Feeling overwhelmed...but not

So here I am...getting ready for a major holiday dinner, I'm going to have my girlfriend Susan and her family out here for a few days, and a dessert open house-eek!!!! Parts of me feel overwhelmed and parts of me don't. The Cooking part doesn't bother me, that's a snap! It's the people in my house part. I always worry that people are scrutinizing me, saying things like "oh I thought she was more talented than that" or "I thought that she had better taste than that". I never go into any ones home and pick it apart. To me and maybe I'm the only one with this kind of an opinion...decorating is a sense of personal expression. This house posed some serious challenges for me, I swear every house we have ever lived in has windows of different sizes and shapes that the previous one and this house is no exception to that rule. Then there's the archway from the front room aka the formal dining area to the dine in kitchen area. Then there's those two skinny windows off to each side of the sliding glass door. Okay so I finally got window treatments done up for then, whew! And I got the window treatments done for the family room as well. I'm not about to kill myself trying to slam out something for the office/guest room or Hannah's bedroom window right now. I'm going to concentrate on getting some other things taken care of. The hard part is that only I can get this done, I only know what I want to do with the house...the sad part is that I'm so worried about resale of this home that I'm being rather stiff in my decorating. I did this before with our house in Virginia.

So I'm going to work on the kitchen today...get something going on with it. I have two items hanging up in the kitchen beside the valance, it's a plate and a framed apple crate label from the 1930's. I need to step it up and get a move on with decorating my kitchen. Usually it's the first place to get decorated and done up and here it seems to be one of the last. The rather high slanted ceiling is part of what is throwing me off. Alright now more dilly dallying, it's time for me to get out the ladder and get to work!