Having cleared a lot of books and furniture out of my living room last week, I looked around and thought: It looks better, but it doesn't look wonderful.  It needs rearrangement.  It needs an artistic eye.

I always used to think I had an artistic eye, but I was stumped.  Maybe not so much.

So I asked my friends throughout the week.  Some said, "You need new curtains."  My curtains - plain white cotton - are plain, and need hemming, but I like them - and I don't want to spend money on this project.  There followed a discussion of curtain colours, and whether people want a warm and cosy, closed-in environment, or something that feels cool and spacious.

The whole point of this project is that I want spacious - or, perhaps, a compromise middle point between the extremes.

Yesterday my friend Pim came down and looked around.  She is an interior decorator par excellence - and artist with the right kind of eye. Her place not only looks comfortable and beautiful, it has character. One would never mistake her place for a page in a magazine, and not just because of the guinea pigs running around.  Her place always looks both lovely and interesting.

So. She looked around my place, and made a few suggestions, and made a few more, and I added some, and we pushed around furniture and moved pictures and bookcases and teapots and suddenly the place looked beautiful, livable, and interesting.

How did she do that?

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And, yes, there's still a lot to do.  The hallway.  The (shudder) kitchen. Work in progress, I tell myself. Work in progress.

Today I'm going to Gananoque to deliver my bags of books to a friend with a bookstore there.  J. Mann books, on Charles Street near King.  A fab place for a browse, and you'll a lot of books there that used to be on my bookcases.

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