The Nesting Place Giveaway

thToday I am featuring a fabulous decorating expert The Nester who has just released a FABULOUS book. {I’m giving away two copies today!} I love her philosophy that it doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful. Here is a short interview with The Nester about this new project.

Tell us a little bit about what life is like around your place these days.

Well, since I wrote the book proclaiming how we moved 13 times in 18 years of being married, we’ve actually moved yet AGAIN! House number 14 is a really special place for us. For years our dream has been to purchase a little house with some land. And we somehow convinced a bank that we were responsible adults and they gave us a loan for a house on 12 acres outside of Charlotte, NC. We moved here in August and have been fixing the place up ever since.

EVERY surface is begging for our attention. We are doing lots of the work ourselves –that’s code for this place is a mess and it’s gonna be that way for a few years. We tore down walls and made a new kitchen, we inherited a pool where everything is broken (it’s currently green) we are fixing up a barn so that we can have gatherings and swap meets and craft days, and we even have chickens! We are slowly learning what it means to live in the country and once again, I’m having to remind myself that it’s possible to live beautifully within the imperfection. And this is the most imperfect house we’ve ever lived in.

When did you first become interested in decorating?

I see the world through house-colored glasses. I always have. When my sister, Emily and I used to play Barbies, she was always annoyed with me because I didn’t care about their backstory or who was dating who, I just wanted to decorate their houses. So I guess it started when I was a little girl.

You say “It doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful.” That is such a wonderful philosophy but how do we live that out in an age of Pinterest perfection?

Pinterest and beautiful shelter magazines are there to encourage us. If we look at them and leave feeling shamed about our home, then we are abusing them and looking at them all wrong.

I don’t compare the photo my son took with my phone to my neighbor’s wedding portrait and then feel bad and give up hope of ever looking pretty. None of us do that. We all know that a wedding portrait is a special once in a lifetime event where it took specialists and a team of people to get the perfect shot.

It’s the same with the homes in magazines and pinterest. I know this for sure because my home is all over pinterest and in magazines. Photo-shooting a home is actually messy business. The cords and extra pillows and extra stuff is all just out of range of the camera lens. When the shoot is over, we usually have to take a minute to straighten up so the house goes back to normal.

If my house always looked like it did that day it was in a magazine that would be tragic, kitchens are for making a big mess making fudge and enchiladas and craft rooms are for crafting and being messy. Beautiful messes are signs of life. Let’s embrace that!

 

photo-42What do you hope women gain from reading The Nesting Place?

I hope we can all start loving the home we are in, and stop waiting for the next house. I hope we can welcome people into the imperfection openly because we realize that imperfections put people at ease. I hope we make decorating decisions not out of fear but out of freedom. I hope we embrace the true purpose of our homes and realize that has much less to do with heavy crown molding and much more to do with our attitude. I hope we finally are convinced of what we have all secretly hoped was true, that it doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful.

GIVEAWAY:

Leave a comment telling us which room in your house could most use a decorating makeover. Two winners will be chosen to receive a copy of The Nesting Place.

207 Comments

  1. My dream is have my extra bedroom as a place to go to relax, pray, sew or just a place to sit in peace. Our bedroom would be my second choice as it has become a storage area….

  2. It would be the whole upstairs in our house where three college guys just moved in (2 of them are our sons). So three bedrooms and an office space need a lot of help!

  3. Both of my bedrooms are begging for a makeover! Thank you for writing this book, Myquillyn! It is much needed.

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