Last night, we were able to remove (almost) everything from the room, tear out the tile baseboard and give those nasty floors a good scrubbin’, all while laughing about how terrible the floor really is.  I guess I thought that, by some miracle, scrubbing the floors on our hands and knees and then using magic erasers over the whole thing would result in a change of color.  C’mon! We were on our hands and knees! But, as it turns out, those tiles really are light blue with dirty brown accents.  To add to their beauty, they are sliced to fit the slope in the floor that leads to the drain–which is why we can’t use stick-on tiles and these large tiles should have never been used in the first place.  The good news is, most of those cracked-on-purpose tiles are underneath the washer and dryer.  Also, the floor is squeaky clean…which is always good news.  Tomorrow we’ll have much more exciting progress to share–like paint!

Since I could never leave you with boring details about cleaning floors and no details about ripping out the tiled baseboards (also boring), I’ll hop on the “we decorated” train, too. While I am still not ready to break out the spider webbing, bats and crows from last year (we might just save those for the week of our costume party), we are continuing to add hints of the season around the house.  Most recently, I picked up some misfit pumpkins for the open shelving in our kitchen:

I love the warts and non-traditional shapes and colors of these.  LOVE them.  Every time we go to the store, we like to play who can find the ugliest most unique pumpkin. And then, one day, I couldn’t take it anymore–we needed some misfit pumpkins in our house! They are really beautiful. Even the warty guy. The open shelving felt like just the right place for them, so I put away the stuff on the top shelf for now and filled ‘er up with these happy, festive guys who feel like they have personalities, right?

They fit our keep-it-classy-not-crafty holiday decorating style perfectly.  Between our new pumpkin misfits and Mr. Skully on the credenza, I’d say we’re…getting there.

But if you could smell this place right now (I got our Leaves candle from Bath and Body works going), the autumn mood around here would be a lot more convincing.

And with that, I’m off to narrow down 50 paint swatches.  Who else is decorating!?