The Smart Girl’s Guide To Easy Fall Decorating

The Smart Girl’s Guide To Easy Fall Decorating will give you a doable plan for decorating your home for fall. It will also help you know when to begin each decorating phase and more.

You may be asking yourself, “Why is Yvonne posting about fall now!” What a great question! I’m really not sharing my fall ideas for this year yet, although they are coming soon. Right now, I want to help you plan for ways to easily decorate your home for fall! This is the smart girl’s guide to Fall Decorating! This post goes hand-in-hand with 8 Fall Decorating Trends To Look Forward To For 2023. Let’s start to think about beautiful fall now and make an easy smart plan to decorate for the upcoming season.

When Should I Decorate For Fall?

This is a personal choice, friend! If you spend any time on social media, I’m sure you will see fall decorating ideas popping up here and there. Bloggers and influencers like to share their ideas now so you can start to think about fall. So enjoy all the pretty pictures and gather ideas, but don’t feel pressured to start decorating for fall. Just enjoy!

I asked, “When do you start to decorate for fall” on my Facebook page, and wow, I got lots of responses. The vast majority of readers say they start to decorate sometime after Labor Day. I agree! Before I started blogging, I would always start fall decorating the Monday after Labor Day.

But it’s totally up to you! When do you like to begin fall decorating?

Get Inspired

Now is the time to peruse old magazines and Pinterest, and blogs for ideas you might like to use in your fall home. You can see all my fall ideas from past years HERE, HERE, and HERE. Can you tell fall is my favorite season?

Make a Pinterest board for your fall ideas, or take a picture of them with your phone. Keep those images in a file marked Fall Ideas 2023.

We can enjoy summer while perusing fall inspiration!

About Fall Decorating

Seasonal decorating has become a lot more subtle than in the past decade or two. No longer do we dump a whole truckload of seasonal decor into our homes! Cutsie items are a thing of the past. And so is most signage that has a clever saying on it like, “It’s fall, y’all” or “Oh, my gourd, I love fall.” I, however, am not giving up my fall doormat!

Decorating has become so much easier! Now it’s all about bringing the outside indoors and decorating with touches of the season, not bins full!

If you still love to fill your home with scarecrows and such, go right ahead! Use what you love. But if you want an easier way to decorate, use a lighter hand. Add a few well-chosen fall items to each room. I think you will actually enjoy decorating for the fall season more! And your home will look much prettier!

Choose a Fall Color Palette

If you have never chosen a fall color palette, you should give it a try! I pick out a color palette for every season and holiday. It makes decorating so much easier! I have a rather large stash of seasonal decor in the basement. I arrange them by season and then by color. It makes it so much easier to see what I have.

This year’s fall colors are my whole home color palette warm beige, white, taupe, and brown, with this year’s fall color, honey, and also burnt orange. I’ll be using lots of white in my fall decor with touches of the colors in the fall 2023 color palette.

This fall’s trending color is honey. And I am so excited to use it in our fall home! You can read more about it Here.

Go Through Your Fall Stash

While you are enjoying the remains of summer and getting fall-inspired, it is also the perfect time to go through all of your fall decor. If you are like me, I bet you have accumulated lots and lots of fall decor over the years. And I bet there are also things that you could give away or put in the trash!

Why let worn out decor or things you will never use again clutter your basement, attic, closets, or any other space in your home. While you are cleaning your fall decor out, you will be able to…

• see what you can bless someone else with
• see what you have and might use this year
• see what you might need to get for this year’s fall decor
• and be able to organize your fall decor

Choose Your Fall DIY Projects Now

As part of the planning for fall, you should start to pick out the things you want to make and have ready for fall decorating.

I make a new wreath almost every year, so right now, I am planning to make one. This fall, I’m using the reasonably priced leafy wreath below and adding white pumpkins and black and white ribbon to it.

I found a few more wreaths I think would look pretty with fall embellishments: this mixed leaf wreath, this honey/orange/eucalyptus and oak wreath, and this maple/oak/pinecone wreath.

Here are other fall projects you might like to make for your fall home:

• Brambly and Bright Fall Leaf Foliage Wreath
• Beautiful And Easy Fall Leaf Wreath
• Easy Leaf Candle With Acorns
• Beautiful Chinoiserie Decoupage Pumpkins

Do A Little Fall Shopping

Now that you have had lots of time to survey ideas for fall, make a fall color palette for this year, and go through your stash, it’s now time to do a little shopping for things you might need for this year’s fall decor. I usually buy a couple of pillows for fall. They most likely will not have an obvious fall motif on them. They are usually a solid color or have a pretty design in the colors I’ll be using. I also like to buy fall-inspired branches or faux flowers, or other organic items I’ll be using in centerpieces and other displays. And I always buy candles! One can never have enough candles.

Shop now for all the things you will need to make any fall DIYs too. Then keep everything in one place, so you know where your supplies are when you are ready to make each fall project.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll have this year’s StoneGable Fall Harvest Shops on the homepage. If you like StoneGable style, then this is the place to look for new fall items for your home. Here are last year’s Fall Shops. There are still great things to be found and lots on sale.

Make A Plan- About Planning

The smart girl (and I know you are one) plans. I always say, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

A plan is a guide. It is something you will want to follow, but it is not written in stone! Plans are amazing guides to keep us on track but not to be a taskmaster over us. I think the reason so many people don’t like to plan is the fear of failure. Not being able to execute the plan to the letter. YOU are the master of your plan, not the other way around. A plan is meant to keep you going in the right direction and not to mentally make you feel like a slave to it!

If I execute 80 percent of the plans I make, I feel very successful! And if the plan falls apart, I make adjustments to it.

Smart Girl Fall Decorating

I like to think of my decorating guide as having four phases. Each phase is to ease you out of one season and into another. We will discuss those phases later.

I am not a let’s decorate-for-the-season-all-at-once kind of girl. That is far too exhausting for me! Putting away all the summer decor and bringing up all the fall decor and decorating in one grand frenzy would suck all the joy out of the seasonal decorating process!

I like to ease into the season! I start taking down summer decor a bit at a time. And before the weather gets cooler and the leaves begin to turn, I start adding early fall decor. I continue to add fall decor to my home until my home is fully dressed up for the season by the middle of fall. Then as the season wanes, I start taking down decor a bit at a time. And eventually, start to introduce Thanksgiving and just a little Christmas decor.

Fall Decorating Phase 1- Pre Decorating

The first phase is what I call the Pre- Decorating Phase. This includes perusing inspiration, deciding on a color palette, going through your fall stash, choosing the fall projects you want to do, and starting to shop. Most of the things we have talked about above.

This is the foundation of your fall decor. Doing this will make fall decorating easier and more successful!

I have a rough idea of what fall decor t I want to add to each room. I just could not imagine how hard it would be to decorate our home without planning!

For example, I know I will put a fall wreath on our front door. And add some kind of organic arrangement to the foyer table.

And here’s the fall foyer from 2021

Here’s my fall foyer from Fall 2022

I will probably use hydrangeas on the foyer table again. A big bush of them is right outside my front door. I also will add candles. I love the soft look of the 2021 foyer. If I weren’t a blogger, I would copy it for this year’s fall decor too!

Thinking about the places you will add fall decor is important. And so is taking pictures of what you decorate!

Fall Decorating Phase 2

This stage is the start of hands-on decorating. In phase 2, I like to start removing overtly summer decor. I usually don’t do this all at once but over several days. And at the same time, I start early fall decorating.

The first thing I do when I decorate for a new season is to add a new wreath to the front door. And then I decorate my mantel.

Here’s how my 2021 mantel looked

And my 2022 mantel

We have a new picture hanging on the mantel, so this year’s fall decor will be a few gourds and pumpkins, and candles.

I wish I would have taken pictures of the mantels in mid-October. I usually add more pumpkins and birdhouse gourds to it.

Fall Decorating Phase3- Adding More Seasonal Decor

By now, I’m adding lots of fall decor little by little. Textual pillows and throws and centerpieces and other organics to our home. This is the height of the fall season. As a blogger, I speed phase 2 up a lot more to get to phase 3, for fall tours! But if I were not decorating my home for blogging, decorating would be more of a process.

Phase 3 fall decorating is when my dining room table might look like this…

And velvet pumpkins and festive arrangements would show up on flat surfaces in our home.

This is also the phase to start taking early fall decor down. Things like bowls of apples, flowering cabbage and kale, and sunflowers. And start adding more pumpkins, gourds, mums, and Indian corn.

Phase 3 is the time to enjoy the height of the fall season!

Fall Decorating Phase 4- Thanksgiving Into Christmas

I don’t decorate for Halloween, so I go from fall decor to Thanksgiving and Christmas.

As a blogger, I tend to take down my fall decor around mid to late October and decorate for Christmas. I love Christmas, but I’m not a fan of having Christmas decor up before November!

However, before blogging, I would take most of my fall decor down in early November, leaving up the best of the real pumpkins and other decor like pheasant feathers, wreaths, and arrangements with candles. This is also the time to concentrate on setting a beautiful Thanksgiving Table! I like to set my Thanksgiving table a few days before turkey day and enjoy it!

And after Thanksgiving, I throw away the rest of the pumpkins, popping off their stems so I can dry them and keep them, and put away any leftover fall decor.

The weekend between Thanksgiving and Christmas would be the start of Christmas decorating.

Fall decorating, phase 4, is all about taking down most of the obvious fall decor and leaving the best of the best fall decor up to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Start Now!

Now is the perfect time to start to plan for fall. Use this guide, and your fall decorating will not only be easier to do but look spectacular.