Haunted Decorating 101

I’ve been trying to clean out the hard drives lately.  They are much more fun than cleaning closets or bathrooms.  There was once a time when I had all my hard drives beautifully organized and then the great crash of oh.. I don’t remember when.. happened.  All my pictures, documents, videos were saved thanks to my glorious husband, but the recovery program renamed all my data.  All that organization gone, date, names, numbers…..GONE!  So, every so often, I try to grab a bunch of pictures and rename them, re file them, and put the scattered pieces of memory back together again.  

So while I was going thru my hard drive today, I came across pictures of our Haunted Mansion room and let’s just say, wow..did I have some decorating issues way back when!

This is the oldest pictures I can find at the moment… If I find others, I’ll be sure to dispose of them share them right away! 

Most of the collectibles in this picture were seasonal, and we would bring them out every year for Halloween.  I believe this is the first year we decided to leave it all out all year ’round.  We started buying large prints from Print on Demand at the Disney Gallery, because we decided that we loved the art from the Mansion, and wanted to surround ourselves with pieces that made us happy!

Here’s the wall opposite of the orange couch, which I liked to call the beast, because of its size…What was I thinking when I chose this wall color?!

I also had no idea how to arrange this room, which was quite large yet awkward to fill because of all the openings to other rooms. I was watching way too much HGTV at the time and decided to move the beast away from the wall and into the middle of the room, basically dissecting the room into two. And I’m completely aware of the hideous window treatments…

…which is why I changed them in 2005. Better, but the room still needs work. But, hey, I had to deal with hand me down furniture and no budget for decorating, because it was all going to collectibles! At least the stretching portraits are all together now, not scattered around the room as before.

Then I turned the beast to face the fireplace (which is behind the Christmas tree), because HGTV told me to and it stayed here for quite a while…

…but I HATED the set up and the weird spaces it created (which possibly explains the lack of pictures from 2006)… so I turned the beast, yet again, and moved it back… but still not against the wall. This opened the room but made it difficult to have a conversation area. At this point, I was an HGTV addict and had to go into rehab. While I was there, the yellow wall was painted to match the rest of the room, and I was cured.

Finally, in 2008, my husband moved the beast one last time (I was forbidden due to health complications from moving the darn thing so many times before) to a more suitable location, where we can have a comfortable conversation area, but not be lost in the huge room. I was really liking this room in 2008. I wish I had taken a better picture of it…

I promised my husband I would never make him move the couch again, and when we moved from this house, we didn’t bring the couch! I regret it now, because I really loved that couch, and I realize now that it would have fit beautifully in our new ‘haunted’ library, which I’ve changed about 4 times since we moved here 9 months ago… *sigh*