A quick fall home tour to inspire a simple fall decor using what have while adding natural elements of white and green pumpkins with fall leaves. You don't need to do much to create a welcoming fall home you'll love!
As many of you know, we are living in a temporary home while we remodel our farmhouse fixer. It's a perfectly fine manufactured home that we are grateful for since it's allowing us to take our time with the farmhouse, doing a lot ourselves to save money.
And it's actually been really good for me to "practice what I preach" - that any home you're in is worth a little time to make it comfortable and beautiful to you. Whether that's a 1982 ranch you wish was a cottage, a rental, or a temporary trailer.
Obviously this home is not my dream home - it's got gray walls (gray walls + Oregon gray skies = sadness in my book...), dingy blue carpet, a mix of cheap wood-look vinyl and badly installed tile, and blond oak cabinets that remind me of the 1980s.
But it is roomy, has large windows, and was remodeled so that the bathrooms are up to date and the kitchen cabinets are really good quality. There were only two spots left of the home's original tiny floral 1980s wallpaper covered wallboard (typical of manufactured homes from the 80s) and I've painted over them, as well as a bright turquoise wall in the master bedroom.
Spending months (that's now going to be years...) walking into a room multiple times a day that I can't stand vs. four hours one Saturday painting it? #worthit
Mini Fall Home Tour
Which brings me to decorating for fall in our temporary home. I'm not going to go all out (I really love to decorate a porch for fall, but we don't have one - or even a stoop), but I did want to add some fall decor that is pretty and welcomes both the season and people. The result is simple, using a few repeated seasonal items and what I already had, and again totally worth it.
It's funny - I don't really think about decorating for the seasonal change from spring to summer (though I totally do for winter to spring!) because all the natural elements are the same - flowers, just different kinds through the spring and summer.
But fall (and also spring)? They need something to help ease us into a totally new season. And the natural elements are so different - pumpkins, gourds, colorful leaves, dried grasses. Filling our homes with these things can really go a long way to helping us welcome the season (especially if you're like me and really enjoy the warmer summer months!).
The Entry
Case in point: see the sweet little Baby Boo pumpkins on the book stack above? That's our "entryway" which is simply a table right across from the door. I grew those in our new garden from seed I had saved from our last garden 3 years earlier - and they were viable!
Not only are they my favorite pumpkins, but for the first time ever I harvested tiny little pumpkins two weeks after I had harvested all the others. It's hard to tell in the picture - I should've had a coin or something next to it - but the smallest is about the size of a silver dollar!
They are perfectly formed and colored and they make me smile every time I see them.
The Living Room
In the living room, I placed more Baby Boo pumpkins around (the two plants that sprouted provided me about a 5-gallon bucket full!) and harvested the last of the zinnias from the garden.
We think of zinnias as more of a summer flower, but they bloom all the way to frost so that's good enough for me. I'll change out the flowers here as needed - I think a small potted mum would look great, too, and last a long time for just a couple dollars.
On the couch, I kept the larger green pillows from spring/summer and changed the smaller pillows to a tan buffalo check cover I used last year (I just looked in my archives to see if I could link to last year and saw I never posted anything - oops, well I guess these are new to you this year!).
I then brought out a tan knitted throw I made a few years ago which is wool so it really amps up the cozy factor (here's the pattern - I made one for everyone in our families over a couple of Christmases, they're great lap throws).
On the bookshelf that works as a "mantel" for decor, you can see a close up from the lead photo of the largest Jarrahdale pumpkin/squash I grew, again from seeds I had saved before we moved in 2016. I was so happy at least one seed sprouted and grew two of these gorgeous green squashes. They are my favorite to decorate with (oh, and they are supposedly really good to eat - I just don't do squash much).
We have a burning bush on the property that I harvested some branches and leaves from to place here and there.
And in the fall, my grandfather's stunning butterfly art that you can see the corner of actually goes with the season - the brown colors of the grasses and flowers are perfect. (Again I looked in my archives to link to the butterfly art and see I never wrote about it - I think I just mentioned it in my newsletter. Oh well, you can see a full shot here in last year's Christmas decor. They are all real butterflies my grandpa collected himself in the 1930s and 40s and I love it.)
Dining Room
More white mini pumpkins can be found on a side table in a simple galvanized tray. Do you see a theme here?
Grab a bunch of pumpkins, add them here and there where you'll see and enjoy them, throw in some fall leaves and call it good. That's my fall decorating "technique," lol.
I applied the same "technique" to the marble lazy susan that sits in the center of our dining table. The green striped table runner is one from my stash that I brought out to coordinate with the Jarrahdale pumpkin. It's slightly smaller than the other so I just piled some of the small white pumpkins around it.
The Jarrahdale even coordinates with the Jadite salt and pepper shakers! You can tell I like green, right?
So that's it for this mini fall home tour - just a few pumpkins and leaves with a new pillow cover and cozy throw and fall is in the house!
Don't grow pumpkins? You can find a ton at craft stores of course, but if you'd like to save money and reuse things, visit some thrift stores to find pumpkins in all sizes. You don't even need to worry about the colors - you can spray paint them any color you want!
How about you - do you add any touches of fall to some rooms in your home?
