Farmhouse fall decorating ideas for your home, inside and out from some of your favorite bloggers and my old farmhouse!
Welcome to this year’s fall home tour! I’m so excited to share some of my favourite farm house fall decorating ideas with you here today, especially because I just failed completely at putting out a fall home tour last year. I never really go completely overboard for these things and usually only really decorate a few rooms in the house these days, but fall really is an especially fun time of year for decorating and making your home feel extra cozy, so I’m glad I made time for putting out a few fun fall decor items this year. If you love fall decor too, but find yourself feeling like you don’t have the time to dedicate to fiddling with it and getting it just right, then this is the home tour for you! If you feel like maybe you do have the time to dedicate to it, but have basically no idea where to even get started, then this is the home tour for you too! 🙂
I’m teaming up with some of my Canadian blogger friends on this home tour once again, just as I often do for Spring, Summer, and Holiday home tours, so if you haven’t been following along with all of the other fall tours this week, you’ve got some major catching up to do! You can find links to all of them at the bottom of this post, once you’re done with my tour. An extra special thank you to Christina and Shannon for organizing all of this for us all to enjoy!
If you’re brand new here, welcome again! I’m Courtenay and I blog (and live) here at The Creek Line House, which I share with my husband and fellow DIYer Chris, our two kids, two cats, and our dog, Chuckers. We bought our 120 year old Southwestern Ontario farm house 6 years ago and we’ve been slowly updating it, little by little over that time.
OK, on with the tour!
If you love looking at all the beautiful homes on Pinterest, all decorated in their fall finery, but feel like you could never actually pull that off yourself, you’re in luck! This stuff takes a little practice, but it’s definitely not rocket science! I’m by no means an expert at this decorating stuff, but I thought I’d share a few of my favourite tricks as we go through this tour here today anyway. Because that’s what I do! 🙂
Stick to One Color (or color scheme)
If you’re feeling a bit lost, it can really help to limit yourself to mainly one or two colors. It can get really confusing these days, now that we have so many different color options available for fall decor. I’ve been seeing a lot of pretty blue and green fake pumpkins in the stores, traditional orange, white, and even some coral. It can be tempting to grab one of everything, because they’re all beautiful, but when you get them home, they probably won’t be all beautiful all together at the same time. Restraintishness is the name of the game here. Well, sort of. You can see in my dining room that my plan was to go with white pumpkins, fall leaves, and a just a dab of navy. I definitely was able to mostly stick to that, but I don’t think anyone would call my use of faux leaves “restrained”. More on that later. 🙂
Pumpkin It
If you need a jumping-off point, start with pumpkins. Natural pumpkins always look great and are really inexpensive at this time of year. A few faux pumpkins can be really convenient too, but they can be pretty expensive so those may need to be collected slowly over time. This year, I picked up all white pumpkins from the farmer’s market for inside and I’ll be putting the bright orange ones from the garden outside. Once you’ve chosen your color and style of pumpkin (real or not), you can start placing them around for instant fallification and then fill in all around them until things feel right to you.
We’re doing a big renovation in our main mud room in the front of our house this fall so this little back entry way is serving as our main entrance for the next little while. I wanted to make it feel fun and welcoming, so I added a few of my larger white pumpkins here and there and then I did the “one color” trick by trying to stick to kind of a burnt-orange with everything else: The wreath, the pillow, and even a little touch of it in the bathroom through that door there.
Texture Like Crazy
If you’ve got your pumpkins, and your color plan in place and things are still looking a little awkward and not-quite-right to you, then it’s time to go for the texture. You’ll probably usually find textury items in the form of things you already own. Some of my favourites are blankets, pillows, baskets (like this cheapo thrift store basket that I painted using my specialty-thrift-store-basket painting technique), old books, plain grapevine wreaths, or anything wooden. My new decor orb that I made out of embroidery hoops deserves a special shout out here, I think too. 🙂
Break it Up With White
Sometimes when you’re fall-ifying, things can start to look a bit muddy, messy, or busy. In that case, a good dose of white is just what the decorating doctor ordered! We don’t usually think of white as a fall color, but I usually end up sneaking quite a bit in here and there even if I’m using a lot of white pumpkins and it helps to keep things balanced.
Fill in With Leaves
If things are still feeling a bit unfinished, I love to fill things in with a bunch of fall leaves. I think faux leaves are really fun at this time of year, but if you prefer to go all natural, definitely collect some from your yard or pick up some natural elements that feel fall-ish to you from your garden centre. For me, fall leaves in traditional colors always seem to do the trick and they make me feel excited for fall, which is kind of the whole point isn’t it? I’m sure you definitely could overdo it with these faux leaves, but when I’m in full-fledged fall mode, I find it pretty hard to find a point where I feel like I need to stop. Even the inexpensive faux fall leaves that you can get these days are pretty great compared to even a few years ago, so if fall leaves are your thing, I say go for it.
(You can see more of this fall table and my kitchen in yesterday’s post!)
So those are my tips for a creating a really fun and festive fall look in your home! If you’ve been wanting to try something like this in your home this fall, but haven’t been sure if you’ll be able to successfully pull it off, definitely give one or two of my tricks a try and let me know how it goes for you. If you love all things fall, this is a great way to make the most of the season and really enjoy every second of it!
Make sure you visit all of the other homes on the tour this week as well and pin this image so you can remember these ideas for later!
Monday
AKA Design
Amidst the Chaos
Lemon Thistle
Love Create Celebrate
So Much Better With Age
Tuesday
The Learner Observer
Woman in Real Life
Life is a Party
Clean and Scentsible
Wednesday
Satori Design for Living
The Happy Housie
Rambling Renovators
Craftberry Bush
The Sweetest Digs
Thursday
The DIY Mommy
Home To Heather
White Wood
A Pretty Life
Vin’yet Etc
Friday
Kim Power Style
PMQ for two
The Creek Line House
Sustain My Craft Habit
northern style exposure
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.