I don’t know about you, but I used to love watching The Rachel Zoe Project on Bravo.  As a celebrity stylist, Rachel is the perfect mix of witty and ridiculously un-self aware.  I don’t have a fashion bone in my body, but I always loved how she referred to a great outfit as a “moment.”

I think about areas in my home as “moments,” too.  When I am working on different spaces, I think about how they may look from other parts of my home since we have a fairly open floor plan.  Recently, my staircase moment wasn’t working for me as I viewed it from my living room sofa, and I just couldn’t take it any longer.

Here’s what it looked like.

Now, let’s be clear.  The vast majority of this picture is my EVERYTHING.  I literally sit on my sofa and swoon at it – the feature walls, the built in desk, the rug on the wall, the red bar cart, the drum light, the Elvis painting.  But, my problem was the accessories on the green wall.  They were just too much going on right there and it needed to go away.

Luckily for me, an At Home has opened up just a few miles from my house.  This is dangerous, I tell you! At Home is a store about the size of a Target, but it only sells home decor items – furniture, rugs, lamps, pillows, bedding, accessories, patio stuff, and more.  It is literally a store I can spend 2 hours in and not see everything.  I absolutely love it.  They have many different styles – cottage, coastal, modern, industrial, traditional, etc. – so there is always something that I can use.

At the same time that I was “over” my staircase “moment,” At Home asked me if I’d like to head into their store and pick up a few things on them to rework a space in my home.  Um, yes!  So this week, I literally spent about 4 hours going up and down the aisles of my local store.  Between some of the incredible items I found and a few things I already had at home, I transformed this area into one that I truly love.

The first thing I did was take down the stuff that was on the green wall and patch/re-paint the holes. Then, I went on a recon mission to At Home.  I intentionally left my gift card at home so that I wouldn’t let myself buy the first thing that I saw.  I took pictures of everything that I loved so that I could go home and look at the pictures and look at the space and back and forth and back and forth until I decided what I wanted.  It’s super scientific.

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