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We’ve been remodeling a guest house on our ranch—called “The Lodge—since last February…and I’m just now realizing we’re actually going to have to buy furniture for the place. Well, I suppose we don’t HAVE to put furniture in there. We could just go the bean bag route, drape beads in the doorways, and act like we’re trying to recreate Greg Brady’s room.

Think anyone would buy it? Probably not on a cattle ranch. Cattle ranches, as everyone knows, aren’t very groovy.

I don’t know how to buy furniture. I’ve never really had to outfit a house all at once as we’re having to do with The Lodge. Aside from being a little overwhelming from a financial perspective, it’s also intimidating to think the decisions I’ll make over the next couple of weeks—what I’ve deemed the “furniture buying weeks”—will be with us for a long, long time. The last thing I want to do is go on a big splurge over a two-week period…and regret half of my decisions later.

So I’ve decided to make The Lodge very, very sparse, at least for now. And when I say sparse, I mean it: in the bedrooms, beds. Maybe a nightstand. In the dining room, a long dining table with benches. In the living room, comfortable sofas and enough end tables to allow guests to set down a drink. Maybe a lamp here and there for light. And that’s it, I tell you—IT! (Remind me I’m saying this, okay?) Read the rest »

Isn’t it amazing how one photo in a design magazine can stick with you? It’s happened to me before—a rusty orange rug in the bedroom of a Colorado home, a cool steel window in a Wyoming residence, a certain cerulean vase on the bookshelf of a Manhattan loft. I remember these random, tiny details, just like I remember a bedroom I saw in a spread in a magazine last year. Oh, was it ever perfect.

There was a four-poster bed—not the old fashioned kind, with mosquito netting or curtains hanging all around—but a more squared-off, contemporary bed that was much more updated than the old traditional four-posters. It was adorned in simple, clean white linens; at certain angles, they almost looked gauzy. The walls of the bedroom were a mottled, taupe-gray-brown color—one I just can’t get out of my head because it was so beautiful. The resulting color scheme—the rustic brown of the bed frame, the subtle taupe of the wall, and the white of the linens—was really something special. It’s remained in my gut ever since.

What I loved about this bedroom—whose magazine spread, unfortunately, I tossed out with the trash one morning—was its intentional simplicity. There weren’t mirrors on the walls or decorative pillows on the beds, no ornate rugs or vases with reeds. There was only simplicity—but miraculously, it wasn’t cold and sterile.

I must be drawn to rooms like this because they don’t even come close to resembling every day life in my own house. In my house, the bedrooms are lived in—lived in to the Nth degree—and that’s okay.

But for The Lodge bedrooms (above), which will ultimately be a haven not just for me and my family, but for guests, I plan on starting things off right. The right bed, the right linens, and the right paint color are my focus right now, and I plan to get those in place and re-evaluate before adding any other furniture or accessories.

I know that level of simplicity is difficult to pull off, and as a woman, the need to build a nest can often involve adding, adding, adding. But since I’m starting with a clean slate, I’m considering it a personal challenge to reproduce the feeling of that original bedroom I saw in the magazine.
I just hope I don’t forget what it looked like.

by Pioneer Woman

A week after returning from my sister’s home in Austin (see above), my house is much farther along on the road to being clutter-free—well, unless you go upstairs to my kids’ rooms, and I haven’t even begun thinking about that trip through Purgatory. But the downstairs? The kitchen and living room area? It’s so clutter-free, it’s almost scary. I still can’t decide if it looks like mom and dad came and stripped my dormroom of all their furniture…or if it looks the way it should look. All I know is, it’s sparse. And I’ve never been happier in my life. Suddenly, a huge weight has been lifted.

We’re in the middle of a huge remodel project on the ranch—not in our own home but in The Lodge, an old guest house up the road from our place. We’re more than halfway through the remodel, and are about to finalize the kitchen plan. Soon we’ll begin thinking about wall colors, furniture, and accessories. Here’s what it looked like before we started the remodel:

My recent Clutter Revelation has got me thinking. While I want The Lodge to be comfortable, homey, warm, and inviting to guests (or Marlboro Man and me, when we escape the mile and a half there to go on an occasional “date”…but that’s another story for another time), I can’t help but shake the notion that I want things to be simple, clean, understated, sparse. It is, in fact, a “lodge”, though, so stark stainless steel and sleek, contemporary furniture and cabinetry would be completely out of place. But the way my mindset is right now, so would big, ornate leather sofas, Navajo throw pillows, and paintings everywhere you look. I don’t want the place to look highly contrived and decorated. I want people to walk in, kick off their shoes, and feel at peace.

Basically, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I want the Zen-type feel of sparseness and clean lines. But I want the warmth of a luxurious Colorado ski chalet. What approach am I after?

This is what’s been occupying my thoughts all week.

As I recently chronicled on my website, I just returned from Austin, where I spent a week visiting my sister, Betsy, her husband, Matt, and their new baby boy. I’d never seen their new house—the house they moved into over a year ago—and after spending an entire week there, I returned to my home having decided something important: We humans have too much stuff.

Betsy and Matt’s house is in a dicey area of Austin, so they were able to get a pretty cool house for less money than if they’d bought in a better area of town. You’d think this would mean they would have used the money they saved to fill their new house to the brim with tons of furniture, pillows, accessories, and velvet wall hangings of The King. But they didn’t. They just kept it simple, using the cleanlined furniture they already owned, and resisting the urge to accessorize-accessorize-accessorize.

As a result, the only clutter in the entire house was the stash of Central Market groceries I brought to their house every day: I had to put all the bread products on top of the fridge because I’d filled the fridge itself with sushi, grilled tilapia, gourmet soups, and Eggplant Parmigiano. I even cluttered up the island—which formerly housed only a plain glass bowl of fruit—with lotions, bath gels, and baby products. Before I showed up, however, except for the oft-used collection of Betsy’s cookbooks, the kitchen was as clutter-free as the rest of the house.

In a nutshell, everything in Matt and Betsy’s house is in its proper place, and sparseness reigns supreme. There aren’t stacks of magazines or baskets of stray junk to distract your eye; you only see clean.
The result? At the end of the week, even though I’d spent the majority of the time taking care of a newborn baby and helping my sister around the house, I felt relaxed, mellow, at peace. And I couldn’t help but think that spending all that time in a clutter-free environment played some role in that. And I resolved to go home and rid my house of every single item that wasn’t monumentally necessary to human life.

Wish me luck—I may not come out of it alive.

-Pioneer Woman