smidgen too vibrant for fall. Isn't this fun? I got this at the Fountain Cottage Mercantile Market and it's got fabric inside. I think it was a sewer's basket. It's so cute. I'm gonna put like shallots and garlic and stuff in Isn't this pretty? It's so beautiful. It's one of my favorite oil paintings. It's just on a board and I just have it on some command strips so that it doesn't damage my painting and it doesn't damage my walnut and I'm just gonna pop it right in the middle here. Probably would have been good if I where I put those command strips. This is still alive somehow. Think about it. I think this is one of my favorite fall looks that I've ever done and it's so simple and I hardly did anything and I think that might be why it's one of my favorites because I get a little overwhelmed when my house is really full of stuff. Like when I do Christmas decorating I put it up and I am just aching to take it down the day after Christmas because a little extra clutter in my life feels like it just overwhelms my senses and it overwhelms my to-do list in my mind and those two things are not things that I need in this stage of life. When all else fails, you know, put a pumpkin on it. One pumpkin. Done. You don't need elaborate centerpieces these days. Cozy fire. Fall decor. Done. Easy swaps of pillows. Done. Easy swaps of blankets. Done. And honestly the biggest change in the entire house was just taking stuff out. Just removing it. I put basically I made this cabinet into my stoneware collection cabinet for lack of better word but nothing in here is new. I just rearranged it and grabbed some things from my downstairs cabinet and put them in here. I obviously added this but that was a really simple addition and also wouldn't even be necessary to make it feel new and fresh in your home just to rearrange the stuff you already have and enjoy a fresh look without purchasing anything or having any overtly fall decor. So in the living room it's really sparse. I basically only have fall leaves and two pumpkins and that's all the fall overt fall decor that I have in the entire living room. The rest of it is just these really gold kind of amber hues and some browns that I brought in with pillows and blankets. In the coffee nook I really only just took stuff out and then rearranged what I had and then those two pumpkins I told you about from Hobby Lobby I added those but everything else was removing rather than adding and I really love this. I don't know why it makes me so happy but it's really cute and it's really simple and it's like the little focal point of this whole area. In this side of the kitchen it was again just a simple swap of this. I showed you these early fall leaves that I put up in my living room months weeks ago not months weeks ago and I just moved them in here and this is just a really simple display of foliage and live plants. And then in the kitchen all I did was add this piece of artwork in this basket and everything else was already here and I removed some things. So most of what I did is removing and then adding a fall color rather than a fall like overt piece of decor and that makes me feel very like it's kind of decorated for fall but it's not like pumpkins in your face. Now this basket kind of blends in a little too much to the walnut. It's a little too dark for this space. I think I would like it better if it was like totally up against just a white background or something because it would make it pop a little bit more but for now it works. So if you're kind of in the same boat that I was and you're not feeling the fall decor this year or you're just busy and you're tired and you don't want to pay anything extra for new decor I hope that this like color palette changes and simple swaps and one extra pumpkin and just like really simple things can help inspire you maybe just refresh your whole home by moving your existing decor around the stuff that's out year round and making collections and cabinets you know it just doesn't have to be overly complicated and so I hope that this has just been something you've enjoyed watching and inspires you a little bit as we head into the full-on fall decorating season. Now if you didn't see last week's video it's a fall front porch but no pumpkins very budget friendly and I went a little bit more bold on that one so make sure and check that one out and I will see you next week.