About two years ago, I faced up to the reality that I couldn’t continue living in my pretty bungalow. I could foresee too many repairs on the horizon and not enough income to accomplish them.

Even though I have modest resources, I have strong opinions about how I want to live. When I started shopping for a condo, I made a big wish list of what I thought my perfect place might be and emailed it to my realtor. It made me feel focused and less arbitrary; still, I never expected to get everything on the list.

As we shopped, I found that the most important feature turned out to be the windows. More specifically, I was deeply affected by the amount of natural light coming into the apartment and what I could see outside the windows. I need lots of light and a room with a view. I don’t need a spectacular view – just a pleasing streetscape with trees and neighbourhood activity.

If you think about it, these are two features that can’t be fixed by decorating. Improved, maybe, with clever lighting and concealing drapery; but this is not a fix if you crave natural light and attractive street scenes.

In the end, the condo that I bought has a great number of features from my wish list. As they say, if you don’t know what you want, you’ll never get it.

When it comes to downsizing, establishing priorities is paramount. When choosing a smaller home, you are also considering differences in lifestyle and, usually, eliminating possessions. My list of priorities would be different than yours. In my experience, the process itself was revealing.

When searching the library catalogue for books, if you use a simple keyword search “downsizing”, you get a list that includes many books on business downsizing. More helpful subject searches are “moving household”, “older people housing”, "small rooms decoration", “orderliness” and “simplicity” - depending on your goal.

Here are some books that are definitely worth exploring.

Downsizing your home with style: living well in a smaller space (2007) by Lauri Ward. The reasons for downsizing are varied: empty nesters have too much space, couples merging households, relocating from the suburbs to the inner city, pursuing a dream job in another city or a just a quest to simplify your life.

“Whatever your motivation, moving is always stressful, but downsizing is more about adapting than it is about moving,” says Ward.

She provides a practical handbook for assessing the things you own for your new space. She looks at multifunctional furniture and spaces, repurposing possessions, as well as camouflage and storage. She offers design tips for decorating small spaces and housekeeping tips for maintaining them. Ward has a great blog which you will find on my list of favourites.

The best of the rest: downsizing for boomers and seniors by Doug and Judy Robinson, addresses the options available when the home you are occupying is no longer meeting your needs. They explore downsizing to a small house or condo and supported living. As well, they provide strategies to age in place and examine intergenerational households.

Lighten up: love what you have, have what you need, be happier with less (2011). I love the title of this new book by Peter Walsh that encapsulates his philosophy. “I am going to show you how to live a life of abundance on less in a way that doesn’t plunge you deeper into misery and despair, and my belief is that with a changed mind-set will come a sense of calm, authentic personal identity, and… yes… happiness,” he says. Quite a promise.

Walsh is a “clutter expert” who has been a regular guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show and hosts his own program on her network.

Stop Clutter from Stealing your Life: Discover why you clutter & How You Can Stop by Mike Nelson (2008)

If you are overwhelmed by the stuff of your life, check out this title.

Nelson is a reformed clutterer and zealous about it in the way that reformed people often are. But he has a sense of humor about the problem. In a chapter titled “40 Ways to Leave Your Clutter”, number six on the list is

"Shoot the next person who tells you, “If you haven’t seen it in six months, you don’t need it.” If you haven’t seen it, how do you know you don’t need it? By their reasoning, the lost tomb of Ramses had no value."

Nelson explores the psychological baggage of clutter and provides practical and emotional solutions.

You don’t need to be coy Roy; just get yourself free.

Next week: DECORATE AND UNDECORATE, two new books from bloggers.

Container gardens are excellent devices for the space-challenged gardener or the garden with a trouble spot. They can add a jolt of colour or a small pocket of serenity. What you quickly learn is that the container is as important as the plants to providing a satisfying visual experience. Here are a few of the lovely books inspiring me this year.

Succulent Container Gardens: Design Eye-Catching Displays with 350 Easy-Care Plants by Debra Lee Baldwin (Timber Press 2010)

Succulents are the perfect plant for container gardening in Calgary. Abetted by our strong sunshine and dry climate, containers dry out quickly. Succulents get by with minimal water, so are more forgiving for absent-minded gardeners. Succulents have impressive sculptural qualities that add texture to the garden; their little leaves are bulked up like young dudes on steroids.

Baldwin’s containers are varied and interesting. Hard materials, such as crushed gravel, polished pebbles, marbles or driftwood, complement colourful plants.

Successful Container Gardening: 75 Easy-to-Grow Flower and Vegetable “Gardens” by Joseph R. Provey (Creative Homeowner 2010)

Provey suggests winning combinations like planting rosemary with oregano, pineapple mint and lavender and recommends saving 4-gallon nursery containers for larger vegetables like squash. “Chard is one of those amazing plants that’s difficult to eat fast enough," he says. Not quite my experience last summer.

The book has clear instructions for making hypertufa containers. Hypertufa is a composition of Portland cement, peat moss, sand and vermiculite. Planters made from this material mimic old stone water troughs which are expensive, hard to heft as well as hard to find.

(Find easy-to-follow instructions online as well from sources like Fine Gardening and Martha Stewart.)

Container Gardening: Fresh Ideas for Outdoor Living by Hank Jenkins (Sunset 2010)

“Think of containers as problem-solvers,” advises Jenkins. You can target these tiny perfect gardens to suit your situation. They can be customized for sun or shade, ornamental or edible. They might feature scent or water. Choose the container to suit your style, for example, contemporary, formal or rustic.

I love the Japanese-inspired combination of spiky grass-like rush encircled by Scotch moss on p. 104. His chef’s special combines Early Girl tomato with purple ruffles basil, garlic chives and jalapeno chili in a galvanized tub.

Continuous container gardens : swap in the plants of the season to create fresh designs year-round by Sara Begg Townsend (Storey Pub. 2010)

The title says it all. One of the delights of container gardening is that a failed experiment or just end-of-season weedy growth can be refreshed into a beauty spot with new plants to suit the season and it’s not a deep-pocket enterprise. If you hit the garden centers late in the season, there are beautiful bargains for refilling pots.

For those who enjoy formal gardens, Container Topiary (2003) by Susan Berry shows how to sculpt plants into globes, spirals and standards. Standards are neat balls of flowers or foliage on top of a clear stem – lollipop plants. For garden whimsy, twist wire into bird and animal shapes to support the plants which are trimmed to the shape.

Better Homes and Gardens Complete guide to container gardening by Kate Carter Frederick (John Wiley & Sons, 2010) demonstrates the creation of planters from concrete pavers that are budget-friendly containers with contemporary flair (p. 46).

Salvage Style in Your Garden: Inspirational ideas and over 30 projects for using rescued and recycled materials in the garden by Moira and Nicholas Hankinson (2001). Upcycling hits the deck with this old charmer. The Hankinsons repurpose an old dining chair into a planter by removing the upholstered seat and fitting it with a zinc tray drilled with holes for drainage.

Other planters are made from packing cases, waste bins, spray-painted tires and even an ex-army latrine bucket. Who knew there was such a thing?

Canadian Gardening shows an old boot filled with succulents:

As I tripped around the web, I found old boots with plants surprisingly popular.

The moral of the story is that anything that can hold an adequate amount of soil and water – and appeals to your aesthetic soul (no matter how outré) – can contain a plant.

When I downsized to a condo last year, I gained an L-shaped balcony with exposures east and south. The balcony was built with a continuous line of planting boxes attached to the top. They are mounted in sections about three feet long and a foot wide and deep. Sounds ideal; but they didn’t provide drainage. “Like a bathtub without a plug,” quipped one of my neighbours.

In fact, the arrangement moves from one extreme to the other: parched-dry on the south side and pools on the northeast end which collects water draining off the building from the floors above.

Still, I’m always up for a challenge. I set about replenishing the soil with a mix recommended by Mel Bartholomew, the square-foot gardening guru. I drained the boggy bits and watered the dry parts.

The garden I left behind with my house was mostly shaded by mature trees which limited my plant choice. With all that sunshine, I determined to grow veggies as well as flowers. Books like Grow Great Grub by Gayla Trail were inspiring. She turns every available corner on balcony, stoops and window sills into an opportunity for food production.

I planted chard, radishes, zucchini, beans, tomatoes, basil, oregano and sorrel. Dusty miller interspersed petunias and geraniums in pots. Some of it worked and some of it didn’t; gardens are like that. New ventures offer so many learning opportunities, don’t they?

The chard and beans produced very little. Powdery mildew took out flourishing zucchini plants midway through summer and a hail storm pummeled off three quarters of the blooming branches from one of my tomato plants. On the up side, the radishes and herbs were very successful.

This year I’m using fewer plants in these forbidding boxes and have planted my veggies in pots which I can shelter against the warm brick of the building. I’m hoping that the tomatoes will be especially pleased with this treatment. Gardeners are always hoping.

If you are gardening with containers, there’s lots of inspiration online. Canadian Gardening offers many articles. Jim Hole designs succulent and water gardens and offers plant lists for both. Bonus.

And, of course, the library has wonderful books on the topic. And that's my next blog.

I have a bedside table that I bought from a co-worker more than 25 years ago. It was part of an undistinguished set that included a mattress and bed frame. When I got the set, the finish was tired and worn.

Initially, I painted it a pretty violet shade, a colour chosen from my quilt. Then I moved to another house and bedroom and repainted the set a soft green to complement the floral print of a new duvet cover.

Somewhere along the line, I parted company with the bed. Perhaps it left home with one of my children – I can’t remember. But I still have the night table, which is one of those small flexible pieces that can be tucked into any room. It’s a keeper.

About ten years ago, I repainted it again with a finish that I will probably keep for as long as I own the piece. The finish looks perennially fresh and fits as an accent with any style of décor.

The source of my inspiration was (and is) a lovely old book in our collection at Central: The tiger rugs of Tibet by Mimi Lipton (Thames and Hudson, c1988).

According to Lipton, the origin of Tiger rugs is speculative and their history may date back more than 1000 years. Tigers enjoy a prominent place in Tibetan art and culture.

Tiger rugs have distinct types. Some depict one or two tigers; others are abstracted designs from the markings on the pelts. The finish on my night stand is based on the latter type.

Although tiger rugs are still being made and sold, I have not often seen them in Calgary. I recently spotted a small one at Tibetan Trom in the Eau Claire market. The shop had a copy of Lipton's book on hand as a resource for shoppers. You can also find tiger rugs online.

To create the finish for my night stand, I used water-base enamel paint. After painting the background colour, I drew the pattern on lightly with a marker and wrapped it around the edges of the drawers onto the sides – a pleasing effect. Then, I painted the stripes with black enamel. The casters were added many years ago to improve height and mobility. Recently, I replaced the handles with spiffy new ones from Lee Valley.

The powerful tiger continues to inspire contemporary artists. Check out the enchanting table in cast bronze by Judy Kensley McKie. I saw it first in American Craft magazine at the Central Library (November/December issue, p 30) and followed the trail online.

Home is a complicated word. It’s an idea – “where the heart is”– the emotional centre of family life. Home is geography: “Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong…” You know the tune. Home is also the building where we live and play with paint cans and drapery.

From planning a renovation, to reorganizing your closet, to filling your rooms with laughter and music, the Library is rich with resources for making your home a better place to be. And the best thing about the Library is the way that one thing leads to another, and another – come to think of it, just like the virtual world.

My name is Jane and I have enjoyed an eclectic career that has included a design business and writing about design trends for the Calgary Herald and CanWest. At the same time (and for many years), I have worked for the Calgary Public Library. You could call me a multi-tracker or just conclude that I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

For sure, I’m a design groupie who can’t wait to tell you about all my favourite things at the Library and make connections for you in the real and virtual worlds. I work with others who also share my obsession and probably have a few of their own. From time to time, they will be punting their projects and ideas your way.

We hope you will join the conversation.