October 18, 2016, - White Lace and Promises . . .

          I am old school.  I believe I told you that before.  I am also a romantic.  I told you that before as well.  So, it should not come as a surprise to you that I simply adore lace curtains.

          As a child I used to play dress up with my best friend down the road.  Her mother had a trunk of old lace curtains, cast off high heels, old pocket books, and sundry treasures. You should have seen us drape ourselves in those laces and shove our little feet into the high heels and race across the parking lot of her father’s butcher shop adjacent to their house to our pretend wedding day.   To this day I still remember how my best friend could run like the wind in high heels twice the size of her feet and not twist an ankle or lose a shoe.  We played brides and bridesmaids and elegant ladies dripping in ‘LACE’.  As little girls we never seemed to get tired of it.

          Maybe that is why I have such a penchant for lace curtains.

          In my opinion, lace curtains are either white or ivory and go with every room color.  They are classic which also goes with every décor [even modern].  They don’t go out of style and they sure are a heck of a lot easier to keep clean than those $%@# mini-blinds.  There! I have gotten it off my chest once and for all.

          Currently, I am setting up my housekeeping and finances for retirement.  We’ve been in this house for almost 18 years.  This house started out with mini-blinds in every single window. I ditched the mini-blinds over the kitchen-sink window the day I moved in.  I want to look out while I do dishes and I want the sunshine to pour into my kitchen.  That is just the way I am with kitchen windows.

          Then, slowly, as the years passed I couldn’t figure out a way to clean those mini-blinds and I had to replace them due to the dinge and embedded dust.  I have a lot of windows and that ‘cha-ching’ hurt when I did them all at once.  As it started to bite into my pocketbook, I started to rotate the replacements randomly.  

Now that I reflect back at all the money I have spent replacing mini-blinds in order to keep them clean and to ward off the “dust and pollen” aggravating my asthma, I should have jerked them all out the day I moved in and spent serious money on lace curtains back then – 18 years ago.  But, the home décor gurus sold me a bill of goods on keeping the “mini-blinds” because they were the “modern or sleek” look instead of what I really wanted.

          Up until late spring this year I had mini-blinds in my “day room” which is where we spend most of our time when we are at home.  It finally clicked in my mind that I had expended a substantial amount of money replacing the blinds and the look of my windows still left me luke-warm.  

          I easily get 20 pounds of catalogs a week; [sometimes it feels like that each day as I come back from the mailbox].  I have always gotten the catalog from Country Curtains founded in New England.  I am from New England and love their style. For years I have lusted after the Bird Song Lace curtains because they have birds, but additionally, there are dragonflies in the design.  

This spring I bought them for my “day room” after procrastinating on the price tag for eons,  and I FINALLY DITCHED the idea that “mini-blinds” were the only “in” decorating avenue.  I took a stand and got what I really wanted: the lace curtains of yesteryear.

I truly sat back on my heels and rationalized my purchase.  No, I actually came to my senses for once. If I had purchased them the first year I had wanted them, I could have easily replaced them more than once in the 18 years we have lived here considering the amount of [$] money I expended on endless mini-blinds that got dirty and I replaced over and over again.

Now that I tackled that room, I have been on the ‘hunt’ for additional lace curtains for my other rooms.   Three more room’s worth of lace curtains arrived today.  I snagged a wicked deal and now I have only two rooms left to do. 

But, what is more delightful for me, I don’t have to expend a single penny on replacing a mini-blind in the future when they get dirty and need to be replaced.  AND, as an added bonus I can wash these curtains any time they get dusty or dirty and the only thing I am expending is time and the cost of laundry soap.  That is just about FREE – now isn’t it?

GEE, I best start looking around at some of the other “old fashioned” things that we had in every facet of our “yesteryear” lives and see if there can be serious cost saving concepts to adopt versus our current high-tech, modern trends that are leading us astray and making us expend money to “keep up with the Joneses”.  [I have never met the Joneses, have you?]

White lace and promises  . . . . of saving money in the future!