CRDA volunteers create Homes For Christmas Tour house
Formal Entry-Living-Dining area, After
In November, Canadian ReDesigners Association members from several Edmonton-area decorating businesses (including me) pooled their talents and resources to redesign and decorate a home for the Homes For Christmas Tour. This fundraiser benefitted the St. Albert Senior Citizens Club, a not-for-profit that has been providing support services and programming for seniors in the community since 1975. (This was the Tour’s second year, six decorated homes were featured, and the tour ran Thurs Dec 4th til Sat Dec 6th, 2008.) Our team of volunteers worked fabulously together, and we are all so very proud of the transformation we made on a shoestring budget, without the multiple-major-retailler support that typifies other tours of this kind. So, I thought I’d share some of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos here.
The following Edmonton-area members of the CRDA donated their time, and many of their own decorations, to redesign and decorate the Homes For Christmas home: Marie Blackburn, Blackburn ReDesigns; Jeanette Dorosh, RubyJean Redesigning & Home Staging; Kelly Foster, Oh! For Organize; Deborah Merriam (me), ecoDomestica reDesign; Bev Norman, Room For Change Decor Inc.; and, Shelley Ollinger, Volaré Interiors ReDesign & Staging.
Inspired by the Georgian period of our clients’ furniture, the long tradition of using tree ornaments shaped like birds, and the current vogue for feathers in fashion and interiors, our decorating theme was ‘Festive Feathers‘. (The wearing of feather boas and ornate feather-adorned hats first became fashionable in Europe in the 1820s, when the gardens of notable European and English estates also featured aviaries of imported exotic birds.)
This redesign involved a fair bit of planning to create a floor plan that would work better for the family. We moved a large china cabinet from the dining room into the kitchen area, removed a built-in shelving unit from beside the family room fireplace, and switched the locations of many pieces of furniture between rooms; enough furniture was left over that we were able to create an additional seating area in the basement playroom. We added newly purchased lighting, and existing, borrowed, and purchased decorations were used to create a liveable scheme that reflected the homeowners’ Modern Traditional aesthetic. A profusion of natural flowers from local greenhouses, soy candles scented with essential oils, and reuseable boxes wrapped in vegetable-ink-printed recycled-content wrapping paper added an environmentally-responsible twist to the holiday decorations.
Family Room Before and After
Tags: Canadian ReDesigners Association, Christmas, CRDA, home tour, redesign, volunteerism