THE HOUSE DOCTOR ESTABLISHING A HOME FOR ALL SEASONS

(Writing and photography by Sheila Gail Landgraf)

With a blog name like "In Season" how could I not have a seasonal house?  If anything stands out about all of my articles of remodeling and making a house a home; I would say being "seasonal" has become my own trade mark.  I love a seasonal house!

If you are interested in the concept of a "seasonal house," just note my comments below and begin to make your own plan.  I promise you; you will enjoy it and it will become a fun adventure for you and your family!

When we began remodeling and decorating our home we wanted it to be flexible enough to change with every season.  That is important in a "seasonal house" and you have to keep it in mind as you go along.  We love the liturgical calendar and the way that different seasons teach us in different ways to live our lives to the fullest.  We wanted rooms that would reflect whatever season we were currently living out.  The concept may sound complicated at first; but it is actually very easy and flexible.  

What about you?  What things do you love about each season?  You might want to make a list and consider these things carefully if you are planning to make a "seasonal house" work into your decorating schemes.  Think of the different things you do and how you entertain and live in your home through each season of the year.  Give these things first consideration and decorate in a way that makes it all flow together with your lifestyle.   

We knew it would be work and take time to make these little changes happen at our house every season; but we thought it would keep us from getting tired or bored with what we had spent so much time and energy remodeling and creating.  We wanted  to use things that were classic,timeless and neutral; things that could be decorated around with any color scheme we chose, things that went with each and every changing season.  Once the major purchases were carefully made, we didn't want to have to spend a lot to keep everything current over and over again.  We needed a house for all seasons, a house that was about living and not about things; but the things that we DO have in our house needed to reflect the way we were living in the season that we were in at the time.  It is more about a living atmosphere than  about decorating.  You know how you can walk into a restaurant and know you want to come there over and over again because it provokes certain feelings in you?  Maybe it isn't the decor or the food; it could be the people that frequent the restaurant, or maybe it isn't the people, but the feeling of quiet peace and harmony that you pick up on.  Whatever emotions that are good, those that feed our souls and make our lives rich, that is how we want the seasons at our home to be lived out by everyone who crosses the threshold of our front door. 

This took careful consideration in choosing the main colors and furniture pieces.  We made most of the walls white and let our accent colors bring out color schemes.  This meant that color and decor could completely change at will.  Like life itself, no season at our house will ever be the same.  Some summers are beachy, some are full of fireworks, some springs are vivid greens and some are creamy yellows mixed with gray.  Some winters are festive and celebratory and some are cozy and intimate.  Each new season brings its own flavor according to where we are in life.  The house is flexible; it lives around all of this and joins in the dance of life with us.

To help achieve an easy blend each season we used very basic black and white and mixed neutrals and creams in the fabrics.  Sometimes the draperies change.  Sometimes the pillows change, but the main fabric covered furniture remains a creamy white.    We bought white sofas and black chairs.  Our kitchen table is topped with black smoked glass.  Our other furniture is mixed wood tones, mostly dark colored woods. but some accent pieces are painted white or a color.  We have used a lot of mirrors in order to create the illusion of space, especially in the kitchen area.   There are vivid brightly colored accent pieces of furniture that I store and only bring out in their season.  I have a set of red wing-backed chairs and a set of forest green chairs that I mix and match when appropriate.  I have different colored side chairs that I set here and there and often I change the fabric in their seats to different seasonal colors.   About half the year those chairs are stored.  Most of the other smaller wooden accent pieces are painted a color of the season.  They are pretty much pieces I've found in junk stores and painted myself.  They add so much personality when in use!

If you decide to do this, you will need a storage shed.  If you have a small space, perhaps an apartment instead of a house, I suggest you splurge and rent a storage bin.  Having this extra space to store things is VERY helpful in pulling this off.  Just remember it isn't about accumulating things.  Smaller spaces just call for simpler designs; the theory works the same.  Size does not matter in a seasonal home.  Don't make this your excuse to overspend or go wild buying crazy impulsive things that bring no value or usefulness to the sacred spaces of your home.  This  need for storage was accomplished at our house by the dutch roofed storage space that is on top of our detached garage.   Renting a storage bin somewhere would work just as well for an apartment or a small cozy home.   I try to keep each season's decor organized in its place in that storage area, so all I have to do is swap out a few things each season, carefully store the old and be creative in displaying the new.  The honest word to use here is "TRY."  It is always my goal to keep this storage space from getting all cluttered up with other things that we should just be getting rid of instead of storing, but that is a constant struggle.  I try to clean out the building with a good old fashioned yard sale at least once a year.  That becomes my "mad money" for summer vacations!   Otherwise, I do go through it all at least once a year and give a lot of unused things away.  The less needless clutter here; the better.

In the beginning I picked strategic places in the house for putting the seasonal accents, the sofa pillows, the paintings and objects just inside the foyer entrance, the dining room tabletop, the top of a buffet (that I move from place to place according to the season we are in) and the areas around the fireplace including the mantle and the hearth.  I usually have something seasonal on my kitchen table as well as the buffet table inside my kitchen window.  Look around your rooms and think about the clean empty flat surfaces.  Don't think clutter, but imagine simple elegant seasonal pieces.

I change the dishes in one section of my kitchen cabinets with each season.  I have a wooden storage closet just for dishes and a closet in my house that is strictly for storing crystal and silver.   The throw pillows on the beds and in the bedroom chairs usually change with the seasons too.  I've used two large wardrobes in my guest rooms for storing bed linens, quilts and extra pillows.

The main larger pieces of art in the central rooms of the house are all classic, lovely pieces of  art that would fit with any type of decor.   They use basic color schemes.   I never move most of these pieces.  I just move the smaller things around them.    The one exception to that rule is the foyer art.  I change that painting just inside my door with each season too.  That piece of art usually sets the mood and the color scheme for the season that I am working on.  For Christmas I have a painting of Aslan the Lion with gold flecks in his mane.  Sometimes thought I chose to use an angel painting.  For Valentines season I have a Winnie the Pooh carrying balloon shaped like hearts (sounds very juvenile, but it actually works because of the very adult art in the rest of the room.)  That sets the grey, red and white color theme.  For St. Patrick's Day and leading into the greens of Spring I have a modern painting of flowers with various shades of greens and whites.  It completely changes the mood into soft green spring themes.  In the summer I have a cheerful sunflower that lends itself to blues and yellows and blends in with the beach themes that I like to use.  I also alternate this with a sailboat painting of bright vivid greens, yellows and aquas.   These two paintings also work with patriotic themes for Memorial Day and The Fourth of July.   After that I often go to beach themes.   For the Fall season I have a painting of golden, orange, brown and rust flowers.  Just changing this one foyer painting every season completely sets the mood for the rest of the decor.

There is one focal point in our living room that is a huge blank wall.  Blank walls can be such a decorating problem, but the right solutions are easier than you might think.  At some point I want to do another article about this in The House Doctor and cover some very imaginative ideas for decorating large blank walls.  This spot at our house required a large piece of artwork.  Right now, I have a modern art arrangement made up of 4 large matching pieces.  These modern design have  a blend of colors that go well with any season.  For the future, I have plans to put a sliding rack on this wall that will allow me to change out different large boards of art for each season of the year.    The painted boards will be the backdrop for that season's large art piece or pieces that will cover most of the wall.  The colored boards in the background will fill a lot of the empty space I would have had if I had just used the art by itself.  They will add splashes of  seasonal color  to the walls.     All I will have to do is take the board down for the last season and put up the board for the new season and the change of the background boards gives the room a whole different color scheme each time.  The rack should make changing this out so easy and simple.  This is a project I've planned for a long time, and it will require my  husband's help.   It will have to happen whenever he has time to help me put it all together.  Something to look forward too! He has a vision of floating glass shelves on each side of my changing focal art on this wall.  He has been sketching this out, but the building has not begun yet.  It should be interesting to see what actually comes together!    I love the concept  and I think it will work well.  I will have a special space cleared in my storage area for the different boards to be stored when not in use.  The floating glass shelves will require large pieces of decorative art, different for each season.  This will help us to achieve the more modern look we want, leaving the traditional/contemporary furnishings we have used in the past.  The change has been a slow, gradual transition.

For now, just changing out various little pieces of the decor each season is working great.  Every time we make these easy little seasonal changes, I feel we have moved into a fresh new house.  Because of this; I never get tired of our decor.  It certainly keeps us from getting bored with our house.

Occasionally all of this festiveness bleeds over into the bedrooms, the bathrooms and the downstairs den and study, even the laundry room, just depending on how much rearranging we want to do when.  Christmas, Fall and Spring seem to always wonder all over the whole house.  If we like a certain season and don't want to leave it - we simply leave that color scheme up until we are ready to move on.  There is no law that says we HAVE to make changes.  We make them as we have the time and whenever we are ready.  I've found it is easier to transition one small piece at a time as the season approaches.  It is a scheme that can be very flexible, depending on  the time and energy available.  It can also be spaced out, a little here and little there as one day leads us into another.  If everything starts feeling to much or too cluttered I can always do what I call "minimalist decorating."  I strip everything down to the bare bones furniture, polish the wood and the floors and just enjoy a little simplicity until I get back into a festive mood again.

This technique has made our house much more interesting and we are never bored with our decor.   In the end it cost very little because we simply use things we've accumulated over the years, only adding a piece here and there and remembering to give away or eliminate the pieces that no longer work for us.  People are always amazed at the changes that have taken place around our home since their last visit. 

If we took the time and trouble to lay out every little family heirloom and every special piece of decor that we love all the time, it would just be one cluttered mess, but this way, we do get to enjoy our special treasured pieces for a season and then put them away and pull them back out when that season rolls around again.  You begin to develop a certain anticipation for what comes with the changing calendar.  Here are some examples of the way things have changed from season to season:

LATE WINTER

New Year's Eve and New Year's Day is so much fun to decorate around, I just use most of the same things I used for Channakah, mostly silver and white, removing the blues.  The silver and white carry over and blend well with the reds of Valentines Day later.  Dazzling is the word that comes to mind.  I don't have many pictures of this New Year's schemes I've used.  I will have to take some next year!  We really don't make a huge deal about the American New Year at our home, as we pretty much follow the Hebraic calendar and celebrate the Hebraic New Year that happens during the Spring Holy Days.  Still, I decorate a little and we often have friends over to celebrate the changing of the American civil calendar with a special meal and a toast of thanks for the year that just passed by.

Then there is Epiphany in early January, a beautiful seasonal tradition.  I simply leave the Christmas decorations of the manger and the wise men up longer, letting the wise men draw closer to the manger every day.  I usually put the manger scene up in my kitchen and let the wise men move from our living room to there as the season progresses.  I actually bring out the manger scene and put it in our Sukkah for The Feast of Tabernacles, then move it in the house during the Christmas season.  There was actually a lot of time between the birth of Christ and the wise men appearing with their gifts.  Some think two years.  Leaving this out longer puts more emphasis on the real time frame in history.  Our kids used to love this when they were younger.  Now I'll be showing the same things to the grand kids.  I don't worry about hurrying to clean up Christmas.  I always wait until after Epiphany has passed.  It is easy to keep some of the reds from Christmas and use them for Valentine's Day in February.  That helps us to transition without being so drastic from season to season, a little here, a little there, until you have the whole look when the next season arrives.

Also with February comes Valentine's Day.  I pull out the silver, reds and whites.  I usually completely rearrange the furniture in my living room, moving out my two modern chairs and pulling in my more classic red wing-backed chairs.  I love how the reds blend with the silvers and whites to show off our house and our hearts toward one another.  I leave the silver from New Year's and incorporate it into the Valentine's themes.

SPRING

St. Patrick's Day is all green and silver and white.  This works well with my annual Purim Party that usually happens just before St. Patricks Day.   With Purim our house starts to turn more green and we lose all the red.  I keep some of the silver and white, it looks totally different with green!   Some of these greens transition on into my spring decor later.  I love colors that lend themselves to one season and the next.  

PASSOVER

Another early Spring tradition at our house is Passover.  We celebrate Unlevened Bread and Early First Fruits as The Resurrection.  It is a beautiful sacred time.  I have two sets of dishes that I use only at Passover.  One set is blue and one set is pink, white and brown.  I alternate using them and decorating for the season around them.

When the world's tradition of Easter arrives, we are usually already in Resurrection mode and so we continue to celebrate the Resurrection with all our friends who keep Easter.  To us it is simply a "Resurrection Celebration" because we follow the Hebraic calendar that Jesus used, which usually has the date of the Resurrection already done by the time the rest of the world gets around to celebrating.  We feel it is okay to celebrate the Resurrection ALL THE TIME, so we just join in on this day with our family and friends who don't quite understand the religious calendar the same way we do.  God is full of love and grace and so are we and our friends and family.  

And....it give us even more reasons to be festive.  With Easter comes the traditional things of spring that we don't bring out at our house until after Passover.  We don't worship these things or put too much emphasis on them, we simply see them as seasonal signs of spring to be appreciated for what they are and we thank the Creator who created them for their loveliness in our lives.  We recognize that our friends celebrating Easter are worshiping the same God that we are and that they appreciate the basic biblical theology of salvation from Jesus Christ the same as we do.  We too enjoy the cute little childish and seasonal things that go along with the more serious things of life. 

SPRING

THE GREEN TIMES OF SPRING

After Easter we tend to enjoy the greens of spring in and around our home, and the essence of new life that abounds all around us.  We leave all of this up in our rooms right through Mother's Day and most of May.  I think it may be one of my favorite decorating schemes.

Lately I've grown fond of using yellows and gray in the spring time too:

EARLY SUMMER BRINGS MEMORIAL DAY/FATHER'S DAY/PENTECOST/INDEPENDENCE DAY

We get all red, white and blue when Memorial Day approaches.  The memories of all those who gave their lives for our country and our freedom brings out the patriot in me.  Out come the flags and the nation's colors.  These things go well with Father's Day celebrations, because almost every Dad I know is patriotic.  Strangely enough, these colors work great for celebrating Pentecost too.  I usually add a lot of green plants into the Pentecost season, more ferns and such.  Then comes the 4th of July and we find ourselves already decorated with the traditional colors!  I love how these seasons can be blended when you decorate.  Gives me a breather in the rearranging time.  

LATE SUMMER
GETTING BEACHY IN JULY AND AUGUST

We are people who love the mountains, but in July and August we get beach fever.  If I can't make it to the coast every summer, at least the main living areas of my home will take me there in my mind.  I feel everyone should think of a weekend at home as a mini vacation and a relaxing place to retreat from the hustle and bustle of a busy life.  Your home should always be your sanctuary.   I love bringing out these fun and whimsical items and making the house a summer paradise.  Note the dishes change, as they do in every season.  So do our foods and the recipes we use.  Our back deck becomes BBQ heaven.  I love using the glass top outdoor table as much as the indoor kitchen and dining room tables for festive summer meals.   I have shelves in my building just for storing seasonal sets of dishes.  I've gradually accumulated these over the years.  Many of them have been gifts from family and friends who know how much I love changing my dishes with the seasons of the year.  The best place to find such seasonal dishes is at yard sales and thrift stores.  People get tired of them after their season is over  and practically give away the best sets!  The way I use them seasonally, I never get tired of seeing them.  

Notice how I've used seasonal picture frames for bringing out my families favorite seasonal memories?  This is an easy and inexpensive way to make a seasonal change in decor.  I look for these frames on sale after their season has passed and frame the season's photos that we just went through.  It is always fun bringing out last year's memories when I pull out that box in the next year.

FALL - SEPTEMBER, OCTOBER AND NOVEMBER BRING THE BEGINNING OF THE FALL HOLY DAYS AND THE BEAUTIFUL TRADITIONAL FALL SEASON OF HARVEST AND THANKSGIVING.

Fall is probably my favorite season, though it is so hard to pick a favorite!  I love what Fall brings to our home.  We celebrate the Hebraic Fall Holy Days; The Feast of Trumpets, The Day of Atonement and The Feast of Tabernacles that usually fall in September and October each year, according to the phases of the moon.  It is a beautiful worshipful time for us as a family full of festive meals and remembering the old old stories that speak of Jesus Christ being our Savior in the form of prophecy.  Below is a table set for The Feast of Trumpets one year.  

All of the feast days of fall speak to us of harvest and teach us the biblical lessons around harvesting our lives.  The traditional American Thanksgiving does the same.  I actually believe that the latter evolved from the former, and we celebrate all in our home.  I love the warm, friendly, coziness of all the Fall colors.  They tend to make the poet in me come alive.  When the fall days of The Feast of Tabernacles arrive, I always try to get the whole family away from work and into a quiet peaceful setting for a family vacation that gives us time for renewal and relaxation together.  It gets harder each year as our family grows, but having a seasonal house that they all look forward to returning to helps keep the nest together even after all the little birds have learned to fly on their own!  My family loves fall and my home reflects this.

EARLY WINTER

The end of November brings Channakah, which leads us into the Christmas Season.  Yes, we do celebrate Christmas at our house, unlike a lot of Hebraic thinking people, but we also celebrate Channakah.  This is simply becuase we know the miracle of Channakah is true and real and it teaches us so much about the Light of Christ.  We have come to realize that Christmas was the time of the Conception of Christ (conceived in December, born in the Fall) and we whole heartedly celebrate the Conception of Christ during the Christmas season.   We don't worship our trees at all, we simply use them as reminders that Christ is the light of the world and we try to avoid commercialism during this season and appreciate true giving from the heart.   We also use the traditonal aspects of Christmas as a time for appreciating our family and friends.  For us it is a time to take a deep breath and get reacquainted with one another at the end of a busy civil year.  Most of us have more time off during this season, so lots of festivities are always available to enjoy in our home.

Something I have used over and over in each season is candles.  Buy candles on sale after their season has passed and use them the next year.  I have a lot of ivory and white candles that serve me in every season.  You can put candles in with any arrangement and make it more special.  They are so flexible and candlelight makes every season more cozy and romantic.  The light of the candles lend a certain sacredness to the religious celebrations and helps to set the mood for almost any gathering.

Well, can you see how much a house can change with each season and say welcome a different way with each of the twelve months of the year?  I hope this little visit to my seasonal home has been inspirational to you and sparked some ideas that you can incorporate into your own decorating schemes.

Another little trick I've found handy is to use seasonal decor when you are on a ten year do-it-yourself transition in remodeling.  Seasonal decorations will destract the eyes away from the things that you just have not had time to do yet.  People tend to only notice the beauty of the season and relax in the care and love you are giving your home regardless of how finished or unfinished your remodeling is.

I would love to hear some of your ideas too!  

May you all find blessings and a heart for your home in whatever season of life you are living through.