Big brothers | Vintage Hearts At Home

I once heard a statistic from an insurance agent that stated Americans use only 20% of what they own.

I thought as I looked around my house… that is true. At the time, my walls were filled with family photos, vintage frames painted and left empty, clocks, shelves and even wall vases with tulips. Okay, maybe I used the clocks, but everything else was for visual pleasure only. Since then, I have repainted my walls which means it all comes down and only a few favorite photos went back up, one clock and one little sconce shelf above the clock.

When I have pictures or artwork to hang, I first gather it all together. Then I lay it out on the floor, moving and arranging how it will go on the wall. Sometimes I have my boy hold something against the wall while I stand a room away and see how I like it. (The men in my house have a lot of patience with me.)

Then I just go for it.

Make sure you are using nails with a head on them when using them to hang pictures, use picture hangers for heavier artwork and sometimes use screws with anchors when necessary. The right tools make any job easier and easier to patch holes when you move or if you are like me, change your mind or rearrange.

A wall at J Crew in Pasadena, CA

My friend Susan’s house

My friend Susan’s house (again)

My friend Sharyn’s house

My friend Abbie’s house

The stairs in my house

So what does this have to do with my brother Barry? I came across this picture of the two of us taken in a Kmart photo booth in the 70’s.

I love it. It has hung with the wall of photos I recently took down to repaint. Barry is my older brother and when we were kids, he was my best friend. I thought he was so cool and I would do anything Barry told me to; like steal jaw breakers from the neighborhood convenience store, yell poems like “milk, milk lemonade, stick your finger up your butt, pull it out, whatcha got? tootsie roll is whatcha got!” at neighbors from the bushes and from our camper, make our little sister eat mud or when she really wanted to play with us, tell her she had to be the dog and leave her on the porch all day barking at cars that went by.

We had a neighbor that was a large man who loved his flowers. He would bend over those flowers tending to them with his butt crack hanging out. One day, my brother told me to take saltine crackers, crumble them in my fists and put them down his pants in that giant butt crack while he, Barry would be the lookout. When Barry yelled at me to go, that the coast was clear, I ran with saltines in my fists. I dumped them in the back of that man’s pants and tore off across the backyard and down the alley and hid under our canoe on the side of the house.

Yes, that was my brother Barry.

So, if you are wondering what to hang on your walls, don’t worry about what the latest trends are or what the designer magazines tell you to hang and whatever you do, don’t hang generic, mass produced “art”. Make sure what’s in your home, on your walls is a reflection of you. Make sure it makes you smile or invokes a special memory whenever you walk by it. It doesn’t need to make sense to anyone but you.