Where to Begin

I know what I like when I see it when it comes to home decorating. But I have no idea how to make it happen myself. Whenever set to the task of home decorating (which has happened many times due to many moves and circumstances in my life), I immediately get overwhelmed, try to control it all with a set of lists, excel spreadsheets and other obsessive-compulsive behaviours and then finally give in to making the inevitable mistakes just to stop the madness.

Let's recall for a moment a bedroom that gave a vibe that can only be compared to drowning in a swimming pool (I like robin's egg blue and thought it would look nice on the walls). The other common mistakes are to take the cheapy route and then after finding that I am not the master of shabby chic, yardsale and Target home decor, swinging in the other direction and going completely over the top resulting in some serious buyer's remorse. And a schizophrenic apartment.

Selecting art makes me even more nervous than furniture. What looks stunning in the first moment can quickly become tacky and cheap or just uninteresting. Similar to my logic in never getting a tattoo, I think tastes and interests change but the investment is long term so how can you ever decide?

Now that I finally have found an apartment in Munich to call home, I want to do it up right but am again confronted with the feeling that the task is insurmountable.

The objective is clear. I want a place where I can both live comfortably and entertain proudly, that is quality but doesn't break the bank and that looks like it was assembled deliberately rather than thrown together in knee-jerk fashion with too much compromise in every direction. Too tall an order? I really hope not.

So where to begin? The apartment has a very nice kitchen already, a wood stove and I bought the Ikea cabinets in the bedroom from the current tenants. Other than that it is empty. So I am looking for my grain of sand, the seed for the pearl, the inspiration to build the rest of the concept around.

In the meantime, I am making one simple list. A list of things that I must have right away. It is short. And that is already a step in the right direction.