Thanks to catmorris for spotting the Vargas in my hula girl. You can get poster of her at allposters.com for about forty dollars, or a five-dollar magnet. Of course, she looks prettier against my green wall...

Can we please talk about how cool those clocks are on Corliss's wall?

I have 22 coats. Twenty-three--I just bought an orange leather jacket at a vintage store in Maine. This is ridiculous. 90 divided by 22 is 4, plus some. In other words, if I rotated the coats every day during the three months of winter, I would still only wear each coat four times.

I promise I am not a spendthrift--if you average out the cost of the coats, I spent about $25 dollars on each. What I am, is afraid. Of not having anything. Of not being able to take care of myself or pay the rent, or apparently, have a coat. I think it's because my father's family had money a long time ago and then lost it all. But that's my film, not my blog post...

Have I shown you this yet? I got it at the same garage sale where I found my white garden chairs (which I have yet to sandblast and repaint). I think it was free, thanks to my friend Nicole of Cortelyou Vintage who actually had the eye to spot the hula girl.

I thought it was fabulous as is. Then I got it home and discovered that the hula girl is alive. She had turned upside down in the frame and moved, leaving her Peter Pan shadow right there burned into the black paper behind her.

Isn't she cool?

Look, I like to drink bourbon. Just kidding. I mean, I'm not, but that's not why I'm posting this. And it's not the year-old box of Cheerios either (I eat yogurt for breakie). Can you guess why I'm showing you my boring old refrigerator? Okay, I'll tell you. I just threw away about twenty real estate agent magnets as well as the gross little pieces of paper with unidentified phone numbers and outdated Film Forum calendars they held up. Then I scrubbed the thing clean. Isaac says my whole problem is that I insist on having liquor bottles on top of the fridge. Whatever that means.

Oh wait, here's a before picture so you get the full effect.

Look closely and you can find out other things about me. Like what? You tell me...

My friend Melissa was over this weekend. She worries that I'll get sick of a mural. I guess I see what she means. But this morning Holly from decor8 sent me a link to these tree murals by Boston-based painter Amy Ross. Look, they're trees but with little sheep and other animals poking out of the blooms.

Be sure to look at her statement, where she explains "the idea of artist as mad scientist." I love that idea!

Would I get sick of these? See more images after the fold.

Scrappy Girl Decorates (that's me at 14) has been tagged by This Shelter Life, one of the community members over at Houseblogs.net. Lucky for you, that means I have to tell you five things about myself that you may not already know. Here goes:

1. I used to be an academic. I wrote a chapter of my never to be finished dissertation about Sandra Bernhard's film "Without You I'm Nothing." The chapter was called "The Mouth that Launched a Thousand Rifts." Other chapters covered Djuna Barnes (after whom my black cat is named), Tallulah Bankhead, and Marcel Proust whose 4,000-page "In Search of Lost Time" I've read front cover to back, thank you very  much.

2. Some people call me Albertine after Proust's character.

3. I still wear the pencil skirt my father bought for me when I graduated from college, but my true love is dresses and suits from the 1940s. I don't just shop for furniture at thrift shops. Once I found a velvet Prada jacket for $8 at the Salvation Army. Other scores: a vintage Calvin Klein cape from the 1970s and a black velvet trench coat from the 40's. I recently found an Agnier Agnier bag at this shop called Heart's Desire in Saco, Maine. If you know of good thrift blogs, please to send my way.

4. I write poems. I recently published one about Orpheus in the brilliant Andrea Lawlor/Bernadine Mellis/E.E. Miller zine series, "Pocket Myths," which are based on Greek and Roman mythology.

5. I played a prisoner in Melissa Friedling's film "Here Lies the Heart" about Mercedes de Acosta. I was supposed to be in love with the prison guard played by an Icelandic woman named Raga. When the other girls broke out of prison and killed her, I sat and wept. Melissa says I cry pretty good on film, but I think she flatters me.

And now for the fun part: here are five of my favorite house/design blogs:

1. decor8 : the idea girl

2. designklub cool stuff

2. My Marrakesh : because I fell in love with Morocco

3. Shelterrific because they test Martha Stewart recipes and home is where the hearth is

4. Design Boston has the best bio

5. Happy Mundane check out the tagline

Whoops, I can't count.

The paint on my walls is cracking and will soon flake, even though I JUST had it painted (grrrrr). So it worries me to think about spending a lot of money on a mural. But, I found this amazing cherry tree (is it?) by Tim Walker called "Shona's Tree, St. Pancreas wall painting, London," which I found in Fotographie. It's so beautiful and dilapidated; the paint on the wall is flaking. Maybe when my room disintegrates it'll look this good.

If not, I have another option...

This is a tale of two cities (and an infinite number of places in between). On the East Coast we have Scrappy Girl, plagued with indecision, but plugging away like the little decorator that could at  furnishing her Brooklyn apartment. On the West Coast, we have Victoria (aka sfgirlbybay), developing her own bohemian modern style (her words, not mine) in San Francisco.

Of course, we're just symbols here. There are many, many of us in this together. Like, I just got a comment from a reader in New Hampshire who's also decorating her new apartment and looking for inspiration.

Well, yesterday, I found mine in San Francisco. In the form of this amazing Jasper sofa/mid-century modern coffee table combo Victoria put together.

Melisse was over here the other day, and she suggested that I use this old mail sorter as a shoe rack. But alas, since I started working at CondeNast, my heels are too high so my shoes don't fit. Then we thought maybe a neck-in wine bottle rack would be a good idea. So I tried it out. But I look at this photo and think: this is the sound of bottles breaking. Then a few days later, I had a flash of genius. Well, you be the judge.  I want to flip the piece on its back so the cubbyholes face up, put a piece of glass on top and use it as a coffee table. I could even do weird little rotating installations inside like a giant shadow box art project. Think about it: stuffed animals, plastic baby dolls, feathers, glow in the dark yoyos. What do you think?

Kennebunkport, Maine is a strange place to be mid-winter... I recently stayed at the cozy White Barn Inn in the Blue Suite, a room done up in a million different blue and white patterns. For some reason it all worked together. And the lamps in the room made me incredibly happy. Take a look at these. I'm going to have to do a little digging to see if I can find the origins of them.

And this touch: the do not disturb sign...

I think Holly at decor8 and I are becoming tree addicts. She's onto Sharon Elphick's collage work, like this pretty group of dogwood (?) branches against a blue, blue sky, which makes me so, so happy. You'll find more of Sharon's work on her website, sharonelphick.com. Imagine that.

I spent my MLK day creating this abstract wall collage. Is it absurd? I kind of like it, but it's in a weird place above and to the left of my desk. It might actually be a great way to display the oddities I keep around the house. The oddities you see here are: 2 wooden factory molds, a photo I took in Coney Island of an old roller coaster, a bird cage, the pen well in the front of an old wooden desk drawer, and an empty frame.

I also have some driftwood I started writing poems on that I want to mount. An idea I got from Celerie Kemble's apartment in the domino design project.

Just found this in the giveaway pile in my building. Should I keep it? I'd need to get new shades and it's not exactly mid-century style, but it's a lamp and my living room is dark. What do we think?

Witness: I've got sofas for brains these days. And so, it seems, does everyone else. I think domino magazine is doing a guide to sofas soon--look for it in the April issue (but don't kill me if it doesn't show up until later). Holly from decor8 has her own mini sofa guide up right now. She found the Hawthorne sofa above from Room & Board.

There's this part of me that wants to just buy (I mean charge) something already. I know what I like. And there are $2,000 versions of the $10,000 couches I crave. But is it worth it to get something inexpensive at this point in my early mid-life? Does it really make a difference if I buy something from Room & Board vs. fill-in-the-blank custom furniture maker? Will my cheap couch fall apart?

And what's the difference between a couch and a sofa, anyway?

So begins an email from other BFF in response to the news that I threw away one of my old couches this morning. A friend also helped me clear out my ktichen (which I've been too afraid to photograph) and my living room (see above). Talk about shame (again). My friend began this project when I wasn't looking. One minute I think the broken overhead light in the kitchen is hiding the dusty paint supplies that have been sitting on the ground for three months, and the next minute, the kitchen is nearly empty and the dust is flying. I told him that I was embarrassed because now he could see my mess. His response: "You think I didn't see that before?"

Maybe we can have a minute of silence for the before and after, or after and before as the case may be...

Man, look at what Maxwell from Apartment Therapy found... I'm speechless.

Okay, close your eyes and pretend you're at my birthday party. You have to pee so you go into the bathroom and shhhh, while everyone's outside doing the Hustle, you're slowly, gingerly opening my medicine cabinet.

Yesterday I showed you a crude rendition of what a tree silhouette would look like on the wall of my bedroom. The other option, you might recall, was to have vines creeping up the four corners and onto the ceiling, like so.

Use your imagination.

Lying in bed last night I realized that the ceiling trompe l'oeil vines might keep me sane...

Photoshop sort of does the trick for me. Here the brush tool is helping me to imagine what it'd be like to lie in bed and see a tree on the wall. I realize it looks like your four-year old did this, but it's good enough to make me think black might be tres severe. What do you think? Could I do a silhouette in brown or rusty red?

I think I might go to Pearl Paint and get some giant construction paper so I can hang a silhouette on the wall and see how it feels before I take the plunge and have to repaint.

Is there another way?

This is really quite mean of me, but I can't help it. Like many of you, I was home for the holidays last week. Here's what I saw: my future. And it scared the hell out of me. They say that you if want to see what a young woman is going to look like when she gets older, just take a look at her mother. My mother's a babe at 75. But if you want to see what my living room is going to look like if I don't hurry up and get rid of those nasty couches, take a look at my mother's. It ain't pretty.

Here we have my sister sitting on the leather couch my father scored from the next door neighbors thirty years ago after the previous owner almost died on it. The story goes something like: man nearly overdoses, my father the doctor saves him, couch becomes bad reminder of embarrassing incident and makes its way, cheap, to us. You can't really tell from the photo, but trust me when I say it is so beat up that my older relatives can't sit in for fear of not being able to get up. It's more like a man-eating catcher's mitt than a sofa. The tawny velvet cushions you see are from an even older couch--they still smell like our long gone dog Duke--and they're there to provide, um, support.

I could go on--note the cowhide quilt-rug in the upper-right hand corner--but I won't. My mom knows she's got to get a new couch. So do I. And we will. Because now I've shamed us both into it.