Up Your Decor - Fling that spring!

Hey there, my little decorators! Guess what time of year spring is! Well, shut up and I'll tell you! It's NOW TIME! WOOOOOoooOOooOoooOOOOOOO! How's your house look? Don't answer that! I'll tell you! It looks stupid, because you haven't redecorated its brains out for several weeks! It's time to correct that by doing some spring flinging! Shut up and start that fling!!!!!!

Do you have a room with several chairs? Do they match? Well, throw them in the trash, you idiot! Every
object in a room should look like it fell off the back of a truck driving through your house! Start with a
bamboo chair thingy, and then add a kind of roman wood chair, and then add in a chrome and glass
Logan's Run table, and a green velvet sofa, flanked by a classically-trained grandma lamp and a futuristic
light tube kind of lamp! Think you're done! Shut up! You need a flamenco-rococo swirlicue mirror to put
a bow on that sundae! Wups! Don't forget the three-inch shag rug guaranteed to jam any vacuum!
Also, some kind of floral pattern window thingies, just to keep things from getting boring! 

Do you long to bring the dog-dump-and-ragweed enchantment of your back yard into your kitchen?
You're damn right you do! That's why you need to build a kitchen gazebo!!!! This breakfast nook has a
table and flower pendant lamp and even a luxurious nine-inch TV! Say wow! Just in case your family
doesn't get the idea, paint flowers on all your cabinets and your kitchen has been transformed into a fairy
tale fantasy that you're guaranteed never to regret! Where's the dishwasher and stove? Why, in the back
yard, of course! Duh!

Do you have a room that's just a little too small to be a family room! Well, here's the solution! Make it
a family room! Nothing creates the illusion of space than cramming in the furniture from a larger room,
right? RIGHT! Start by painting the walls a nice, deep brown-red. And, going by the Theory of Color,
match that with some nice green carpet! What makes a house feel nice and cozy? That's right! Coming
home and immediately bashing the door into your nice colonial couch, lavishly upholstered in a rich
pattern that we call "Noise to Other Noise Ratio"! Now you'd swear you were living in the romantic
cowboy days, before we understood germ theory or civil rights! Yay!

Up Your Decor - Think Spring, Idiots!

 Hey there, my little decorators! It's your old friend, hero and decorating spirit animal Vorbia, here! Wow! It's been a while hasn't it? I supposed you're all wondering what I've been up to, aren't you? Well, I was just out in Arizona, taking a 23-week course in reiki crystal massage! Exotic huh? It's sooooo relaxing and zen, you know? And besides, those crystals aren't going to massage themselves!

But enough of that! It's almost fall or something, friends! And you know what that means! That's right! It's time to THINK SPRING!

THINK SPRING OR I WILL KILL YOU! Okay! Let's get this party started!

WoooOOOooo! There we go! This breakfast nook has got spring up the ying yang! I'll bet your ying yang
has some room for some spring up it! Start with a nice multigreen-swirl five-inch shag rug, for easy-to-clean simplicity! Then go out and find some lime green chairs for a nice pop of color. If your local chair dealer doesn't seem to have that color, punch them! Then, finish it all off with a this gorgeous wallpaper in a green Junglegasm pattern!

Wow! This basement has barely any spring at all going on! I'm looking at the wall, but I don't see any pattern or color. My brain doesn't know how to process such input! Good thing the tile has a nice, happy six-color random assortment, for a pop of color! And don't overlook the arts on the walls! Let's go in for a closer look an those arts!

Wow! That's Yi Ling Smithberg's famous print The Tethered Emperor with Outhouse! A real collector's item, for the knowing eye!

And this is Grunella Flangemint's penultimate masterwork Lonely Triangle at Sunset! Someone's investing for the long term!

What's better in spring than dignified, simple, black and white? Nothing! That's what! This classically restrained anteroom features a wallpapered floor by Franceau Witherings and carpeted wallpaper by Wi Messe!

This lucky lady not only has an apple that matches her floor, she has a kitchen that matches her dress! Tres envie! You can bet that when you step into this dynamic and functional foodspace, your eyes won't know where to look next! Pity the floor doesn't match the rest of the ensemble, though! That's what I call a missed design opportunity! But that's what summer is for! Start planning YOUR kitchen floor wallpaper refresh today! DO IT NOW!

Up Your Decor - Spring prep!!!!!

Hey there, my little urgent decorators! As you can probably tell by looking out the old window on the wall, it's almost springtime!!!!! That means you need to start planning all your decoratings now, now, NOWWWW!!!! Fortunately, your pal Vorbia is here to help you get on that shit with some mind-hurtling decorating ideas! We begin!!!!!

This superfun rumpus room is perfect for your precocious child, Eod! Little Eod will simply adore deciding which of its personalities is dominant at the moment that they are needing to store something!  Where oh where did Eod store its recreational apparatus? Was it the green personality, the yellow one or, god help you, the red one? Only Eod can tell you!

Hey! Just because you live in Mordor, it doesn't mean you have to be an old fuddy-duddy! This intimate and dynamic entertainment hall will make sure all your minions know you're the grooviest dark lord since Morgoth! The striped shag on the floor will keep things fun when your little goblins come over for some chip-n-dip, while the cork or carpet or whatever that is on the walls keep the draft out! We'll find those halflings after the pizza rolls come out of the oven!

Everyone knows that springtime is also new wardrobe season! This efficient sewing room concept will keep all your sewing needs handy! It even has a wall rack for all your sewing guns! What's got two thumbs and is ready for a fashion blast? Wooo! This girl right here!

Up Your Decor - Add eye-food!

Howdy-do, my hungry little lookers! Guess what? I've decided that you are all starving your eyeballs! They need color and pattern to grow big and strong! Yes they do! No, your house is NOT fine the way it is! SHUT THE HELL UP! Don't take away my joy or I will KILL YOU! Let's get started!

Starting with your kitchen, you need to realize that if you like your wallpaper, like really like your wall-
paper, you'd just wallpaper it right up onto your ceiling! See? Now don't you think you owe your wallpaper
an apology?

What time is it? Daytime? NO!!!!! It's time to cover those windows with decoration! These screens are
easily made from other screens, or even panels! Then, just fill them with stretched fabric in whatever
pattern drowns out the voices inside! There! Now you can't even hear them at all! Just the blissful racket
of your children playing, completely unaware of... things! Nice!

Have you found where your husband goes all weekend? Is it some kind of stupid workshop that is outside
your control? Yay! You found it! And he's a silly goose! You control everything! Now's your chance to teach that whatever he gets up to in that shop of his is just as pointless as a toddler playing with blocks. Paint the whole place in fun, bright colors! What's that? He won't like it? Awwww, what's wrong? Doesn't the widdle baby like his playpen? Then he can come back in the house and help you wallpaper the television like an adult!

Now that he's back in the house, you both should spruce things up in the rumpus room! Let's start with a fiberglass elephant-foot table... only because the goddam World Wildlife Fund won't let you buy a real
elephant foot on the open market! What do they know about decorating? Psst! Here's a pro tip! They'll never know if you just cover a real elephant foot in fiberglass, but you didn't read it here! Now just cruise the rummage sales for a plywood rooster, a tambourine, a wicker reindeer and some blacktop buckets made into stools! Paint it all in a pleasing red and fuscia motif and you're ready to pumpus that rumpus! I think that's enough for you to do until next time! See you soon, decorators!

Up Your Decor - Holiday decorating!!!!!!!

Woooo hoo, decorators! You know what time of year it is??? Yes! That's right! It's Almost Holiday Time of Year! It's a time when everyone comes to your house and looks around and judges you based on your decorating force! You don't want your house looking all crazy and bad, do you? Decorate that shit or I will kill you!!!! That's the spirit!

If you've ever seen a window, you know they can be a real challenge to decorate!
They're pretty much a glass hole with nature poking through. That's not festive! You
should gather all the objects in the room in front of the window in a big pile, then
frame the whole deal in some tastefully restrained flowered drapes or something!
Shew! Crisis averted! Hahahahahahah!!!!!

Now that your windows are all covered, you'll want to find a way to remind yourself that
there's nature out there. Decorative nature! Start with a garden-themed wallpaper in a
subtle red-pink-green colorway. Then, allowing that to be your thematic touchstone,
simply collect objects around, using this rule of thumb: If there's nothing within eight
inches of a given object, move something to within six inches of that object. Cozy!!!!

It's not all restraint and self-control, though! In some living spaces, you can really
kick up your heels and have some fun, like this dining area with a fun black motif!
Start by painting the walls black, then do the floor in black things! The classical
Romangreekitalian sideboard is ready to be useful, all decked out with four apples,
a nine-ounce gravy tureen, and two teacups. Now you're ready for any number of
guests! Also, there are things on the wall, at a distance of no greater than five inches
from any other thing! Intimate!!!

And when you need to get away from the teeming crowds of holiday revelers, you can come to this
little sanctuary! A shrine to Ziffsabanbel Ur, your lion god and spirit guide of decorating! He's made from  fabric scraps and tea-dyed hemp! The Worship Shelf has everything you need to supplicate yourself to His Divine Whiskers: a lamp, a pot of baby's breath, a snuff box of tea-dyed
hemp, a brass urn filled with the ashes of your previous, now heretical god, and various manuals
on decorating and sacrificial rituals! Oh yeah, keep those windows covered, too! The light of day is
a hated foulness that dims the voice of interior design! There! Isn't that better????!!!!!!

Up Your Decor - Small spaces, BIG ideation!!!!

Hi, decorators! You know, you don't have to re-ideate a whole room all the time! You can just ideate on a small scale, like half a room, or maybe just a toilet! So, really, you don't have any excuse for not decorating the hell out of everything around you constantly! Here are some less-than large ideations to get you started. DO IT NOW!!!!!

Imagine how happy your child will be, waking up every morning with this whimsical trellis, or sort of house-shaped thing headboard, populated by these hyper-whimsical grinning characters! Your daughter's or son's or whatever's first thought every frikkin' day will be the reminder that all you want to see is a smile on their face all the damn time. Nothing else is acceptable!!!

Are you constantly trying to figure out where to store all your clean towels? Well, with this unreasonably convenient toilet shelf, keep them right over the toilet! It's easily made from 1x10" lumber and 3/4" F/Z-grade plywood. Then, just stain it a rich fecal brown, or just leave it "au natural" and wait for nature to stain it for you! Mmmmmm, you can really smell the nature! "But," you may ask, "What do you do when you need to take the lid off the toilet tank for ordinary maintenance or something?". You're right! You may ask that! Shut up!

GEOMETRYYYYY!!!! It's all around us! It's gonna get ya! If you forget that, then geometry will smell your weakness and move in for the kill! Never forget it, by painting your boring old closet doors with these eye-twistingly vibrantly bright vivid geometric shapes! All your favorites are here! The seemingly friendly circle! The deceptively reliable square! The not-good-enough-to-be-a-square rectangle! The enigmatic triangle! Know your enemies! Never forget!

Are you tired of waking up with your head not stuck in some kind of pseudo-library cove in the wall? Sure! We all are! There's got to be a better way! Well, stop it, because there is!!! This sort-of-library looking headboard cove deal is made from wood and stuff with nails! The fabric of spacetime gets a little sketchy inside the cove, though. It's hard to tell if there's a mirror in there or if that's a doorway to another room or just an ordinary extra-dimensional space behind the bed. Also, is that a side wall to the left of the mirror or just a divider concealing the storage space behind the shelves. Who cares! Let the scienticians figure out how you built it! It's bed time!

If you're feeling flush with cash, you can outfit your
sort-of-library-wall-headboard-hole with antiques, as
shown in our example. This is Kandinsky's Horse
Pawing At The Back Door. Fancy!

And this saucy little number is an Olmec effigy
of Gerald, the god of Wearing a Bird on Your Head.
Ooooo! Spooooky!

Up Your Decor - What a treatment!

HEY DECORATORS! It's me! Your interior design goddess Vorbia! I know! It's been a while, huh? I've been.... getting treatment! "What kind of treatment?" you reasonably wonder? NEVER MIND THAT! Go to hell, you bastard! Window treatment! That's what kind of treatment!

Anyway, dearest friends, it's all autumnal outside, and you know what that means! It's time for spring decorating season! That's because, if you're Spring Decorating right, spring isn't long enough to fit it all in! GET ON THAT SHIT IMMEDIATELY!!!! DO IT NOW!!!

Hey, look! Numbers and letters! Everybody loves numbers and letters! If you're like me, and you'd better be, they're how we keep track of things and keep track of our track keeping! Why not decorate a whole room (Just one???) with this dynamic and vivacious alpha numeric theme? Even your milk-churn umbrella barrel will need a number, if you're to know exactly which milk-churn umbrella barrel you're staring pointedly at! How much fun is that! Let me count the ways, using pretty much every surface in the room!

Ooooo! A reading room! So scholarly! Wade is reading a decorating magazine in our super groovy shag-o-delic orange shag reading room, with lighting scheme courtesy of K-Mart Strategies Department! Just in case there's not enough light (Can there ever be?), there's a very mod globe light to illuminate even the black levels to 100 IRE! You're not going to believe this, but the shelving unit is made from - are you ready for this? - plywood! Can you believe it? It even has shelves that face the wall, for all your reading
material that Must Not Be Found. You know what I mean. 

Don't leave your kids out of the fun! Sure, the kids play in the yard all the time, but sometimes they'll
need to get out of the rain, right? With this super mod playhouse, they can pretend they were stranded
on a grassy veldt when their rowboat crash landed, half burying itself in the ground. Just image the
fun they'll have, pretending to draw straws to find out who they'll eat first! 

Have you ever been locked out of your house? Perhaps by a loved one pretending to be afraid of you?
HA HA HA HA HA! I love that joke! You can get that whimsical, fun feeling all the time by simply
nailing shingles to your bedroom wall! Good times! Also, during Private Time, it'll feel like you're
having sex in the yard, just like an animal! Pretty erotic, huh, tiger? Gosh! What has two thumbs and
is getting all hot and bothered? Me am! That's who! Well, I hope the neighbors don't have windows!

Up Your Decor - Turn that frown upside brown!

 Hey there, decorators!!!! Shut up and pay attention to my decorating!!! I've got some really boss ideas that you need to do them to your house immediately, okay? Of course it's okay!!! Let's get started with your basement!

Your basement is probably full of spiders and not yellow! Fix that with this brave basement rumpus room concept featuring concentric yellow floor rings centered on the sump pump that you walled over. Then, you can cleverly force your visitors to sit and stay a while by reducing headroom with that cheeky shelf! What's on the shelf? The steamer trunks of previous guests who tried to leave! Neat! Everybody stays!!!!

If your bathroom is more of an open plan concept, consider adding Arizona! Meep meep! The brown fixtures not only gloss over the months where you forget to clean them, it also  harmonizes with the bucolic  Southwestern scenery. That's you over there by the window, looking lonely, but not for long! The bears and coyotes will be lining up to have a dip in your bath!

Your little media moguls will appreciate this super-affordable bedroom! Firstly, the vinyl-covered pillow tubes were probably just lying around somewhere or something! They'll do a good job of keeping your head from drying our too much when you're sleeping! And those drapes probably look expensive imported or whatever, but they're really just painted rulers! Not only that, but they also block up to 35% of unwanted daylight when you're watching the latest news on the television! Speaking of news, that wallpaper is really grabbing headlines what with it's being-actually-just-newspapers-ness! Why stop there, when the floor can totally be covered in newspapers, in case your children are boys? That's because they simply can't be taught where to do their filthy business!

If you're like me, you dream of floating in a sea of brown that's actually just your bathroom! Don't dream it! Do it! It all starts with brown shag carpeting that you'll no way ever, ever regret! Brown towels, extra bath mat and curtains! Then, add some beautiful brown stools for anyone who wants to watch you take a bath! Contrast that with yellow tartan wallpaper... wups, make that ceilingpaper... and you're goin' down to brown town! With a bathroom like this, you'll be at the forefront of the brown movement!!!

Up Your Decor - Overdone is never done.

Hey there, decorators! It's mid-to-late summer, and maybe you feel as though you've done all the decorating you can do in one season? Well, your old pal Vorbia's here to tell you that you're not decorating hard enough! Can you have too much happiness? Shut up, NO! Can you have too much sunshine and color? Go to hell!

Keep decorating! And when the decorations are all in place, decorate them! Let's get decorating, for fuck's sake!

Green means life! Like grass, and all God's creatures that swarm over a dead possum or piece of discarded meat! Green, green, green! This Greek-themed green room reminds us that "Greek" rhymes with "green", doesn't it? Leave me alone! I think it does! Nothing says "I'm in Greece" like some scrap wood easily nailed into the shape of an arched window! What do you see through that window? I see the demons that will take me if I ever stop decorating! This magic simulated window makes an elegant backdrop for a concrete statue of Glemdria Hugging Some Leaves. Who's she? Why, she's the Greek goddess of sticking your butt out  a little bit, silly!

Crucified Fish with Swallowed Trombone is by Stephan Spim, and makes a delightful accent piece for the side table.

Do you have a room that you think is too small to decorate? Shut up or I'll kill you! This very presidential microsuite is here to prove you're a bastard! Credenza with fold-down tamber that can never be folded back up because of a lamps and five other things? Check! Chair and  foot stool a few inches away? Check! Accent table filled with tea cup, incense burner, ice bucket, lamp, and curiously oversized "exotic pleasure device"? Check! Day bed only a few inches away? Oh, you bet that's a checkaroonie! All this wonderful stuff is embraced by a vibrant French colonial striped wallpaper with ornamental swirlicues. So cozy! If you never stop putting pretty things in your Special Little Room, that will keep The Voices quiet! We like quiet!

At the end of a long day of decorating, isn't it nice to just sit and relax in a simple, peaceful room of your stronghold to just unwind? In this Romanesque sitting room by Ernst Stavro Blofeld, you can enjoy a nice sit-down while enjoying the simple, everyday things that make your life worthwhile, like your marble statues of Poseidon, your tapestries, and your Lurking Cheetah printed tablecloth. You can take all this in while you ignore the veiled sexual overtures of your husband, looking sharp in his after-dinner-but-before-dessert jacket. It's the simple things that matter, stupid! Right?

Up Your Decor - Patterns for Spring!

Good morning decorators! Vorbia here, with another pile of fresh, steaming ideas for your interiors! Well, it's really looking like Spring is about to go "sproink!" around here! What better way to welcome the birds and butterflies into your house than with some fun, splashy designs that are as timeless as they are interesting! That's right! No better way!

How do your eyes know they're alive? I know, it's a question as old as time itself! One thing's for sure,
you'll know they're alive when they're vibrating in their sockets like a couple of bumblebees! Black
against white is the theme for this breezy patio sunroom! That fabulous fabric selection brings so much
 life the space that we ran it right up onto the ceiling! You'll think you've died and gone to visit Genghis
Khan or something! Better put some extra money in the meter: your horse will be parked here for a while!

Ooooo! This lucky room was saved from the boringness of its beige walls by rich blue velvet chairs and matching carpet! Everyone needs a sofa in their bedroom for those kicky laundry-folding parties! Nothing keeps a pattern company like another totally different pattern, and that's what the bed and sofa are doing
for the carpet.

This lucky room also has not one but two paintings by famous artists!...

"Victoria with Two Right Arms" by Arnhelta Fnu...

...and "My love is Like a Sausage Bound with String", by Gortrand Drinkwater.

This sun-kissed breakfast solarium is the perfect place to unwind with a glass of cooking sherry or a can of mineral spirits! Whether your game is mahjong or super-crowded-chess, you'll want to stagger around your solar all afternoon, which is just fine, because there's no door! The carpet's flowers keep your mood bouncy, and the sunny walls will have those carpet-flowers positively blooming with springiness! Oh! What's that I see? Another art!!!

Why, it's Blobligliani's "Barbie House in the Triassic"!
This piece is bound to go up in value in seventy million
years or so!

The brightly painted wooden floors of this rustic living room will make you feel like you're sitting on your porch... but with curtains!!! Boldly patterned fabrics and the old-timey, partially-functional furniture
capture that this-house-is-owned-by-an-eight-year-old-girl feeling that simply everyone is going kooky
for this season. Besides, if you really need to take a load off, you can always go sit in the yard!

UPDATE: Diligent Reader John did us the service of removing that boring old floor in the black and white sunroom so that we can all have some fun dressing it up with exciting new spring patterns, everyone! See?

This one now has a jazzy leopard skin carpet! Rowerr!

Here's the version with a clear floor so you can play along at home! How many ways can you improve it?