Panoply: Before & After the Holidays

Friday, January 3, 2014

Before & After the Holidays - in the Sunroom

(Thank you, Cindy at Dwellings, Marty at A Stroll Thru Life, and Debra at Common Ground for featuring this post!)
As much as I love Christmas decor, I do love the clean slate of putting it all away after the holidays. This year, I had everything completely stowed by New Year's Eve and I'm planning to enjoy some time catching up on reading and planning throughout January. Here are some before and after shots of holiday decor/quiet winter in my sunroom, my favorite place to be.

I switched out my holiday reds and greens for some soft neutrals throughout the sunroom. The Christmas wreath was replaced with a handmade, natural twill, rose wreath. The Pottery Barn holly & berry lumbar pillow on the chaise was replaced with a Frontgate after-summer clearance, a fringed lumbar in greens & greys. The throw is now a cozy, faux fur score from Big Lots - $14!

The center table in the sunroom has gone from a holiday centerpiece to an all-natural, woodsy appearance by simple removing the greens and reds, and clustering all the loose pine cones in the room into the tray. Gone are the plaid throw and holiday toss pillows on the chairs in the background, replaced by pillows covered in all neutrals.

Pictured above is the side server, an old washstand which I scored at auction, that sits just inside the sunroom wall. Beneath the shelf you see pictured here, we gather recyclable newspapers and magazines in a wire basket, so it's a multi-purpose piece. I've switched out all of the dessert displays (long gone!) for a winter-fresh potted freesia plant I picked up at the grocery. It smells SO good to walk past it and have that faint fragrance linger (which, btw, Mr. P. has not detected, so you know it's faint)! The copper watering jug is an antique find, and the framed photograph (hard to see for the light glare from the sunroof windows) is a local park scene, in each of the four seasons.

In the opposite corner of my sunroom stands a wrought-iron baker's rack, on which I store books and magazines on the lower shelves, and some sort of seasonal display on the top. I switched out my garland and woodland Santa for my doorknob rose garden and 'Marguerite' statue after Christmas. The wooden bowl displays my flint stone treasures uncovered in my landscape renovation, relics of pre-historic Native American inhabitants.

Right next to the french doors that lead from the sunroom to the courtyard outside, I switched out the holiday scene of poinsettia and lighted logs to a much more quiet look of all neutrals. Although the lights are a welcome sight, I really don't like putting one or two leftovers away out of sync with the rest of my holiday decor. It seems to disrupt my organizational aura, and I despise stacking and unstacking the tubs numerous times in the basement. So out the lights went, along with the poinsettia, which still had some life in it. For some reason this year, the poinsettia plants I bought had extreme shedding of the little buds - what a mess! I was glad to see those go, too!