I am a believer in making room in our home for serendipitous discoveries. If you keep your eyes and heart open, you never know when you’ll unexpectedly find something more wonderful than you could have planned.
A home should tell our stories. And what better way to add character to a home than to furnish it with serendipitous discoveries?
Today I will share my thoughts on furnishing our home and the tale of unexpectedly discovering my dream bed on Facebook marketplace just a few days ago!
You might recall that I had recently posted about a little spring refresh of our bedroom. In that post I said I was still looking for a new light fixture but other than that I didn’t really have any other immediate plans for updating our room.
Well, things have taken an unexpected but exciting turn. Not only did a find a new light fixture but thanks to a mood board I made and a serendipitous discovery on Facebook Marketplace, I brought a new to me coastal dream bed to our home and now I can’t wait to have it in our little bedroom overlooking the Salish Sea. It was meant to be.
Our Plan for Furniture
In my post about our spring mantel and our thrift store pheasants, I mentioned that I was now open to the possibility of being on the hunt for “new to me” furniture. In downsizing to move here we gave away a lot of furniture! This is a smaller home so not everything we had fit and I didn’t want to feel overwhelmed trying to make decisions right away.
There is no rush. We are happy with our home and I’m always content to use what we have. And I’m still working through trying to pare down and get rid of things we don’t need here! It’s been a process. We bought a few accent chairs here and there to fill out spaces but I decided that if anything we truly love comes along (and on our budget), we’ll happily swap anything else out. That slow process will help us continue to enjoy making this home our own without any pressure or timeline.
But now that our renovation is over, I feel a little more “ready” to begin looking around more and even scrolling FB Marketplace now and then, just in case. It actually seemed like fun to just look so I began looking at FB Marketplace and found a new little console table with a marble top and a darling chair. Those finds ignited my creativity and renewed my excitement over the thrill of the hunt! I will share those pieces in a future post.
So I guess my plan for furnishing our living room was simply to be open to serendipitous discoveries! I have taught my HomeBody Gathering Place decorating community about the value in developing their sense of serendipity as well as how to bring a collected style together to it feels cohesive.
It really is fun to have a home that tells a story! The stories of how our home came together is what helps create a sense of sanctuary. I did originally think that if I bought anything it would be for the living room! Well, that’s what I get for trying to plan! 🙂 Being open to whatever you find can make the stories of your home even more interesting! You don’t know what you’ll find or when. And when you discover something you really love, it feels like it was meant to be so I’ll happily adjust any plans.
How Creating A Mood Board Led to My Dream Bed
In HomeBody Gathering Place last week we taught how (and why!) to make a mood board. There are SO many reasons I think a mood board can be very useful in home decorating and renovations, but one reason is that they can help you to better visualize and define your own style. That really is important to creating a home you will love.
Over the weekend I was inspired to make a mood board for our bedroom. Now mind you, I wasn’t intending to buy furniture for the bedroom, I just wanted to visualize my style as whole. I wanted to visualize all of the rooms to create our style.
A mood board doesn’t have to turn into a shopping list (although that is another useful reason to make one), it can be just for inspiration!
One decorating principle I teach in the HGP is to start by making a dream board first, and then a reality board can come next. I find creating a dream board to be quite inspiring as it can encourage you to get out of a design rut or save you from always playing it safe instead of listening to your heart is telling you.
Once you can visualize your dream style, you can still incorporate what you already have but also elements of your dream into your reality.
So that’s what I did. I let myself dream a little! The first thing I put on my board besides a couple of pieces I had was an image of a bed I’ve loved for years. It’s classic, but also feels so whimsical, which I think truly is my style at heart.
I looked at all the colors the bed came in and loved them all, but I landed on robin’s egg blue. This bed has always reminded me of waves at sea and what better color for it than my favorite shade of blue?
The bed was only a dream for me, but it represented something significant about my style. An unexpected bit of whimsy is something I always crave in a home. Even if it’s just in one element, the lightheartedness and unpretentiousness of a whimsical style makes it feel like home to me.
The Serendipitous Discovery – In Another Country!
While there seemed to be no chance of me getting that bed, I reminded myself that if you are really going to be open to serendipitous discoveries, you cannot close off the possibilities before you even start. Don’t pre-determine what you’ll find or decide in advance what is or is not possible. If something speaks to your heart, listen!
So even though it seemed to me to be the most unlikely thing to find on Facebook Marketplace (especially when you don’t live in a big city) I thought I might as well look. Why not? I wasn’t in a hurry or expecting to find this bed. But even if I never found it, maybe I’d find something else that would be of a similar style or mood. There was no hurry or expectations.
This is what I love about creating a home over time. Any pressure of immediate gratification is off when the thrill of the hunt is ON! You never know when the discovery will be made.
Minutes after placing the robin’s egg blue bed on my dream board, I opened FMP and typed in the name of the bed. As I said I really didn’t expect to find it. But I immediately did a double take. Much to my surprise, there it was. My dream bed! Some people call that a “God sighting” — it really did feel like a gift was sitting right there waiting for me.
But that’s also when I went into panic mode. The price was a fraction of the cost of a new bed and no sales taxes, no shipping, so it was a no brainer…but …. there were other roadblocks. We don’t own a truck. And also, this bed was across the border in Canada. It was late Saturday night. We didn’t have any Canadian cash and no banks were open. So many questions but I decided to at least message her.
I didn’t hear back.
I couldn’t sleep a wink all night. That’s when I knew. If this bed made my heart flutter this much, there was no doubt it was meant to be. I didn’t want to accidentally miss a return message so I checked my phone really early in the morning. At 5:30 AM, she asked when we could come get it.
By 10AM we had rented a Uhaul utility truck and were on our way to the border. It turned into a much longer story — involving finding no cash machines open on Sundays, not having the right tool to take the bed apart, our phones did not work while we were in Canada and many other challenges — but we didn’t give up!
By 6PM Sunday night, my dream bed was in our home.
Dare to dream friends! You never know what might happen. 🙂 I had to use the funds I had set aside for something in the living room, but I can’t imagine a piece of living room furniture I’d love more than my new bed. Right before we found the bed and the day after my last update post on the bedroom, I bought the new light fixture so I guess I’ll be working on the bedroom now :). That’s how you create a collected home over time, it just might turn into an unexpected adventure!
Of course, I also really loved the bed I had (this cane bed) but GOOD NEWS all around my daughter Courtney and her husband wanted a new bed, and now I just happen to have a lovely one to pass along to them. Win win!