Scuffed, painted furniture. Tattered, Depression Era quilts. Mix and match vintage china from England. Faded handmade rugs.
It's interesting to me that, literally, nothing in my house is perfect. Even if it was bought new at a store (usually as a gift to me by a friend or family member), it has imperfect, scratchy, chippy, vintage style.
Even my house is imperfect: cracked walls, un-level floors you can roll marbles down, moldings that don't quite meet each other at the ceiling.
Why does this comfort me so? And should anything be done about it?
My best guess today is it's psychological.
I am a radically imperfect person, and therefore I relate to these blatantly imperfect--yet charming--surroundings. Probably underneath this affinity to these old things I am hoping that, like them, my imperfections could be endearing rather than something to dread or hide.
In The Nesting Place, a lovely decorating book by Myquillyn Smith, aka "The Nester," imperfection is both celebrated and encouraged as a sort of welcome mat of hospitality. When someone enters a home with perfectly matched new furnishings, sparkly clean floors and counters, with no children's handprints or visible paper piles, they don't feel they can be their own imperfect selves. They will not relax enough to nestle into the throw pillows with a glass of wine.
Because guess what? We're all imperfect. Shocker, I know.
Are vintage furnishings therefore a metaphor for us all? I wax existential...
Anyhoo, Smith encourages us to go ahead and flaunt our homes as they are, not as we ideally wish them to be, because they are more welcoming to those with which we want to be real.
Let's keep it real in all our chippy, charming and fading glory.
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